Agenda Setting, Policies, and Political Systems

The agenda-setting approach pioneered by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones--which centers on which issues receive political attention--originally focused on policy decision-making in the United States.  It has now has evolved into a more general and comprehensive approach for understanding political systems and their actors. This volume is the first to apply the agenda setting approach to other countries and their political systems as a whole. It covers eleven different countries, with each chapter written by a specialist on the country under study. By tracking attention to issues over long periods of time, the contributors uncover basic patterns and systemic features of the polities under study. The essays revolve around two broad themes. The first part of the book--on the UK, US, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland--addresses the electoral input side of politics: parties and party competition, elections, government formation, and government priorities. They mainly examine to what extent party change, electoral change and shifts in the partisan composition of government have led (or not led) to changes in policy. The chapters in the second part--on Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Canada--analyze changing institutional structures. They examine the issue priorities of political actors both before and after major institutional changes, such as German reunification or federal devolution in Belgium to see whether these changes lead parties and governments to significantly shift priorities. Ultimately, as the editors make clear in their introduction and conclusion, the volume persuasively establishes both the centrality of political attention and the efficacy of the agenda setting approach in understanding not only how policies evolve, but how political systems function.