When politics matter for the media

During the last few years, there has been a strong increase in studies assessing the influence of attention for issues in the mass media on the attention for those issues in the political realm (e.g. Green-Pedersen & Stubager, 2010; Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011). These studies demonstrate that this effect is often present, but also that the size of this effect is contingent upon a range of variables, such as political context, issue characteristics, and country characteristics. Remarkably enough, the reversed causal relationship, i.e. politics influencing the media agenda, has been largely neglected. This is all the more remarkable, since we know that politicians are important sources of information for journalists and actively try to influence coverage (e.g. Bennett, 1990). In this paper, we address the question to what extent the media agenda follows the political agenda and to what extent the presence and the strength of this effect depends on the institutional position of the political actor under consideration (e.g. coalition versus opposition), the type of media (television versus newspapers), and issue characteristics (e.g. obtrusive versus non-obtrusive issues; see Soroka, 2002). We rely on a large-scale dataset that includes a range of agenda’s (media, parliament, government, movements, party manifestoes) in Belgium for the period 1993-2000. Using pooled time-series and multilevel analyses, we demonstrate that, media follow politics, but that the size of this dependency is contingent: parliamentarians from government parties, for example, are stronger agenda-setters than their colleagues from opposition parties, while newspapers follow politics more closely than television.