Friederike Richter, Associate Researcher at the Defence Economics Chair - IHEDN, is co-author of a chapter in the book Handbook of Public Administration.
Emiliano Grossman and Friederike Richter are the authors of the chapter «Agenda-Setting in Comparative Perspective: Contrasting Policy-Making in France, the United Kingdom and the United States”.” in the book Handbook of Public Administration, published by Barth Hildreth, Jerry Miller and Evert Lindquist at Routledge.
This chapter focuses on analysis of public policy, with a particular focus on the agenda-setting process. Agenda-setting studies are based on the principle that no objective fact constitutes a problem in itself, and that any public problem must therefore be constructed. For public policy to change, a (new) problem must therefore be recognised as such, including by decision-makers. But decision-makers' attention is limited and competition for it is fierce. Kingdon has proposed a very useful analytical framework for thinking about the conditions that enable an issue to reach the political agenda: feasibility, the acceptability of the issue in the political community, the costs of solving the problem, public support and the receptiveness of decision-makers.
In this chapter, we analyse the development of public policy by examining the media and legislative processes in France, the United Kingdom and the United States. To do this, we are relying on data collected within the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). This research programme, which was initiated by Baumgartner and Jones in the 1990s, developed an influential coding system to classify attention into thematic categories. This classification made it possible to study the dynamics of political agendas. Baumgartner and Jones thus demonstrated that public policy change tends to be characterised by punctuated equilibria: most policies are stable most of the time, and when they finally change, they tend to change radically. This research programme has now been extended to over 20 countries as part of the CAP, providing a unique opportunity to compare agenda-setting dynamics in different institutional contexts.
To illustrate the possibilities of CAP data, this chapter looks at the role of the media in law-making in France, the United Kingdom and the United States. More specifically, we compare environmental issues with police and justice issues. In line with traditional media studies, we analyse the extent to which the media can influence agenda-setting and law-making. Empirical analysis shows that there is no clear pattern in the relationship between media coverage and lawmaking in the field of environmental policy. We see peaks of attention at different times, but they do not follow any clear rhythm. In relation to environmental issues, police and justice system issues show higher average levels of attention in all three countries, but - again - do not show a clear pattern. While attention has increased in France and the UK, correlations with the legislative agenda are temporary at best. Overall, Our empirical analysis confirms that the driving forces behind the media and lawmaking diverge and that their relationship, where it exists, is conditioned by factors other than those we have observed here.
This type of research offers the possibility of examining system-level dynamics and understanding the interaction between different subjects. The aim of this chapter was to illustrate some of the possibilities offered by CAP data, which have made it possible to renew the study of agenda setting.
Emiliano Grossman and Friederike Richter (2021), ”Agenda-Setting in Comparative Perspective: Contrasting Policy-Making in France, the United Kingdom and the United States" in Barth Hildreth, Jerry Miller and Evert Lindquist (eds.) Handbook of Public Administration, New York: Routledge, pp. 293-302..
