[gov2001-l] Abstract: The Media Followed the Parties...

Hi all, Please find our preliminary abstract below. We would appreciate comments and recommendations. Thanks, Jacqueline and Jen The Media Followed the Parties, but Not Equally on All Issues: A Closer Look at Agenda Formation in the 1997 British General Election A small body of literature has attempted to determine the causal flow of agenda-setting during political campaigns: do the media lead the parties or vice versa? Using time-series cross-sectional data from the 1997 British general election campaign, Brandenburg (2002) employs ordinary least squares regression to conclude that the media tracked the parties' issue agendas. We replicate these results but find evidence in first differences that parties conceivably followed the media agendas as well. We therefore re-estimate Brandenburg's five models using negative binomial regression in light of the over-dispersed count-data. The results confirm Brandenburg's stated but imperfectly supported conclusion that agenda formation was unidirectional, from parties to media. In addition, however, the negative binomial models uncover differences across policy dimensions in the magnitude of this party impact, information that OLS suppresses. It appears that the parties particularly affected the media's tendency to cover the economy, welfare, education, and foreign policy.