Hi everyone,
Below is a revised version of our abstract. Thanks in advance for any comments!
Jen and Jacqueline
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 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,
Brandenburg (2002) employs ordinary least squares regression to conclude that
agenda formation was unidirectional, from parties to media. We replicate these
results but find evidence in first differences that parties conceivably
followed the media as well. We therefore re-estimate Brandenburg's models using
negative binomial regression, given the over-dispersed count-data. Changes in
media coverage that chronologically follow changes in party coverage *are*
greater than party changes that follow media changes. Additionally, because the
negative binomial model permits variation in party influence across policy
dimensions, we demonstrate that the parties particularly affected the media's
tendency to cover the economy, welfare, education and foreign policy. OLS
treats jumps between policy dimensions identically and thus improperly suggests
a uniform impact across all issues.
(154 words)
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