Definitely a cool project. The title asks a question; you want it to make an argument, so that someone skimming a table of contents could get a sense of what conclusions you draw. Something like "Costless Conflicts" would help communicate your point. Also, I think the "while at first glance" clause and the information that follows immediately from it is a bit subtle for an abstract--if there is a gap between the factual and counter-factual, why isn't that gap the causal effect? I wasn't quite clear on that--is this a liability in the method more generally? Also, I'm not sure you get much from the final sentence about how your result differs from Abadie and Gardazabal's from another country--although if you highlight a bit more any methodological improvements you guys offer, you might mention them there. Best, Dan On Wed, 3 May 2006, Daniel Fetter wrote:

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)