Local Media, Public Opinion and State Legislative Policies: Agenda Setting at the State Level

Transcription

1 Local Media, Public Opinion and State Legislative Policies: Agenda Setting at the State Level By Yue Tan & David Weaver School of Journalism, Indiana University Press/Politics, 14, 4 (Oct. 2009):

2 Research Purpose to explore first-level agenda setting at the state level. examines the relationships among media coverage of state newspapers, state-level public opinion, and state legislative policies tests the intervening impact of two state level factors--state legislative professionalism and state political culture--on agenda setting effects

3 Hypotheses H1: There is a positive correlation between the newspaper agenda and the public agenda at the state level. H2: There is a positive correlation between the newspaper agenda and the policy agenda at the state level. H3: There is a positive correlation between the public agenda and the policy agenda at the state level.

4 Hypotheses H4: Political culture influences agenda setting effects. In particular, in individualistic political cultures, newspaper coverage and public opinion have greater influence on legislative policies than in traditional political cultures. The policy agenda setting effects in moralistic cultures fall in between these two other cultures. H5: State legislative professionalism influences the relationship between public opinion and legislative policies. However, the direction of the impact is not clear.

5 Research Methods (1) Public agenda: state public s response to the survey question of What is the most important issue facing the state? Poll data from Odum Institute for Research in Social Science odum/jsp/home.jsp

6 Research Methods (2) Media agenda: content analysis of the states most popular newspapers (those with the highest circulations) Keyword (SmartIndexing + state s name) searching of the papers archives in Lexis- Nexis Academic (relevance score 90%)

7 Research Methods (3) Policy agenda: the number of bills that are introduced in the statehouse Keyword searching of the bill archives on the state legislatures websites The issue categories and search terms are the same as those used in measuring the media agenda.

8 Sampling scope Media-public comparison: FL(97), GA(91,96,97), IL(84-97), NJ(89-93), SC(89,90), N=25 Media-policy comparison: randomly selected two years from AK, CO, FL, LA, MA, MN, NV, NM, OR, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI, N=29 Public-policy comparison: South Carolina (89 & 90), N=2

9 Main Findings (1) a moderate positive relationship between the newspaper agenda and the public agenda in five U.S. states from 1984 to 1997 (mean rho =.42, H1 supported) a strong positive relationship between the newspaper agenda and the policy agenda in 15 U.S. states from 1989 to 2006 (mean rho =.70, H2 supported) a fairly weak positive relationship between the public agenda and the policy agenda in South Carolina in 1989 and 1990 (mean rho =.31, H3 not supported)

10 Main Findings (2) At the state level, state political culture moderates the degree of agenda-setting effects between the newspaper coverage and the legislative policies (F=3.5, p=.05). In particular, the agenda-setting effects in the states of moralistic political culture (mean rho=.77) are significantly stronger than those in the states of individualistic political culture (mean rho=.55). Legislative professionalism doesn t significantly impact agenda setting effects (r=.04 & r=.12).

11 Conclusions Agenda-setting effects at the state level are about as strong as the findings of national level agenda setting from previous studies, at least for newspaper-public. Relationship between policy and newspaper agendas is stronger than between newspaper and public, and much stronger than between policy and public agendas. State political culture influences the newspaper-policy agenda setting effects at the state level. Other societal level factors that may influence agenda setting at the state level include number of terms of office, the structure of TV markets, and political ideology. Findings raise questions about representativeness of state government.