Explaining political attention allocation with the help of issue character: evidence from the European Council

Abstract

Policy issues compete for the attention of political actors, and the size of the agenda an issue can occupy is largely determined by the way in which it is defined. This logic constitutes a simple agenda-setting model in which factors related to the participants in the policy process and their context influence the attention a single issue receives after being problematised. In order to be able to apply this model to the construction of a whole agenda, we need to add an intermediate step. This study proposes to do so by incorporating the notion of issue character and offers an empirical application of the adapted model to the European Council, a crucial informal player in European Union (EU) agenda setting. Using a dimensionality reduction technique, the composition of the agenda is broken down to two constitutive dimensions -core vs. non-core themes of government and economic vs. noneconomic character. Since the first structuring element is in line with existing knowledge and the role expectations for the European Council, the analysis concentrates on the second type. Changing saliency levels of the economic issue character of the agenda are used as a dependent variable in a model, including predictors related to the nature of the institution and contextual factors. The results show that leftist European Council party ideology and growing government deficit in the EU contribute to the increasing prominence of the economic dimension, which in turn explains rising levels in attention to various issues, especially of the non-core themes type.

Building the technological European Community through education: European mobility and training programmes in the 1980s

“…We analyse the contextual elements that key actors selected to frame their policy proposals and note the dimensions that were emphasized as a result. According to Alexandrova’s agenda-setting model, the extent to which a certain dimension is emphasized determines the degree of attention paid to multiple issues, that is, it structures the overall agenda ( Alexandrova, 2016 : 408–409). In more general terms, however, we are interested in discovering how the agenda was set and which broader problems it appealed to.…”

Issue Hierarchization in Agenda‐Setting: The Case of the European Council Agenda

“…The political importance of an issue and thus the attention dedicated to it on the agenda correlates with the salience of an issue (Alexandrova, 2016; Dearing and Rogers, 1996; Peake, 2001; Shrauger, 1967). The issue salience corresponds to the notion of the matter of degree (Boydstun et al, 2014; Princen, 2009).…”

“…Once an item is highly receptive to a venue and has privileged access on a venue's agenda, it is considered a core issue. All other issues are classified as non‐core, and they have to compete for policy attention among themselves but, first and foremost, with core items (Alexandrova et al, 2012; Alexandrova, 2016).…”

“…The role of the European Council in the EU agenda‐setting process is crucial since it sets the basis of strategic guidelines for EU actions, and thus to define the main EU agenda. Besides, it is considered the highest informal agenda‐setter in terms of an ability to set an issue on the agenda of any other EU body (Alexandrova, 2016; Alexandrova and Carammia, 2018). Even though I acknowledge that the EC agenda is not identical to the EU agenda, it is one of the closest agendas to the decision‐making point of EU policy‐making with significant formal and informal agenda‐setting powers.…”

“…Even though I acknowledge that the EC agenda is not identical to the EU agenda, it is one of the closest agendas to the decision‐making point of EU policy‐making with significant formal and informal agenda‐setting powers. Furthermore, supposing that the EC agenda impacts agendas of all other EU venues (Alexandrova, 2016; Alexandrova and Carammia, 2018), it seems a logical starting point for the analysis of the issue hierarchization in the context of vertical attention dynamics of EU policy‐making. This makes it an ideal case study for the analysis of EU agenda‐setting dynamics.…”