Political Communication Faces the 21st Century

Inter-party Agenda-Setting in the Belgian Parliament: The Role of Party Characteristics and Competition

“…First, it often focuses on the influence of the mass media, which is perhaps not a very typical political agenda. This is due to the fact that the agenda‐setting approach and accompanying research into the transfer of issue salience from one agenda to another is strongly developed in the area of communication science, where the approach has provided one of the main theoretical frameworks since the early 1970s and has been used elaborately to assess mass media impact on public opinion and political actors (Graber, 2005). Second, although parliament is often considered to be an important institution for study – it is often the dependent variable – it is almost always treated as a unitary actor when researchers talk about ‘the’ parliamentary agenda (e.g.…”

On the Interpretation of Digital Trace Data in Communication and Social Computing Research

“…For communication, a master list was created of all journals reviewed in two landmark studies of the theoretical history of communication research (Bryant & Miron, 2004;Graber & Smith, 2005). On January 27, 2013, each of the following keywords-''hyperlink,'' ''twitter follower,'' and ''retweet''-was searched in Google Scholar within each journal and the number of results was recorded for each journal/trace combination.…”

Contemporary Political Communications: Audiences, Politicians and the Media in International Research

“…As a result, researchers have been concerned with the ‘quality’ of political information communicated to citizens to help them choose those officials. Also prevalent are ideas about the ‘exciting’ nature of election campaigns as a political competition or contest; and the regular occurrence of campaigns in the political cycle to provide analytical material (Graber 2005, 482). Within electoral studies, researchers have focused on how ‘traditional’ political actors have communicated with the public during national election campaigns.…”