Agenda-setting
Weaver D H, Graber D, McCombs M, Eyal C 1981 Media Agenda Setting in a Presidential Election: Issues, Images and Interest. Praeger, New York

M. McCombs

Agendas: Political
The political agenda is the set of issues that are the subject of decision making and debate within a given political system at any one time. Significant research specifically on the topic of agenda setting, as opposed to decision making, dates mostly from the 1960s. Early studies of agenda setting were quite controversial because they were often presented as critiques of the pluralist studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Truman (1951) mostly ignored the issue of who set the agenda of political debate. Dahl (1956) discusses the matter in mentioning that ensuring that no group have control over the range of alternatives discussed within the political system is a requisite for democracy. In his study of New Haven he explicitly raises the question of agenda setting, noting that with a permeable political system virtually all significant issues would likely come to the attention of the elites. ‘Because of the ease with which the political stratum can be penetrated, whenever dissatisfaction builds up in some segment of the electorate party politicians will probably learn of the discontent and calculate whether it might be converted into a political issue with an electoral pay-off’ (Dahl 1961, p. 93). In Dahl’s view, then, any issue with a significant potential following in the public would likely find an elite-level champion, though he also notes that issues with no large-scale electoral pay-off might never enter the agenda.

1. Conflict Expansion
E. E. Schattschneider (1960) focused attention on how political debates often grow from the conflict of two actors, the more disadvantaged of whom may have an incentive to ‘socialize’ the conflict to a broader political arena. Of course, the more