The Media’s Informational Function in Political Agenda-Setting Processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The political agenda-setting literature has extensively demonstrated that issues receiving more media attention rank higher on the political agenda as well. Scholars now try to get grip on the mechanisms underlying these findings. This paper focuses on the media’s informational function as a driver of political agenda-setting processes. It studies the extent to which politicians, when reacting to media information, really learn about the information from the media—as opposed to instances where the media function as an amplifier rather than as the true source of policy-relevant information. The matter is investigated by means of a survey with Members of Parliament (MPs) in Belgium, Canada, and Israel ( N = 376). We confronted the MPs with news stories that had recently been in the media, asking them whether they undertook political action on the news story and whether they knew about the news story before it appeared in the media. We show that politicians mostly knew about the information before it appeared in the media—but that there is variation between politicians and types of action in this respect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".