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WORKING PAPER
Politicians and the Press: Who Leads, Who Follows?
Bartels, Larry M.Abstract his paper examines the interplay between politicians and the press in setting the national policy agenda. The data for the analysis consist of daily counts of executive branch activities, congressional activities, New York Times stories, local newspaper stories, and ABC News coverage of Bosnia, Medicare, NAFTA, and Whitewater during the first three years of the Clinton administration. Vector autoregressions suggest that all three media outlets (and the politicians themselves) followed the lead of the executive branch on Bosnia and NAFTA and of Congress on Medicare and Whitewater. However, New York Times coverage led political activities even more than it followed them, with especially strong agenda-setting effects for NAFTA and Whitewater. The independent agenda-setting power of ABC News was substantially less than that of the Times, but still considerable, while local newspapers tended, by and large, to follow the lead of politicians and the national news media. Prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, September 1996. Keywords agenda-setting Bosnia Congress media Medicare NAFTA president VAR Whitewater File
Uploaded 08-23-1996 Document ID Number 374 |
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