Comparative Agenda Setting: Messaging, Communicating and Legislating

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Agenda setting is a key stage of the policymaking process, and policy entrepreneurs both inside and outside of the system spend considerable time, effort, and resources attempting to move the political agenda in their preferred direction. This panel examines political communications from comparative, methodological, and historical perspectives to identify how policy entrepreneurs successfully frame and communicate their agendas. The four papers composing the panel use distinct approaches to analyze political communications from both official and unofficial policy actors. The work here suggests that policy entrepreneur signaling - across time and contexts - is highly informative but tends to occur in cycles, reflecting the punctuated nature of the policy process. Two of the proposed papers focus on communications coming from official policy actors - analyzing political communications that span speeches, to laws, to tweets - both papers use innovative approaches to understanding agendas and what moves them. The other two papers examine communications from informal policy entrepreneurs in the form of lobbying and letters to assess the role of external pressure on shaping legislative agendas. The variation across methodology and context in these papers bring a unique perspective to studying the agenda setting process.

Sub Unit

• Division 25: Public Policy

Individual Presentations

• Dear Prime Minister” – A Punctuated Equilibrium Approach to the Study of Letters from the Public to the Executive - Daniel K. Casey

• Solving Multi-Class Classification with Large Language Models - Miklós Sebők, Centre for Social Sciences / TK; Akos Mate, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence

• Discordant Messages: Contextual Differences in Lawmaker Policy Communication - Whitney Hua, University of Southern California; Annelise Russell, University of Kentucky

• Lobbyists and the Civil Rights Legislative Agenda, 1945-1964 - Shamira M. Gelbman, Wabash College

Chair

• Anne Whitesell Miami University

Discussants

• Herschel F. Thomas West Virginia University

• Jonathan Lewallen University of Tampa