the anatomy of agenda-setting research (pages 68–84)journal of communication 1993 43 2.pdf

The Anatomy of Agenda-Setting Research

by Everett M. Rogers, University of New Mexico, James W. Dearing, Michigan State University, and Dorine Bregman, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris

Intellectual histories are complex because they represent the culmination o f many instances of personal and impersonal influence. For example, Walter Lippmann wrote Public Opinion in 1922, based on his World War I experiences in propaganda and military intelligence, because of the prompting of his Harvard professor, Graham Wallas. Almost 50 years later, Maxwell McCombs walked into the UCLA Bookstore and bought a copy of Bernard Cohen’s (1963) ?‘he Pr-ess and Foreign Policy.’ In both cases, social influence played an important role in determining what each scholar would do, and the work for which both o f them would be remembered.

lJCLA faculty colleagues in a bar in Los Angeles. He called their attention to that day’s front page of the LosAngeles Times. The paper reported three major news items, one of which, the resignation o f the director of the Los Angeles War on Poverty programs, was highlighted. McCombs and his colleagues discussed possible reasons why one news item was headlined over the others, and speculated about the consequences of front-page headlines for readers. McCombs’s next step was to the UCLA bookstore and Cohen’s (1963) book. Soon he was on his way to Chapel Hill and his classic study of agenda setting with Donald Shaw (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).

Before buying Cohen’s (1963) book, McCombs had been sitting with his

’ McComhs had first encountered Lippmann’s (1922) book, and Cohen’s (19631, a few years previously, while doing assigned reading for a doctoral course on communication theory taught by Wilbur Schramrn at Stanford IJniversity. A detailed history o f how Maxwell Mc- Conibs and Donald Shaw came t o carry out their agenda-setting study during the 1968 presidential election is provided by Tankard (1990, pp. 278-286).

Everett M. Rogers is professor and chair o f the Department of Communication and Journal- ism at the University of New Mexico. James W. Ilearing is assistant professor in the Depart- ment o f Communication at Michigan State University. Dorine Hregman is a researcher at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in France. An earlier draft of this article was presented at the jointly sponsored session “The 20th Anniversary of Agenda-Setting Research” (Maxwell McCombs, chair) at the annual conferences o f the American Association for Pub- lic Opinion Ilesearch and thc World Association for Public Opinion Research, May 17-19, 1992, St. Petersburg, FL.

Copyright 0 1993 Jorirnal of Communication 43(2) , Spring. 0021-9916/93/$5,00

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Because intellectual histories are so complex (and complicated even more by the diverse interpretations of later scholars), they are simultane- ously fascinating and very difficult to understand using social scientific methods. The most common means for investigating intellectual histories is the historical method, which seeks t o understand paradigmatic change by identifying key instances o f personal and impersonal influence, which are then interpreted as determining the paramerers and directions of a particular field of study. A social scientific understanding of such histories, while acknowledging the importance of key instances o f intellectual influence, must seek to identify patterns that represent influence over time. Thomas Kuhn (1970) and Diana Crane (1972) both understood this, for they emphasized it in their important work on, respectively, scientific paradigms and invisible colleges.

In this article we seek to add insight into the complex intellectual history of agenda-setting research by identifying over-time patterns o f (a) puh- lications and (b) bibliographic citations. Our primary purpose is to address issues about the past, present, and future o f agenda-setting research.

Parameters of Agenda-Setting Research

O u r conception o f agenda setting, as explained elsewhere, is relatively broad (see Rogers 8r Ikaring, 1988, p. 556; Rogers, nearing, C(r Chang, 1991 ). We include studies o f media agenda setting, public agenda setting. and policy agenda setting, and refer t o the theoretical interrelationships among these three types o f research as the Ugen~u-settinRprocess. Media agenda setting includes those studies that conceptualize the mass media news agenda as the main dependent variable of study. Public agenda setting includes those studies that conceptualize the relative importance o f issues t o members o f the public as the main dependent variable of study. Po1ic.y agenda setting includes those studies that conceptualize the issue agenda o f governmental bodies o r elected officials as the main dependent variable o f study. Increasingly, some agenda-setting studies include two o r three o f these dependent variables in their design (for instance, see Protess et al., 19C)l). Our conceptualization o f the agenda-setting process is sufficiently broad t o draw intellectual relationships among investigations that may be quite diverse in their conceptualization. However, all agenda-setting studies share an obvious concern with the relative importance of puhlic issues a n d a less obvious concern with the general func- tioning o f public opinion in a democracy. Ultimately, research on the agenda-setting process seeks to offer one explanation o f how social change occurs in modern society.

Whereas the tradition o f public agenda setting, in particular, is closely identified with a specific research design (the combination o f mass media content analyses and public opinion surveys), we adopt a pluralistic ap-

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proach to agenda-setting research methods. We do not draw parameters around agenda-setting research on the basis of the methods of study. That is, we include studies that operationalize variables cross-sectionally or over time, at the macro level and micro level, via multimethod research designs that address only a single agenda or issue, and that rely on archival data as distinct from field data.

We believe that the advantages of such an approach for understanding the agenda-setting process, broad in conception and methods, outweigh its disadvantages. The disadvantages are important, however, and include the possibility of less deterministic results and the danger of obscuring certain strong relationships through the desire to include more variables measured in more and different ways. The primary advantage o f our broad approach is a better informed understanding of the social phenomena of agenda setting. In other words, the disadvantages of our broad ori- entation are primarily methodological, whereas its advantages are mostly theoretical. Our concern with the theoretical integration of agenda-setting research drove us to adopt a broad perspective.

Identifying Agenda-Setting Publications In the present study we analyzed 223 publications’ that included one or more of the three agenda-setting dependent variables discussed previously. It was not necessary for a publication to report data results, to mention agenda setting in its title, to cite other agenda-setting publications, or to be published in certain outlets. We did not include convention papers un- less they were presented so recently that they could not yet have been published in a scientific journal. We feel confident that we collected virtu- ally all of the publications on media agenda setting and public agenda setting, but our search of policy agenda-setting publications may be somewhat less ~ o m p l e t e . ~ The 223 publications explicitly or implicitly concerned agenda setting over the 70-year period from 1922 to 1992, with the vast majority of agenda-setting publications completed after 1971 (Figure 1).

Growth of Agenda-Setting Research

Lippmann (1922) titled the first chapter of Public Opinion “The world outside and the pictures in our heads” and argued that the mass media are the principal connection between events in the world and the images of

’ A complete bibliography of the 223 publications is available from the first author.

’ We invite additions to our list o f 223 agenda-setting publications. Please send them to the first author.

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these events in our minds. Without using the term agenda setting, Lipp- mann wrote about what we today call public agenda setting.

by Cohen, who observed that the press “may not be successful much o f the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people, depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers o f the paper they read” (1963, p. 13, italics added). Cohen thus expressed the metaphor that led to agenda-setting research, and its focus on the mass media.

But agenda setting was still a theoretical idea. It didn’t even have a name until McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) classic study of the media’s role in the I968 presidential election campaign in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They calculated the media agenda in Chapel Hill from a content analysis of the main mass media that w-ere reporting the presidential campaign, and measured thy puhlic agenda by surveying 100 undecided voters. The media agenda correlated almost perfectly with the public agenda; that is, issues like foreign policy, law and order, fiscal policy, and so forth, ranked simi- larly on twth agendas. Perhaps people had their agenda set by the media.

The 1972 study set off a research tradition that at first closely followed McCombs and Shaw’s approach of combining a media content analysis with an audience survey of the ranking o f agendas. Our review shows that 131 o f the 223 publications wholly or mainly concern the relationship hetween a media agenda and its corresponding public agenda.

IJnrelated to this large stream of mass communication research on public agenda setting is a research tradition on policy agenda setting, carried forward mainly by political scientists, sociologists, and other scholars. For these scholars the key question is “How does an issue get on the policy agenda?” Cohen (1963) gave a mass media focus t o what was already an important issue among political scientists and international relations scholars. For example, Schattschneider’s (1960) well-known statement that “the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power” (p. 68) organized many political scientists around the study of policy agenda setting, while Cohen’s (1963) statement had a disciplinary crossover effect on mass communication researchers. Among political scientists such as Roger Cobb and Charles Elder, and for subsequent studies by scholars such as John Kingdon (1984), for whom the mass media is but one o f numerous influences on the policy agenda, Schattschneider’s I960 landmark book, ’Ihe Semi-Sovereign People, was more important than Cohen’s 1963 publication. The policy agenda-setting tradition consists of 65 publications.

Until recently, researchers seldom investigated how the media agenda is set. Our review shows 15 publications that investigate the media agenda, stemming from the 1948 publication by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton (1948/1964). A s Carragee, Rosenblatt, and Michaud (1987) said, “Agenda-setting research has consistently accepted the media agenda as a

Forty years later, the conceptualization of agenda setting was advanced

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given without considering the process by which the agenda is constructed” (p. 4 3 ) . We need t o better unclerstand how the media agenda is set, and b y whom. The media agenda is constructed through an interactive process between the news media and their sources, in the context o f competing news organizations, news-handling conventions and routines, and issue interest groups (Shoemaker & Reese, 1991; Ilearing & Rogers, 1992).

Wh.y Com m u n icatio n Researchers Research Agenda Setting What attracts communication scholars to investigate agenda setting? One mafn reason f o r their interest is that agenda-setting research appears t o offer an alternative t o the scholarly search for direct media effects on atti- tude change and overt behavior change. Earlier mass communication research had found limited effects, which seemed counterintuitive t o many researchers, especially to those (such as McCombs and Shawl who 1iad previous mass media experience. Further, early inass communication PhIh felt that the media’s main purpose was t o inform, rather than t o per- suade or change overt behavior. So they looked for cognitive effects, like agenda setting, in which people are told what to think about. Many o f t he agenda-setting researchers stated that the main justification for their work was an attempt to overcome the limited-effects findings o f past research. For example, McCombs stated in a 1981 overview:

Its lagenda setting ’sj in it i d empirical explo rat ion was.fortu ito u d y timed. It came at that time in the history of mass communication research uihen disenchantment both with attitudes and opinions as dependent variables, arid wilh the limited-ejfects model as a n adequate intellectual summary, was leading scholars to look elsewhere. (1 98 1, p. 121)

Recently, Carragee et al. (15M7) assessed the contribution of agenda- setting research to understanding effects in this way:

Despite important shortcomings, the agenda-setting approach has con- tributed to a more advanced understanding of the media’s role in soci- e ty . It has helped to change the emphasis qfmass communication research away,from the study ofshort-term attitudinal effects to a more longitudinal analysis qfsoczal impact. This is no small contribution. (p. 42)

A Citation Analysis Over Time

Citation analysis allows us t o determine the extent t o which scholars in a scientific specialty reference each others’ publications. A citation indi-

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cates that a researcher may have considered the work of another scholar to be important or pertinent to his or her own research. Citation analysis can help illuminate the intellectual history of a research tradition, provid- ing a quantitative balance to more interpretive measures.

What does it mean if publication B cites publication A? Generally, such citation means that the author of publication B recognizes an intellectual debt of some kind to publication A. Perhaps author B is acknowledging having borrowed methods, theory, o r findings from publication A. In some cases, author B cites publication A in order to attack it or to dis- agree with its methods, theory, or findings. Nevertheless, such a citation indicates that publication A has influenced author B. In some cases, author B may cite publication A just because it seems the proper thing to do, even though author B has not even read publication A. So while citation data are not perfect indicators of academic influence, they do pro- vide a general understanding of the structure of intellectual influence in a scientific specialty.

A research specialty evolves over time as a kind of family tree in which earlier studies influence later studies, as is indicated by citation data. Agenda-setting research dates in publication from 1922 to the present-a time span of 70 years. When tracing research on an intellectual idea over time, we should know the over-time pattern of research activity on that idea. A lag occurs between the time a research study is conducted, the results are published, and the studies’ findings are consequently cited in a later publication (which is itself time-lagged). Thus the pattern of citations will lag the pattern of research activity by several years. If a period of one year is considered a typical length of time between the research activity and the publication of its findings, then at least one additional year will probably elapse before citations to the original research begin to appear.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of agenda-setting publications by date of publication. Figure 2 shows the distribution of the 1,544 citations from the 223 studies to previous agenda-setting publications (plotted by the date of the publication cited). As Figure 2 indicates, the most important years in agenda-setting research were, in order of citation frequency, 1977, followed by 1981, 1972, and 1975. Citation frequency is a variable that does not take into account the different number of publications appearing each year. For example, 1972 had about four times fewer publications (N=5) than the year 1977 (N= IS), yet the number of citations to authors of publications in subsequent years is about the same (161 citations for 1972 and 170 citations for 1977), even when allowing for the 5 more years of citability for 1972.

intellectual integration of the emerging research specialty of agenda setting. In the following section we analyze agenda-setting publications on the basis of the three research traditions that we identified as components of the agenda-setting process, in order to gain insight into this research

In their seminal article, McCombs and Shaw (1972) helped facilitate the

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specialty's degree o f integration. Supposedly, the more integrated a research specialty is, the more quickly theoretical, methodological, and policy-relevant advances will occur. When scholars are unaware of other research pertinent to their own, they may unnecessarily reinvent the wheel, and waste time and energy.

Citations Among the Three Research Traditions

To what extent have researchers in each o f the two main research traditions (public agenda setting and policy agenda setting) cited publications in the other main research tradition? We found that researchers whom we identified as focusing on public agenda-setting research cited publications within their own research tradition 844 out of 1,073 times (79% of total cites). They cited policy agenda-setting publications 229 out of 1,073 times (21% of total cites).

Researchers whom we identified as focusing on policy agenda-setting research cited publications within their own research tradition 135 out of 298 times (45% of total cites). They cited public agenda-setting publications 163 out of 298 times (55%) o f total cites).

So policy agenda researchers cited policy agenda research somewhat less than they cited public agenda research, while public agenda researchers cited public agenda research almost j&w times as often as they cited policy agenda research. Our post-1987 data show that mass communication scholars who are investigating the policy agenda look more often t o policy agenda studies, especially t o those by Cobb and Elder (1971, 1983).

One possible explanation for these citation relationships is that early research (1972 to 1978) on the agenda-setting process was conducted particularly by mass communication scholars. These investigations, driv- en by a desire to understand the effects o f mass communication, sought to determine whether the media agenda influenced the public agenda.

look beyond their own communication journals t o find published results about agenda setting. But political scientists did. During the mid-l970s, they paid relatively more attention to the total agenda-setting process, since their conceptualization o f agenda setting included more indepen- dent variables than just the media agenda. Political scientists who wanted to study the total agenda-setting process found relatively little research on this topic in political science journals, and so investigated journals outside o f their discipline, particularly to understand how the media agenda affected policymakers. Political science researchers investigating the elec- toral process became interested in the agenda-setting process as a frame for analysis of political communication during election campaigns. S o , one may conclude that research about agenda setting has been based in communication research journals.

Communication researchers interested in agenda setting did not have t o

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Citability of Agenda-Setting Research Publications

How many citations have been made to each o f the 223 publications about the agenda-setting process we analyzed? We constructed the variable of citability to index the relative degree of intellectual influence that each publication has had on subsequent agenda-setting research publications. Citation counts are time-dependent, so we removed this time bias from our measure of citability fo r each publication. We assume that a scholar can cite only research published at least one year prior to his o r her own publication. S o the citability percentage for citations received consists of dividing the number o f cites received by a publication by the number of all publications appearing at least one year later than its publi- cation4 For instance, the 115 cites received by McCombs and Shaw's (1972) article are divided by the number of publications that appeared after 1972 (N=204). The citability percentage is thus ll5/204, o r 56%.

Table 1 identifies the 16 studies published since 1972 that received the highest number of cites, as well as the percentage of total citations received by each.5 A research tradition is created when a number of scholars in different university locations form an invisible college around a shared paradigm. Research traditions form more rapidly and have a greater degree o f interconnectedness in terms of theory, methodology, and research findings when like-minded scholars are in close physical proximity to one another. Such interpersonal contact, usually exemplified when two o r more scholars from the same department coauthor an article, are a factor in the number of citations that an agenda-setting research publication receives. Only 2 of the 16 most cited publications (see Table 1) are single-authored.6

Since authors generally tend to cite themselves, having one o r more coauthors who each later cite their own work can help boost a publication's citability. Fourteen of the 16 publications in Table 1 have two o r more authors; 8 o f the 16 publications have more than two authors. Yet

'I The assumption that :I scholar can cite only research published at least one year prior t o his o r her own publication is not always correct. Scholars who attend more conferences, who have more extensive interpersonal networks with other scholars in their specialty, and who work in closer physical proximity with other scholars studying the same topic, know of research results prior to their publication. In the case o f agenda-setting research, we found several cases of concomitant and/or prepublication citing. 'The importance o f interperson:iI networks among scholars in citation analysis is suggested by the case o f several researchers investigating the :rgenda-setting process who are in the same university department.

We also computed (a ) the number o f cites received b y each publication, (1)) the percentage of cites received, ( c ) the numlxr of cites inacle; and ( 4 ) the percentage o f cites made, for each o f the 223 publications included in o u r analysis. Copies of this list a r e available by re- quest from the first author.

'' The mosi highly cited o f the 16 publications are characterized by being published relatively earlier.

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Table 1. The 16 Most Highly Cited Agenda-Setting Publications

Citations received Number of %of possible

Publication cites cites University

1 . McCombs & Shaw (1972) 115 56 North Carolina 2. Shaw & McCombs (1977) 56 36 North Carolina 3. McLeod, Becker,

& Byrnes (1 974) 55 28 Wisconsin 4. Funkhouser (1973) 49 25 Stanford 5. Tipton, Haney,

& Baseheart (1975) 45 24 Kentucky 6. Erbring, Goldenberg,

&Miller (1980) 41 29 Michigan 7. Weaver, Graber, McCombs.

& Eyal(1981) 37 31 Indiana 8. Zucker (1 978) 37 25 lrvine 9. McKuen & Coombs (1981) 26 22 Michigan 10. Weaver, McCombs,

& Spellman (1 975) 26 14 Indiana 1 1 . Benton & Frazier (1 976) 25 14 Minnesota 12. Cooket al. (1983) 24 24 Northwestern 13. Becker, McCombs,

14. lyengar & Kinder (1987) 21 42 Stony Brook 15. Rogers & Dearing (1988) 21 48 Southern California 16. Behr & lyengar (1 985) 19 23 Yale Note: The last column lists the university affiliation of the first author at the time of publication.

& McLeod (1 975) 22 1 1 Ohio State

only 66 of all 223 agenda-setting studies (30%) are coauthored by two authors, and only 48 (22%) are coauthored by three or more authors. Clear- ly, multiple-authored publications are more highly cited. Exactly why this is so deserves further study.

When a small number of scholars in frequent interpersonal contact with each other are each actively publishing in the same research tradition, a high degree of cross-citation will likely occur among the members of the invisible college. For instance, wherever McCombs was teaching (at the University of North Carolina from 1967 to 1973, then at Syracuse Universi- ty from 1973 to 1985, and presently at the University of Texas at Austin), we see a number of agenda-setting publications coauthored with him by other scholars at the same university. Over the past 20 years, McCombs has continued his active involvement in agenda-setting research and has thus added coherence to this research specialty (McCombs’s name appears on 12 of the 223 publications analyzed here).

Why is the McCombs and Shaw 1972 study so widely cited by many of the 197 other agenda-setting studies that follow it in this research specialty? There are three reasons.

First, this article contained several important theoretical and method-

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ological innovations: (a) a name for the research specialty that was to emerge (agenda setting) and (b) an empirical methodology for studying the agenda-setting process, by combining a content analysis of the media agenda with a survey of the public agenda.

Second, this article reported a spectacularly high relationship between the media agenda and the public agenda, suggesting that mass communication has indirect effects, a finding that fulfilled the expectations of mass communication scholars at the time.

Third, this article was originally presented as a paper at the 1971 annual convention of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. It was published in 1972 in Public Opinion Quarterly, thus exposing it both to mass communication scholars who mainly study public agenda setting, and to political scientists and sociologists who mainly investigate policy agenda setting.

Present and Future Research

After the mid-1980s, public agenda-setting scholars began to break out of the McCombs-and-Shaw-style methodological mode, while still pursuing the basic question of how the public agenda is set. For example, Shanto Iyengar and his collaborators (see, for instance, Iyengar & Kinder, 1987) began to investigate the microlevel agenda setting of individual respondents in a series of laboratory experiments with doctored television newscasts (constructed so as to overstress some news issue). Researchers conducted over-time, single-issue studies in which time becomes a variable of study, with the media agenda, the public agenda, and the policy agenda indexed as variables, and subjected to either pretest or posttest designs in order to understand the causal relationships involved in the agenda-setting process (Cook et al., 1983; Leff, Protess, & Brooks, 1986; Protess et al., 19911. Others used multimethod approaches (Rogers et al., 1991).

This proliferation of research approaches used to study the agenda-setting process has given this research specialty a renewed intellectual energy. The original and basic question McCombs and Shaw (1972) asked- whether the media agenda affects the public agenda-was answered fairly thoroughly by the 1980s. Today, a variety of different research methodologies are being used to probe other, related questions about the agenda-setting process. These include:

1. How is the media ugendu set?7 How is the policy agenda set? How do the media agenda, the policy agenda, and the public agenda collabo- ratively influence each other, if they do?

' Steven H. Chaffee raised this research question for the first time in his commen- tary on a paper presented by Maxwell McComhs at the 1980 International Corn- munication Association Conference in A c a p ~ i l c ~ .

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2 . 1Vh.y do “real-world indicators ”of a n issue notplay a n important role in the agenda-setting process? For instance, the issue of drug abuse rose to a high position on the U.S. agenda in 1986, and stayed in this high priority for several years. It finally declined after 1989, while the long- term trend in the number of drug-related deaths in the U.S. has slowly and almost linearly declined (Danielian & Reese, 1989).

process at the individual level? Here experiments by Iyengar and others, centering on such concepts as priming and framing, are important.

4. How can we measure thepublic agenda more accurately?Often researchers use a single survey question, such as “What is the most important problem facing the U.S. today?” to represent the public agenda. The exact wording of this question is crucial. For example, while only 6% of the respondents in a 1988 national sample o f U.S. adults responded to this question with the word “AIDS,” more than 70% of the same respondents said that AIDS was the most important health problem facing the 1J.S. at that time (Rogers et al., 1991).

3. What are the cognitiveprocesses involved in the agenda-setting

Coauthorship and Agenda-Setting Research We suggest that coauthorship, an artifact of research collaboration, may be used to investigate networks among agenda-setting researchers. Coau- thorship data have strong inferential advantages over citation data be- cau5e coauthorship represents a complex set of activities that requires direct, personal communication among the two or more coauthors, and it can be taken as evidence of similar or complementary cognitive orienta- tions, whether theoretical, methodological, o r pragmatic.

Coauthorship indicates a two-way communication relationship, although such relations are not necessarily equal in the degree of contribution or in the status of the authors. Coauthorship data have been used previously to measure the degree of scientific integration of a research tradition, and trends in international scientific collaboration. We suggest using coauthorship data to represent patterns o f scientific communication among agenda-setting researchers.

Continuity and Change in the Agenda-Setting Paradigm

The primary purpose of the present article has been to address issues o f paradigmatic development in general, and more specifically to consider the implications of our structural measures for the present and future o f agenda-setting research. We have also included key instances o f personal and impersonal influence that have been important t o the development of agenda-setting research.

Our structural measures, publications, and bibliographic citations offer evidence of both paradigmatic change and continuity. Since 1972 (and especially over the last 15 years), the 5-year mean number of agenda-set-

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ting publications has remained somewhat constant. The 1972-1976 mean number o f publications was 6.8; the 1977-1981 mean was 11; the 1982-1986 mean was 9.8; and the 1987-1991 mean was 12.6. The policy agenda-setting tradition has heen more consistent over time than the public agenda-setting tradition in number o f publications produced. That is, although Lippmann's ( 1922) seminal publication was concerned with the public agenda-setting process, most publications from 1922 t o I972 were concerned with the determinants o f the policy agenda (as indeed Lippmann also was). These included Lasswell (19271, Almond (195O), Davis (19521, Schattschneider, (19601, Rosenau (1961), Cohen (1963, 1967, 1970, 19831, Crenson (19711, and, finally and importantly, C o b h and Elder (1971, 1983). These political scientists were interested in the formation o f a public agenda insofar as it could be considered ;I predictoi o f foreign and domestic policy elahrat ion. Kingdon (1984) expanded the political science :issociation o f foreign policy and agenda setting into the realm o f domestic politics, following Schattschneider (1960) and Downs (1972).

After 1972, policy agenda studies were conducted at ;I relatively lower frequency per year than were public agenda studies. S o the number o f policy agenda research studies appears constant since 1972, with a mod- est increase after the 1972 publication o f the first edition o f Cobb and Elder's book, Participation in American Politics: The D-vnamics of Ageri- da-Building. In contrast, pul,iic agenda-setting publicat ions sprung from Lippmann's (1922) book. But not until 1972, when McCombs and Shaw's article suggested an appropriate mettioclology for studying the public agenda-setting process, did the numher of ptiblic agenda-setting publications increase considerably and regularly.

IJnexplained is the apparent cyclical pattern o f all agenda-setting publications (see Figure 1 ). Why does the.publication o f agenda-setting studies rise and fall every 4 t o 6 years? Perhaps, since many agenda-setting studies are conducted during national elections, this cyclical pattern is a result o f the timing o f election campaigns.x Or perhaps the over-time cyclical pattern within a paradigm indicates the delayed artifxt o f a loss of scholarly interest in a phenomena o f study, as studies are perceived as redundant or predictable. Then, scholarly interest is heightened when 21

few key innovative researchers publish new concepts and methods and stimulate other researchers t o test these new ideas or replicate their findings.

'I'he over-time distribution o f l>ibliographic citations (see Figure 2 ) dis- plays the time-dependent nature o f citation data. Over time, there is a decrease in the numher o f citations made t o previous publications. Nev- ertheless, throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the most important years for significant intellectual contributions in this research specialty appear t o be 1963, 1972, 1975, 1977, and 1981. These are also the years

we arc indebted to h v i d Weaver f o r this suggestion.

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when the greatest number of studies was published. When the time lag between publication and possible subsequent citation is considered, one can sense that the data in Figure 2 (the number of citations per year) are positively correlated with the data in Figure 1 (the number of publications per year).

The amount of cross-citation between scholars studying policy agendas and scholars studying public agendas provides an indication of the degree to which a paradigm of the entire agenda-setting process exists in the minds of both public agenda and policy agenda scholars. These data suggest that a paradigm of the agenda-setting process is more a reality for political scientists than for communication scientists. For the latter set of scholars, the narrower tradition of public agenda setting may be perceived as more accurately comprising a paradigm.

The data in Table 1, showing the most highly cited publications, points out a high percent of possible citations to two recent publications, Rogers and Dearing (1988) and Iyengar and Kinder (1987). Citations to the Rogers and Dearing (1988) publication, a meta-research of the agenda- setting research literature, may serve an integrating function, since it pre- sents the history of the media, the public, and the policy agenda-setting research traditions as parts of a larger program. The high rate of citability of the Iyengar and Kinder (1987) publication, which introduced and test- ed both conceptual and methodological innovations, suggests a willing- ness on the part of agenda-setting scholars to consider new research directions.

References Almond, G. A. (1950). The Americanpeople and,foreignpolicy. New York: Har.

Becker, L. H., McCombs, M. E., & McLeod, J . M. (1975). The development of polit-

court Brace.

ical cognitions. In S . H. Chaffee (Ed.), Political communication: Issues and strategies for research (pp. 21-63), Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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