Public agenda dynamics: Competition, cooperation, and more!
Date:
Agenda-setting has been extensively investigated over the past 50 years as a formal theory of media effects. Of the various research questions about agenda setting, the competitive nature of the interissue relationship on public agenda is particularly intriguing but has not been settled. In the past decade, we have conducted a series of empirical studies (Xu et al., 2013; Sun et al., 2014; Peng et al., 2017; Peng & Zhu, 2022) to understand public agenda dynamics in both online and offline settings. I will first present two studies based on large-scale social media data: one re-tested the issues competition theory and the other proposed and tested an issues coopetition model. Then I will share our latest effort that proposed an ecological perspective to explicate interissue relationships on public agenda. With the Gallup Most Important Problem (MIP) polls in the United States from 1958 to 2020, we empirically show that the issue ecosystem of the American public is essentially competitive and that the balance of competition and cooperation has remained unchanged over time.