Original
Initiate and Elevate! How Political Parties Can Set an Agenda
Abstract
The study of political agenda setting is a cornerstone in political science. Within this literature, political parties are implicitly portrayed as being capable of proactively initiating discussions. However, this fundamental notion of party agency deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. In response, this article crafts a new model (the Issue Initiation Model) that opens the window into parties’ efforts to set an agenda and traces how they initiate and elevate their agenda. The model is tested on an original dataset covering more than 5.5-million tweets by political parties and MPs, coupled with over 750,000 news articles and 419,000 parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and Denmark from 2015 to 2022. Results show how parties and their MPs can proactively redirect the attention of other actors through strategic planning and orchestrated actions. By theorizing and empirically testing the implicit notion that parties can proactively initiate discussions, this article has important implications for political agenda setting.
中文
发起并提升！政党如何设定议程
摘要
政治议程设置研究是政治学的基石之一。在这一文献中，政党被隐含地描绘为能够主动发起讨论。然而，这一关于政党能动性的基本观念仍值得进一步的理论与实证关注。为此，本文构建了一个新模型（议题发起模型），为考察政党设定议程的努力打开窗口，并追踪其如何发起并提升自身议程。该模型在一个原创数据集上得到检验，该数据集涵盖2015年至2022年英国和丹麦政党与议员的超过550万条推文，并结合超过75万篇新闻报道和41.9万件议会质询。结果表明，政党及其议员可以通过战略规划和协同行动，主动引导其他行为体的注意力。通过将政党能够主动发起讨论这一隐含观念理论化并进行实证检验，本文对政治议程设置具有重要意义。
关键词
政党、议程设置、议题发起、议员、社交媒体、议会质询、比较政治、英国与丹麦