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While policy agenda studies have extensively examined the interplays of various venues, one under‐explored area is the internal dynamics within an agenda venue. In this study, we focus on one of the important venues—news media—and investigate the inherent connections between how a public problem is characterized and how problem solutions are generated in media agenda setting. Drawing on agenda‐setting theories, we develop a typology to theorize the relationships between problem characterization and solution advocacy, and use a news dataset on climate change to empirically assess how issue characterization affects issue solution generation. Our logistic regressions demonstrate that the likelihoods of climate change policy solutions being proposed in the news are significantly influenced by how the media stories characterize the issue along four key attribute dimensions: issue image, scope, linkage, and narrative style. Key implications are discussed in the conclusion.

Agenda theories suggest that problem indicator, focusing event, and information feedback enhance issue attention. However, few studies have systematically tested this. This study, using time series data and vector autoregression (VAR), examines how climate problem indicator, high-profile international event, and climate science feedback influence media and congressional attention to global warming and climate change. The findings confirm that these attention-grabbing factors indeed generally promote issue salience, but these factors may work differently across agenda venues. Attention inertia, interagenda interaction, and partisan advantage on agenda setting are also included and analyzed in the VAR modeling. Implications of the study and recommendations for future research are discussed in conclusion. Adapted from the source document.

ObjectiveThe objective of this research is to address the roles of age and socialization in explanation for attitudes toward economic reforms in China.MethodUsing data from the China Survey 2008 and the China Governance and Policy Survey of 2016, this note reports age/cohort‐related differences in both abstract and concrete attitudes toward economic reforms, and addresses two competing (or complementary) explanations for those differences, one attributing differences to life cycle and the other attributing differences to the different environments within which Chinese adults were socialized.ResultsWhile socialization/generation explanations seem to apply for the more abstract "market reform would bring chaos" attitudes, an age/life‐cycle explanation alone seems sufficient to explain attitudes toward the more concrete subject of "privatization."ConclusionConsistent with our literature‐based theoretical expectations, "life cycle" tends to explain more concrete attitudes while "socialization"—in early and/or lifelong forms—is a more potent explanation for abstract attitudes.

A great deal of research has been dedicated to understanding the relationship of public preferences to public policy. Much of this literature, though, does not account for risk perception, an important characteristic that affects individuals' preferences. In terms of policy, those who perceive high risk in association with a particular issue should be more likely to oppose policies that would increase that risk, and, conversely, support policies that would decrease this risk. In this article, we examine the role of specific risk perceptions related to nuclear, coal, and renewable sources of energy on related policy preferences. Controlling for the influence of knowledge and several specific attitudinal indicators, we find that risk perceptions are strong predictors of energy policy preferences.

AbstractTo what degree are Chinese citizens concerned about the seriousness of global warming and climate change (GWCC) and what are the key factors that shape their concern? Drawing theoretical insights from extant literature and using recent data from a national representative public survey (N = 3,748) and provincial environmental and economic statistics, this study, the first of its kind, examines the variations and determinants of Chinese GWCC concern. Our data show that in China, compared to other countries, average public concern about GWCC is relatively low, and concern varies greatly among Chinese citizens, across different provinces and between coastal and inland areas. Statistical analyses reveal that the levels of Chinese GWCC concern are significantly influenced by individual sociodemographic characteristics, personal post-materialist values, and regional economic dependency on carbon-intensive industries. Specifically, women and younger Chinese with greater post-materialist values are more concerned about GWCC than their counterparts, and citizens from provinces with higher economic dependency on carbon-intensive industries tend to be less concerned about GWCC than people from provinces with lower carbon dependency. We discuss key policy implications and make suggestions for future research in the conclusion.

Following spatial choice theory and MAP methodology, we employ the data drawn from recent nationwide public opinion surveys to probe the latent political choice space in American political competition. Our analyses demonstrate that, in addition to the traditional left-right ideology continuum, there is a second distinct dimension in American political choice space. More importantly, the results from our regression analyses suggest that the second dimension seems to be driven by a cleavage among different reform prospects, ranging from low-politics reformism, to politics-as-usual approach, to high-politics style of change. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]