Suchergebnisse

AbstractA growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single‐party governments compared to those with multiple‐party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single‐party governments compared to those with multiple‐party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non‐Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system—parliamentary or presidential—and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country‐ and institution‐specific.