Inter-party Agenda-Setting in the Belgian Parliament: The Role of Party Characteristics and Competition
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Author | Rens Vliegenthart,Corine Meppelink,Stefaan Walgrave |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00867.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Inter-party Agenda-Setting in the Belgian
Parliament: The Role of Party Characteristics
and Competitionpost_867368..388
Rens Vliegenthart Stefaan Walgrave Corine Meppelink
University of Amsterdam University of Antwerp University of Amsterdam
In this article we explore the inter-party agenda-setting dynamics in the Belgian parliament during the period
1993–2000 and investigate whether and when parties respond to the attention paid to issues by other parties
in parliament. We rely on an elaborate coding of parliamentary questions and interpellations, as well as media
coverage and government meetings. Pooled time series analyses demonstrate considerable agenda-setting effects
from one party agenda to another. The results indicate that in particular parties from the same language com-
munity, parties that participate in government and extreme-right and environmental ‘niche parties’ have agenda-
setting power.
Keywords: Belgium; agenda-setting; parliamentary questions; issue attention
The agenda-setting approach is increasingly used to study political processes (Baumgart-
ner and Jones, 1993). Taking attention to political issues as the key prerequisite for policy
change, the main focus is on when, how and why certain political actors pay attention
to specific issues. Increasingly, scholar s explore how the agenda of one political actor
influences the agenda of another political actor (e.g. Van Noije et al., 2008; Vliegenthart
and Walgrave, 2009; Walgrave and Van Aelst, 2006). Until now this research has been
limited in scope in at least two respects. First, it often focuses on the influence of the
mass media, which is perhaps not a very typical political agenda. This is due to the fact
that the agenda-setting approach and accompanying research into the transfer of issue
salience from one agenda to another is strongly developed in the area of communication
science, where the approach has provided one of the main theoretical frameworks since
the early 1970s and has been used elaborately to assess mass media impact on public
opinion and political actors (Graber, 2005). Second, although parliament is often con-
sidered to be an important institution for study – it is often the dependent variable – it
is almost always treated as a unitary actor when researchers talk about ‘the’ parliamentary
agenda (e.g. Walgrave and Van Aelst, 2006). In well-functioning democracies, however,
parliament consists of at least two parties that have different ideologies and political
preferences and give different priorities to issues. In this article we try to overcome these
two shortcomings. More specifically, we are interested in the dynamics of internal par-
liamentary agenda setting: when are parliamentarians from one party influenced by par-
liamentarians from other parties? How and to what extent do parties differ in their
influence on – and thus their agenda-setting power over – other parties?
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00867.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59, 368–388
© 2010The Authors. Political Studies © 2010 Political StudiesAssociation
We address these questions by looking at the attention twelve different political parties
devoted to 25 political issues in the Belgian federal parliament during the 1993–2000
period. Based on weekly data on parliamentary questions and interpellations and a longi-
tudinal time series design, we assess the agenda-setting relationships between the parties in
the Belgian parliament. First, we more elaborately introduce the political agenda-setting
approach and base our arguments on the ideas of issue competition advanced by scholars
of party politics. From these arguments we formulate several hypotheses regarding the
contingency of agenda-setting effects.
The Contingency of the Political Agenda-Setting Process
The term ‘agenda setting’ is widely used in political science, yet with a different meaning
in different schools of research. George Tsebelis (2002), for example, uses agenda setting
to refer to the institutional power of political actors to issue a proposal to which other
actors must react. However, the approach to agenda setting we follow here does not rest
on the idea of this notion of a first actor but on the idea of resource scarcity for different
actors.
The origins of what can be labelled as the ‘policy agenda approach’to politics can be traced
back to classic works by Kingdon (1984) and Schattschneider (1960). Since then, the
approach has gained momentum, especially in the study of American politics but increas-
ingly in Europe as well (John, 2006). One of the most recent articulations of the ‘policy
agenda approach’ is elaborated in Agendas and Instability in American Politics by Frank
Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993). The basic premise of this approach is that political
decision making requires political attention – taking the form of resources, time,personnel,
etc. – and that shifts in attention are a precondition for policy change. Primarily, agenda-
setting scholars investigate why some issues get more attention from parties, government,
parliament, interest groups, etc. than other issues.
A key finding of contemporary agenda-setting research is that the level of political
attention is often stable for a long time but that there are then often sudden and strong
changes in political attention, which are termed ‘punctuations’. Jones and Baumgartner
(2005) suggest cascading to be one of the explanatory mechanisms of the punctuated
character of many policy agendas, where cascading implies that political actors imitate
each other. To phrase it differently, imitating behaviour can partly account for the fact
that attention to issues is stable over time, with only a few irregular but significant
upsurges in attention. We employ this idea of cascading and imitation as an explanation
of how different political actors imitate each other by adopting each other’s issue
agenda.
Imitation implies that there is a causal relation between the agendas of different actors
whereby attention by actorA leads to attention by actor B. A fair amount of work has been
done by different scholars and applied to very different agendas as dependent and inde-
pendent variables. For example, Gary King and colleagues take an agenda-setting approach
to look at the impact of various US social movements on different stages of the policy
INTER-PARTY AGENDA-SETTING 369
© 2010The Authors. Political Studies © 2010 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011, 59(2)
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