Authors
Daniela Širinić, Josip Šipić, Danijela Dolenec
Conference
9th Annual Conference of the Comparative Agendas Project
Description
The political-setting power of the media has been found to depend on the features of political actors at stake, the type of media outlet or the character of policy issues. We follow this line of research focus by extending it into the exploration of mutual effects between the media and political actors in the context of new democracies that emerged in the third wave of democratization. More specifically, by relying on newly collected, extensive data based on the content analysis of newspaper front pages, parliamentary questions and weekly government meetings in Croatia from 1990 to 2015, we analyze the trajectory of this mutual influence from the period of regime change to the contemporary electoral cycle. The aim is to establish whether the media act more as a passive transmission belt, or it is better conceptualized as an active molder of the policy process in an emerging democracy. Apart from taking into consideration the time dimension of the emerging democratic framework, we also investigate this relationship across different political actors and different issues. As a result, this study contributes both to the existing literature on the dynamics of policy attention, as well as to the under-researched theme of the changing role that the media play in democratization processes.
Scholar articles
D Širinić, J Šipić, D Dolenec - 9th Annual Conference of the Comparative Agendas …