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³⁶ See, for example, Brants, Kees and van Kempen, Hetty, ‘The Ambivalent Watchdog: The Changing Culture of Political Journalism and Its Effects’, in Kuhn, Raymond and Neveu, Erik, eds, Political Journalism: New Challenges, New Practices (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 168–85Google Scholar.

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⁴⁰ Asp, Kent, ‘The Struggle for the Agenda: Party Agenda, Media Agenda, and Voter Agenda in the 1979 Swedish Election Campaign’, Communication Research, 10 (1983), 333–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁵ Wood and Peake, ‘The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting’, p. 182; see also, Morgan, David, ‘British Media and European Union News: The Brussels News Beat and Its Problems’, European Journal of Communication, 10 (1995), 321–43Google Scholar; Edwards and Wood, ‘Who Influences Whom?’ Soroka, ‘Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy’.

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⁵² Geddes, Andrew, The European Union and British Politics (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004)Google Scholar; Allen, David, ‘The United Kingdom: A Europeanized Government in a non-Europeanized Polity’, in Bulmer, Simon and Lequesne, Christian, eds, The Member States of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 119–41.Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ See, for example, Hooghe and Marks, Multi-Level Governance and European Integration.

⁵⁵ Symbolic agendas include all political forums intended for the communication or deliberation of political viewpoints, whereas substantive agendas include actual policy measures.

⁵⁶ The argument of Walgrave and Van Aelst expresses our reason for not working with party press releases, a common indicator for the political agenda. Moreover, in many countries party press releases are too irregular to allow for a time-series analysis.

⁵⁷ Kleinnijenhuis, ‘Het Publiek Volgt Media die de Politiek Volgen’.

⁵⁸ Hodess, Robin, Tedesco, John and Kaid, Lynda, ‘British Party Election Broadcasts: A Comparison of 1992 and 1997’, Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 5 (2000), 55–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brants and Van Kempen, ‘The Ambivalent Watchdog’.

⁵⁹ Amongwhich, most importantly, the Maastricht Treaty signed in 1992, the Amsterdam Treaty signed in 1997, the Treaty of Nice signed in 2001 and the introduction of the Euro in 2002.

⁶⁰ Downloaded from the Hansard internet site, the official report of both British Houses of Parliament.

⁶¹ All British and Dutch newspapers are downloaded from Lexis Nexis. The Independent and Independent on Sunday start in 1989 and 1990 respectively. To deal with the non-simultaneous start of the newspapers a weight of 1.5 was appointed to media hits in years with two newspapers. Hits for The Times and the Independent were multiplied with 6/7, once their Sunday-editions were introduced.

⁶² Dutch debates were obtained from the publishing house for government documentation, SDU.

⁶³ British debates were integrally downloaded. Dutch debates were selected according to SDU classifications based on policy domains. Relevance was established afterwards by checking for the presence of the same search terms as used for article selection.

⁶⁴ The difference in numbers is due to the fact that the Dutch SDU selected debates in which an issue was the primary subject, whereas the British debates were selected if one search term was mentioned. The British debates include more peripheral hits. Such lack of correspondence matters little to the results, since the score for attention is not dichotomous, but increases with the number of keyword hits per article. Hence, debates with only peripheral issue relevance hardly contribute to the final scores.

⁶⁵ The wordlist of each issue is made up of synonyms, for example ‘drugs’, ‘narcotics’ and ‘controlled substances’ or ‘herbicide’ and ‘weed killer’, as well as hyponyms, for example ‘windmills’ and ‘biomass’ as subcategories of ‘sustainable energy’ or ‘Pakistani’ as a subcategory of ‘immigrant’.

⁶⁶ The list of keywords and supporting criteria is available from the authors.

⁶⁷ See, for example, Wouter van Atteveldt, Nel Ruigrok and Jan Kleinnijenhuis, ‘Associative Framing: A Unified Method for Measuring Media Frames and the Media Agenda’ (presented at the International Communication Association (ICA), Dresden, 2006).

⁶⁸ Both the media and political data are skewed. Box–Cox tests, based on the transformation x'= log(x^λ-1)/λ, showed that the optimal λ is _λ= 0.40 and λ= 0.37 for the British and Dutch political agendas respectively, and λ= 0.02 and λ= 0.12 for their media agendas. The common solution of a log-transformation, (x'= log(x+1)/log(2), which equals λ= 0 in the Box–Cox transformation), would reduce the skewness too much. We opted for a uniform square root transformation (λ= 0.5) for all agendas.

⁶⁹ See for example Lütkepohl and Krätzig, Applied Time Series Econometrics, chap 5; Freeman, John R., Williams, John T. and Lin, Tse-min, ‘Vector Autoregression and the Study of Politics’, American Journal of Political Science, 33 (1989), 842–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ Maruyama, Geoffrey M., Basics of Structural Equation Modeling (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ Trumbo, Craig, ‘Longitudinal Modelling of Public Issues: An Application of the Agenda-setting Process to the Issue of Global Warming’, Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs, 152 (1995), 1–27Google Scholar, finds media effects that last between two weeks and three months. Wood and Peake, ‘The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting’, observe media effects to diminish within three weeks. Edwards and Wood, ‘Who Influences Whom?’ find media effects lasting up to six weeks on average. Stuart Soroka finds media effects using a lag of one month (‘Issue Attributes’, ‘Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy’). Kleinnijenhuis, ‘Het Publiek Volgt Media die de Politiek Volgen’, concludes that the political agenda need more than two weeks to react to media coverage.

⁷² The results of the Vector Autoregression Models are available from the authors.

⁷³ The residuals of VAR-models based on weekly and monthly data were compared on remaining serial correlation (Breusch–Godfrey) and autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (Engle's ARCH). We compared weekly and monthly data with one lag and a yearly seasonal lag (of fifty-two weeks, or twelve months). Moving from weekly to monthly data reduced the number of series with negative serial autocorrelation in the residuals. ARCH disappeared in all but two of the series with monthly data.

⁷⁴ Finkel, Steven E., Causal Analysis With Panel Data (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ Lütkepohl and Krätzig, Applied Time Series Econometrics, p. 33–4. In two of the sixteen cases the SBIC indicated an optimal lag length of two months (British media regarding drugs; Dutch media regarding the environment), but additional regression analyses showed that lagged effects of two months become insignificant when instantaneous influence is allowed for. Thus, only a model with influences from time points (t), (t – 1) and (t – 12) could serve as the point of departure in each case.

⁷⁶ To test whether the actual variance–covariance matrices could have been expected from the estimated parameters of the model, Absolute Fit Indices Chi-square and RMSEA will be presented, as well as Comparative Fit Indices (CFI), (see, for example, Boomsma, Anne, ‘Reporting Analyses of Covariance Structures’, Structural Equation Modelling, 7 (2000), 461–83Google Scholar).

⁷⁷ It turned out that this modelling strategy always converged in a single model regarding the crossover influences, i.e. instantaneous causation rather than cross-lagged causation.

⁷⁸ See, for example, Behr, Roy and Iyengar, Shanto, ‘Television News, Real World Cues, and Changes in the Public Agenda’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 49 (1985), 38–57Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ The British asylum figures were kindly delivered by the Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate. We are obliged to Rens Vliegenthart and Hajo Boomgaarden for the Dutch figures, which they retrieved from the Dutch Central Statistics Office (CBS).

⁸⁰ For a more extensive overview, see van Noije, Lonneke, The Democratic Deficit Closer to Home: Agenda-building Relations between Parliament and the Press, and the Impact of European Integration, in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France (Amsterdam: VU Amsterdam, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Note that this x ² test for significant differences between models requires p<0.05, whereas a satisfactory fit of a single model is indicated by p>0.05.

⁸² To assess the statistical significance of the differences between correlations, Fisher's z-transformation and the formula: t=z1-z2/[(1/n ₁-3)+(1/n ₂-3)]^½ were applied.

⁸³ We are aware that agenda building may involve a complex short-term and long-term time structure, which the SEM models cannot entirely account for. Granger causality tests, which reveal incremental effects over the course of a year without accounting for instantaneous causation, largely corroborated the results per issue as identified by the SEM models. The only deviations pertain to the British environment and drugs, where parliament exerts influence on the media agenda over the course of a year (in addition to short-term media dominance in the case of the environment (p<0.10), or as the sole source of influence in the case of drugs (p<0.05)). Note that these two issues, which now demonstrate a long-term role for British MPs after all, are the very same ones that involved uncontested parliamentary dominance in the Netherlands according to the short-term SEM models. The gap between the results in the two countries is narrowing (see Van Noije, The Democratic Deficit Closer to Home).

⁸⁴ Brandenburg, ‘Who follows Whom?’; Kleinnijenhuis, ‘Het Publiek Volgt Media die de Politiek Volgen’.

⁸⁵ Molotch and Lester, ‘News as Purposive Behavior’; see also, Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics.

⁸⁶ Hallin, We Keep America on Top of the World; Bennett, ‘Toward a Theory of Press–State Relations in the United States’; see also Mermin, ‘Television News and American Intervention in Somalia’.

⁸⁷ Wolfsfeld, Media and Political Conflict; Robinson, ‘Theorizing the Influence of Media on World Politics’; Althaus, Scott, ‘When News Norms Collide, Follow the Lead: New Evidence for Press independence’, Political Communication, 20 (2003), 381–414Google Scholar; Niven, ‘An Economic Theory of Political Journalism’; Bennett, ‘Cracking the News Code’.

⁸⁸ Peter, Jochen, ‘Country Characteristics as Contingent Conditions of Agenda Setting: The Moderating Influence of Polarized Elite Opinion’, Communication Research, 30 (2003), 683–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁹ Studies that have used quotations from the media to measure the political agenda have indeed found less evidence of an increasingly autonomous media, cf. Kleinnijenhuis, ‘Het Publiek Volgt Media die de Politiek Volgen’.