Focus Group Follies?

Abstract

Media coverage of the contemporary British Labour party routinely suggests party leaders, notably Tony Blair, have been overly reliant on using focus group as a means of obtaining voter feedback. The paper explores this popular understanding by considering how and when qualitative forms of opinion research began to play a significant role in developing campaign strategy. Following their incorporation into party planning during the mid-1980s, focus groups provided an increasingly influential (and at the time more discreet) source of data and support for the leadership's Policy Review later that decade. Following the 1992 election defeat selective findings from the party's qualitative research programme became integral to the public relations' initiatives of Labour's self-styled “modernisers,” particularly in their largely successful attempt to delegitimise and then marginalise the role of the party's once formidable affiliated union supporters in internal affairs. Crucially this contributed to a climate that enabled the key moderniser Tony Blair to emerge and win the leadership.     

Foreign and Defence Policy on Australia's Political Agenda, 1962–2012

This paper explores the content of the Australian foreign and defence policy agenda over the past 50 years, finding evidence of both continuity and change. Australian political leaders have generally committed to cooperation with international institutions, wealth creation through engagement with Asian economies in particular, and security through the American alliance. In this period, changes in foreign policy approach either concerned marginal issues or were driven significantly by exogenous factors: by changes in the international environment or by global events that propelled a reconsideration of Australian foreign and defence policy interests. However, periods of policy change and significant public attention in – particular around the Vietnam and Iraq wars – illustrate the continued relevance of political choices and agency. Both conflicts and debates around them ushered in changing foreign and defence policy considerations, and both raised fundamental questions about Australian security and independence in the context of the American alliance.     

Setting the Post War Australian Policy Agenda – Causes and Content

What are the origins of policy agendas and what determines agenda setting? The one robust theory in the literature associates different agendas with different moments in the evolution of the broader party system namely mass, catch‐all and most recently cartel patterns. This article explores Australian evidence for this thesis. It also argues the cartel moment has recently mutated. Agenda setting is now circumscribed by a mismatch between the needs of policy making and the political incentive structure. The media have become primary tissue connecting political elites to their publics. But this traps the system in short term, primarily populist stances. Systemic capacities to mediate agenda setting have thus been corrupted.     

F.H. (Terry) Terblanche (17 June 1939 – 30 April 2014)

ABSTRACT

Research shows that there is a perception that gender equity in the South African news media has reached maturation and that the power female journalists hold in the newsroom equals that of their male counterparts. these perceptions might be attributed to the fact that South african news media have reached near gender parity in terms of the workforce. However, the question is whether this translates into women having equal power to influence news agendas and to extend the broader public discourse.

Through interviews with journalists from a cross-section of the South african english- and afrikaans-language media, the study shows that despite improved gender equity in the workforce, female journalists do not think they have the same power to alter news agendas as their male counterparts. Furthermore, the study shows that despite women and men often covering similar beats and stories, they emphasise different story angles and also articulate their role in society differently.     

Measuring the Media Agenda

Measuring media attention to politically relevant topics is of interest to a broad array of political science and communications scholars. We provide a practical guide for the construction, validation, and evaluation of time series measures of media attention. We review the extant literature on the coherence of the media agenda, which provides evidence in support of and evidence against the emergence of a single, national news agenda. Drawing expectations from this literature, we show the conditions under which a single national news agenda is likely to be present and where it is likely to be absent. We create 90 different keyword searches covering a wide range of topics and gather counts of stories per month from 12 national and regional media sources with data going back to 1980 where possible. We show using factor analysis wide variance in the strength of the first factor. We then estimate a regression model to predict this value. The results show the conditions under which any national source will produce time series results consistent with any other. Key independent variables are the average number of stories, the variance in stories per month, and the presence of any “spike” in the data series. Our large-scale empirical assessment should provide guidance to scholars assessing the quality of time series data on media coverage of issues.     

Indispensable,yet Invisible: Drinking water management as a local political issue in Swedish municipalities

ABSTRACT

Local policy-makers’ incentives to address an issue is conditioned by how they perceive public attention. Our study focuses on drinking water management at the municipal level in Sweden. Provisioning and management of drinking water is a responsibility of the local governments. Interviews with local politicians and public administrators in seven municipalities reveal that local policy-makers think that citizens view provisioning of drinking water as a taken for granted service, and also lack knowledge of and interest in drinking water issues. Public attention is further seen as a double-edged sword since engagement in water issues often is a result of problems with water provision. The findings are discussed from a theoretical perspective of the role of agenda-setting in public policy. It is argued that the view of policy-makers of citizens as unengaged negatively affects the incentives to bring drinking water to a prominent place on the local policy agenda.     

Reflections on law and impact in the light of Brexit

ABSTRACT

The impact agenda in academic research affords rich opportunities – to inform the media, policymakers and the general public; to co-produce research with third sector organisations. In the context of Brexit, the prevailing ignorance of politicians and other stakeholders has been so profound, and the falsehoods that have had popular purchase so baseless, as to make the need for impact and public engagement all the more acute. This is not simply about fact-checking, but about making the case for the very worth of expertise, and reasserting the basic, core scientific values that drive academic work – values that have been trashed by the precepts of a postmodern nihilism, in which all positions are equally (in)valid and only your own gut can be trusted. But challenging these precepts in public arenas has personal and professional costs: significant workload implications, the acquisition of new skills and often a torrent of abuse. As such, this work needs institutional support. Departments need to value it appropriately, to promote equal access to impact opportunities and to confront the discriminatory barriers to (and consequences of) taking up the impact gauntlet. Throughout the Brexit process, expertise and experts have been dismissed and denigrated. The task now is to restore public faith in the value of the pursuit of truth.     

Fifteen minutes of glory: A Burkean analysis of press coverage of Oliver north's testimony

Public esteem for Lt. Col. Oliver North prior to his testimony before the Iran‐contra Committee was low. As he testified, his popularity and support soared, and then tailed off after he left the witness stand. This analysis suggests that these dramatic shifts in audience response to the drama of Oliver North are attributable to the evocation of different audience values before, during, and after his testimony by press coverage of his story which placed differential emphasis on the elements of Kenneth Burke's dramatistical pentad. The differential impacts of print and electronic media to these audience effects are assessed through content analysis. Implications for political processes in general in our media society are discussed.     

Government alternation and legislative agenda setting

Recent studies of the legislative process have put forward a number of plausible hypotheses regarding the distribution of agenda‐setting power. These hypotheses have guided scholars in identifying those conflicts and actors that are crucial to explaining legislative change and the wording of legislation. However, this has not yet led to a better understanding of the choice of specific agenda‐setting rules. Why does the cabinet in some parliamentary democracies enjoy an undisputed role, while in others the parliament continues to play the role of co‐protagonist? This article attempts to answer this question by looking at some well‐known features of party systems. It is argued that in pivotal party systems, with limited government alternation, it is much more difficult to strengthen the government vis‐à‐vis the parliament. One factor prevents the procedural and institutional predominance of the cabinet under these circumstances: the lack of opportunities for, and expectations of, large and controversial policy change.     

媒介议程设置功能的心理学观点

由记者和编辑画的认知地图和李普曼认为受众头脑中的图像两者之间是否存在着一一对应关系,值得我们探讨。如果这个关系存在,我们就有理由认为,媒介确实能够影响我们头脑中的形象。就像科恩讲的那样,媒介确实能够影响人们在想些什么。按照阿托尼.梅耶的三个现实的划分,实际上我们是在寻找通过内容分析法获得的符号真实与通过“认知树”法获得的主观真实两者之间的对应关系。