| This dissertation aims to study the agenda-setting effects among newspaper coverage, public opinion and legislative policies. This study examines first-level agenda setting (transferring of issue salience) at both the national level and the state level. Specifically, at the national level longitudinal research is conducted to test cross-time variance from the 1950s to the 2000s, while at the state level, cross-sectional variance is analyzed among 19 U.S. states. Besides looking at the trends of entire agendas at the national level, it also investigates the evolutions of four individual issues (defense, international affairs, crime and law, and government operations) to add to the explanatory power of the causal relationships among the three variables. The time unit of longitudinal study is one year. In addition, this study tests the impact of two issue characteristic (obtrusiveness and party ownership) on the agenda-setting effects at the national-level analysis and controls two societal factors (legislative professionalism and state political culture) at the state-level analysis.;This research primarily uses secondary analysis of available datasets and original content analysis. This study found that issue agenda setting exists among newspaper coverage, public opinion and legislative policies at both the national and the state levels. The bond between the policy agenda and the newspaper agenda is stronger than the newspaper agenda's relationship with the public agenda and the policy agenda connection with the public agenda. The agenda-setting effects at the state level are stronger than at the national level. Attention by the media, the public, and Congress is largely determined by their own recent histories. Issue obtrusiveness and issue's party ownership are important issue characteristics to moderate the agenda setting effects among media coverage, public opinion and legislative policies. State political culture, but not state legislative professionalism, moderates the degree of agenda-setting effects between newspaper coverage and legislative policies. |
