Agendas, issue prioritization and the media

One of the goals of this research project is to contribute to the analysis of issue priorization -how new ideas, new policy proposals and new understandings of problems get into the Spanis political system for the last decades. To do this, we analyse how the media contributes to the transformation of the Spanish political agenda across time. The relationship between the media and politics has been increasingly analyzed by political scientists focusing mainly in the casual directions between the media agenda, the public agenda and the political agenda. Our goal is to contribute to this line of research and to explain the increasing role that the media plays in the Spanish policy process –directing attention from one issue to another and reinforcing tendencies that already exists in the political agenda.

Political representation and multilevel governance

The analysis of issue prioritization is an excellent point of departure for the analysis of quality of political representation. The project is aimed to explain to what extend variations in issue prioritization follow public preferences, and whether policymakers are attentive to the prioritization of issues by the public. This line of research is aimed to increase our understanding of how political representation in Spain diverge form other countries and varies among issue areas and how institutional factors –degree of political decentralization, the relative power of the Executive and the Parliament, European integration, policy cycles and elections— explain these differences.

These questions about the quality of political representation and issue priorization became especially relevant with the consolidation of the process of European integration. The increasing fragmentation of political systems into multilevel systems of governance generates an intense theoretical debate focused on whether European integration contributes to create a new scenario in which governments are less devoted responsive to the public. The underlying idea is that delegation of power (and the reduction of state autonomy to take political decisions upon issues that have been under its exclusive control) is not accompanied by a process of institutional building aimed to guarantee that political decisions reflect the priorities and concerns of citizens. Accordingly, another of the main goals of this project is to analyze how the consolidation of the multilevel system of governance has altered/modified the degree of correspondence between political decisions and the priorization of issues by the public across time and policy subsystems.

Policy convergence

Why priorization of issues does differ across countries and sub-national governments? Another goal of the project is to increase our understanding of policy convergence by identifying the similarities and divergences in the prioritization of issues among countries and policy areas, and to explain how Europeanization, the process of political decentralization, or global trends at the economic, political and social level have contribute to policy convergence across time.To do that, we build our research on existing theoretical frameworks giving especial importance to the role that interest groups and social movements play in this process of issue framing and policy convergence across time.

The project focuses in different policy areas: morality politics (abortion, stem-cells research, assisted reproduction techniques, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage), foreign aid policy, terrorism and national security, health policy (with a special regard to pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and food safety), and education in different countries. These policy areas have experienced radical transformations from the late seventies –pe.gender issues, the role of the Catholic Church, food safety scandals- and have generated an intense political debate that in some cases have caused radical policy changes. Our goal is to analyze how and why these changes occur across policy areas and across countries.

The Spanish Policy Agendas Project is also aimed to the analysis of morality politics in Spain. We are participating in the international project: Morality Politics in a Comparative Perspective directed by Christoffer Green-Pedersen (University of Aarhus, Denmark) a project that constitutes the first systematic, comparative study of politicization of morality issues. Our goal is to contribute to the analysis of cross-national differences in how much political attention morality issues receive in Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.