Media systems and information environments : a comparative approach to the agenda-setting hypothesis

Abstract

The present dissertation aims at the comparative study agenda-setting (i.e., the impact that media content has on the importance people give to several political and social issues) in Europe. The focus is set in the 2009 European Parliament election campaign period, and one of the central goals is to observe whether the media agenda-setting capacity varies from country to country or not, and why. The hypothetical causes of cross-country variability are the nature of the several European media systems (in terms of development of press markets, freedom of press, journalist professionalization, state intervention, media partisanship) and their effects in the informational environment, both from the perspective of the supply (information quality) and demand (trust in the media). The results show that these macro-level dimensions vary considerably in Europe, and that there is a link between media system dimensions related to politics, information quality and agenda-setting.