Real-World Agenda-Setting: Linking Different Types of Voters to Media Reporting on Political Events

Although there is ample research on media agenda-setting, it suffers from two shortcomings: First, the link between the media agenda (a macro phenomenon) and voters (at the micro level) is often indirect since research is either experimental or uses aggregated public opinion as dependent variable. Second, when putting the individual voter into focus, it remains unclear if different types of voters also react differently to media reporting, e.g. with regard to media usage or party identification. This paper thus uses multi-level analysis with media reporting on the macro and individuals’ opinions on the most important problem on the micro level by combining several online surveys and media content analyses conducted by the German Longitudinal Election Study. This enables us to study both real-world agenda-setting effects and interactions between media reporting and voter characteristics, hence to contribute an important piece of the puzzle to media agenda-setting research.