Parties as Transmission Belts: How well do parties in Germany represent citizens and influence the government agenda?

The question of which issues are (or are not) regarded as the subject of collectively binding decisions is one of the central problems in democracy. A growing number of empirical studies have begun to investigate which policy issues make it onto the political agenda. In party democracy, the traditional way of representation is through political parties functioning as conveyer belts that transmit interests in the political system from citizens to government. However, parties do not act independently from the wider political environment. Media attention is likely to affect which issues parties prioritize. In this paper, we assess which issues citizens would like to see on the government agenda and if and to what extent parties pick up these issues, place them on their agenda and try to influence the government agenda. Since citizens’ perceptions of politics are not independent of media coverage, and parties’ issue prioritization and the media coverage likely affect each other, we also assess the role of the media in, both, agenda taking and agenda setting. For these analyses, we combine data from a representative citizen survey and the issues addressed in party manifestos, applying the coding scheme of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). We capture the government agenda by legislative proposals introduced by the government or one of the governing parties. Finally, we operationalize the media agenda by the topics addressed in news reporting. The results of this paper contribute to debates about how well or poorly political parties represent the citizens and to what extent the media affect representation through parties.