Can Politicians Set the Public Issue Agenda? Evidence from the 2020 US Presidential Election

A prominent and long-standing literature demonstrates that politicians, often with significant cost and effort, compete to set the public agenda. Having a favored issue dominate the public’s agenda can be electorally beneficial for politicians, as a long line of research documents. Yet, as of today, we have limited evidence linking these two observations: Does the agenda-setting efforts of politicians actually influence the public agenda; or is the public agenda rather set by forces outside the control of politicians? We advance the state-of-the-art by collecting two new datasets covering the two months leading to the 2020 US Presidential election. The first consists of a survey with representative samples of 400 respondents interviewed every day, generating a dataset of more than 24,000 unique respondents in total (c. 400 respondents per day x 60 days). The second dataset consists of all of the Twitter communication of the two main contending candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The results demonstrate that there is congruence between the issues that the candidates and voters focus on, but we almost invariantly find no effect of the Presidential candidates’ tweets on the public agenda. This suggests that the massive agenda-setting efforts of politicians often are futile.