The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting

The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting

Author(s): B. Dan Wood and Jeffrey S. PeakeReviewed work(s):Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), pp. 173-184Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2585936 .Accessed: 05/02/2013 17:18Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .American Political Science Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toThe American Political Science Review.http://www.jstor.org

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American Political Science Review Vol. 92, No. 1 March 1998

TheD ynamicos f ForeignP olicyA gendaS etting

B. DAN WOOD and JEFFREY S. PEAKE Texas A&M University

T heoreticaal nd empiricawl orko n publicp olicya gendas ettingh as ignoredfo reignp olicy. Wed evelop

a theory of foreign policy agenda setting and test the implications using time-series vector

autoregression and Box-Tiao (1975) impact assessment methods. We theorize an economy of

attention to foreign policy issues driven by issue inertia, events external to U.S. domestic institutions, as well

as systemic attention to particular issues. We also theorize that the economy of attention is affected by a law

of scarcity and the rise and fall of events in competing issue areas. Using measures ofpresidential and media

attention to the Soviet Union, Arab-Israeli conflict, and Bosnian conflict, we show that presidential and

media attentions respond to issue inertia and exogenous events in both primary and competing issue areas.

Media attention also affects presidential attention, but the president does not affect issue attention by the

media.

V arious theoretical and empirical analyses have

focused on understanding how domestic policy

issues reach the systemic or institutional agenda

in the United States (e.g., Cobb and Elder 1972; Downs

1972; Jones 1977; Walker 1977; Anderson 1978; Kingdon

1984; Peters and Hogwood 1985; Light 1991;

Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Jones 1994; Flemming,

Wood, and Bohte 1995). There have also been case

studies that explore how single issues develop, also all

domestic (e.g., Bosso 1987, Carmines and Stimson

1989, Glick 1992). As of yet, however, there has been

no systematic analysis exploring the dynamics of U.S.

foreign policy agenda setting.

This neglect of foreign policy by students of American

politics is not a matter of chance but is due to

practical reasons. Foreign policy does not readily fit the

theoretical mold most scholars associate with domestic

issues. Theories and analyses of domestic policy

agenda setting usually focus on concepts like problem

perception, issue definition, mobilization of interests,

subsystem formation, venue shopping, and institutional

attention.1 The first two and last of these concepts are

certainly relevant to foreign policy agenda setting. It is

less certain that interest groups, subsystems, and venue

shopping are of much importance. The conventional

wisdom is that for many foreign policy issues subsystems

do not develop, since these issues do not

typically involve the material or solidary benefits required

to invoke strong interest group participation

(e.g., Ripley and Franklin 1991).2 Congress and its

B. Dan Wood is Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University,

College Station, TX 77843-4348, and on the faculty of the

George Bush School of Government and Public Service. Jeffrey S.

Peake is a Ph.D. candidate, Department of Political Science, Texas

A&M University.

The authors appreciate comments on earlier versions of this

manuscript by George C. Edwards III, Kenneth J. Meier, Steven A.

Shull, Nehemia Geva, and four anonymous reviewers. This research

was supported financially by the Center for Presidential Studies,

Texas A&M University.

1 Venue shopping means that because of the U.S. system of fragmented

representation, potential agenda setters have multiple institutions

through which to pursue policy goals.

2 We do not mean to imply that interest groups and congressional

committees never become involved in foreign policy or have no

influence, but their involvement is typically less than for domestic

committees are generally considered to have less influence

in foreign policy than in domestic policy. Moreover,

the president is the primary venue through which

new foreign policy issues enter the U.S. system.3

There can be little doubt that the presidency has

evolved through time as the primary actor responsible

for U.S. foreign policy. The Constitution limited presidential

authority in this area with respect to war,

making treaties, and appointing official representatives

to foreign nations. Short of war, however, the president

has traditionally received considerable latitude. The

president is the only actor in the U.S. system who can

legitimately speak for the nation as a whole or be

spoken to by other nations (usually through ambassadors).

The increasing involvement of the United States

in the international community, the public's desire for

strong personal leadership, and the political ramifications

of foreign policy mean that the presidency attends

more heavily to foreign policy issues than does any

other U.S. institution.

Theories and analyses of domestic policy agenda

setting also tend to describe the process as proceeding

in a slow secular fashion, occasionally spurred by

focusing events or the policy entrepreneurship of important

actors or groups (Anderson 1978, Cobb and

Elder 1972, Kingdon 1984). Yet, foreign policy issues

do not often arise in such a gradual fashion. Rather,

they tend to burst onto the scene as a result of crises or

issues. The degree of involvement obviously depends on the type of

issue. Trade policy, for example, would provide the cement for

subsystem relations to develop. Congress may also become involved

in human rights or strategic arms control. Ripley and Franklin (1991;

see also Ripley and Lindsay 1993, chapter 2; Lindsay 1994, chapter 7)

provide a framework for considering different types of foreign and

defense issues.

3 The view stated here has long been the dominant one among

presidential scholars. For example, historian Arthur Schlesinger

states: "In foreign policy the inclination is to let the Presidency have

the responsibility-and the power" (1989, 420; see also Halperin,

quoted in Doherty 1993, 323). Likewise, Barbara Sinclair (1993; see

also Hinckley 1994) argues that while congressional leaders have

been more active in foreign and defense policy since the Vietnam

War, their influence is limited to the extent they are acting as

independent policy entrepreneurs, rather than as agents of an active

and involved membership. In contrast, see Lindsay (1994) for an

extended discussion asserting congressional influence on U.S. foreign

policy making.

173

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The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting March 1998

other dramatic occurrences, and once they are on the

scene attention is driven by a continuous stream of

policy events. While events are occasionally important

in driving attention to U.S. domestic issues (e.g., a

Martin Luther King speech and civil rights, a thalidomide

controversy and drug safety, an attempted presidential

assassination and gun control), they are of

much greater importance in driving attention to issues

in foreign policy.

THE ECONOMY OF FOREIGN POLICY

ATTENTION

We explore the determinants of attention to major

foreign policy issues in the U.S. system. As noted

above, past work on domestic policy agenda setting

provides a weak theoretical basis for exploring the

dynamics of foreign policy attention. Pluralism and

interest groups are generally considered of lesser importance,

the process is seen as event driven, and

foreign policy making is considered the primary domain

of the president. A theory of foreign policy

agenda setting and attention, therefore, should necessarily

focus on the president. Yet, the president's ability

to attend to particular foreign policy issues is often

constrained by other responsibilities. The president is

governed by an economy of attention in which competition

exists for scarce resources.

Of course, the proliferation of demands on the

modern presidency has produced new institutions

within the White House that are intended to alleviate

limitations due to scarce presidential resources. Yet,

modern presidents and their staffs remain only boundedly

rational (Simon 1947). Cognitive limitations mean

that they neither can accurately forecast the rise of new

foreign policy issues nor possibly attend to the plethora

of potential issues that ultimately arise. As a result,

presidents purposely restrict the set of issues at any one

time to a few. They tend to process these few issues in

a serial rather than parallel fashion, attending to one

before moving on to the next (Jones 1994). In order to

prioritize issues, presidents rely on cues from their

environment regarding the relative severity of the

problem, as well as political benefits and costs. As

political creatures, presidents are ever aware of the

risks associated with ignoring or attending to new

policy problems.

To be sure, this economy of attention is altered when

presidents make conscious efforts to give higher priority

to some issues rather than others. The president

brings to office an agenda and, if possible, will attempt

to implement it (Light 1991). For example, President

Nixon clearly gave a high priority to relations with

China, which necessarily restricted the amount of time

he could spend on other issues. This personal dimension

the president brings to the office is inherent to the

motivations and goals of the individual. Yet, even

though most presidents have foreign policy goals, they

often have agendas thrust on them by the office and

external events.

Indeed, multiple forces move attention to foreign

policy issues away from presidential discretion. For one

174

thing, presidents often inherit problems that dominate

their attention through time. Chief executives from

Truman through Bush inherited the foreign policy

problems associated with the Cold War and devoted

considerable time to these issues. Similarly, President

Nixon inherited Vietnam from the Johnson administration

and necessarily devoted more attention to this

issue than to any other foreign policy domain. On

issues of this sort, presidents must fulfill continuing

obligations to the office and nation, regardless of

personal agendas.

More generally, once issues gain prominence in the

economy of presidential attention, attention becomes

highly inertial. As a technical matter, the most important

foreign policy issues are very persistent and require

time and effort to resolve. To be successful,

presidents must maintain focus on the difficult issues

until they wane or at least are displaced in importance

by other concerns. The security of the free world,

public approval, and the president's historical legacy

all depend on dealing effectively with important

problems, so there is strong incentive for the president

to maintain focus to the potential exclusion of

other issues.

This highly inertial character of some foreign policy

issues suggests a rationale for the economy of attention

to exhibit stability. Presidents tend to concentrate on

the most difficult foreign policy problems. The proportion

of presidential time devoted to these problems

remains fairly stable so long as they require strong

consideration and no more pressing problem arises.

The duration of attention to foreign policy problems is

proportional to the tractability of the problem. As long

as the problem remains unresolved, presidential attention

remains fairly consistent.

Nevertheless, short-term disturbances to this stability

may occur due to policy events or changes in

perception of the relative importance of the issue.

Because the president must ration attention according

to which issues are most critical, shifts also may occur

as new problems arise. These shifts may be either short

or long term. In either case, the chief executive often

operates in a responsive mode, reacting to a continuous

stream of exogenous events. There can be little

doubt, for example, that President Truman preferred

not to be dealing with the Soviet blockade of West

Berlin in 1948, but this event skewed foreign policy

attention even more toward U.S.-Soviet relations

through early 1949. Likewise, President Carter preferred

not to be attending to the Iran hostage crisis

during the 1980 election year, but he had little choice,

since it also dominated media and public attention that

were critical to the election. Not all foreign policy

events are this dramatic, but still there is a continuous

progression of world events to which presidents must

always attend.

The decision as to what constitutes an issue deserving

of executive attention may initially arise through

developing events, but political factors affect the perceived

importance and persistence of foreign policy

issues. The president cares about public perceptions.

The president has always depended on public ap-

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American Political Science Review Vol. 92, No. 1

proval as a source of legitimacy and strength in

dealing with other actors, both foreign and domestic

(Neustadt 1960). While approval of the way a president

is doing the foreign policy job does not fully

determine approval, it does at times comprise an

important component, especially when foreign policy

is salient (Edwards, Mitchell, and Welch 1995). To

maintain good standing, the president must attend in

some measure to what the public perceives as important.

Thus, as the public pays greater attention to an

issue, the president must in turn attend more to that

issue.

Of course, public perceptions of the relative importance

of an issue are largely determined by the news

media. The media interpret issues, giving them more or

less significance through the type or amount of coverage

provided. The media, particularly television news,

also focus attention on events through this same interpretive

function. Americans generally do not pay attention

to foreign policy issues until events covered by

the news media cause them to do so, and then their

attention is slight and deteriorates quickly (Wittkopf

1990). Iyengar and Kinder (1987) show that what the

television news covers influences what citizens think is

important and how they evaluate their leaders. Likewise,

Bosso (1989) argues that the media played an

important role in mobilizing the citizenry toward famine

relief in Ethiopia during the 1980s. Television news

chose to focus on the famine, making an endemic

problem in Africa a new foreign policy problem in the

United States. Thus, media attention to foreign policy

issues and events may drive systemic attention, as well

as attention by the president.

The direction of this relationship may not run purely

from the media or system to the president, however,

Presidents are not purely responsive actors bending

with the breezes of popular attention. Rather, they also

seek to lead on matters of policy. The president often

wants to achieve a personal agenda, both domestic and

foreign, but especially in the area of foreign policy the

president is expected to be the locus of policy influence.

Manipulation of the press is critical to the White

House operation (Cohen 1963), and all presidents

since Franklin Roosevelt have maintained a staff dedicated

to informing the media on matters of interest to

the president. In efforts to lead, the president attempts

to mold how the media treats emerging issues and

events. For example, Brace and Hinckley (1992) found

that presidential trips, summits, speeches, and other

initiatives create rallies in public approval while attracting

large amounts of media attention. More generally,

each year the president is given the stage to set the

policy agenda for the American people and Congress

through the State of the Union address. Cohen (1995)

showed that public opinion follows the president's

lead on which problems are most pressing, as outlined

in the State of the Union address. Thus, the

media are a principal means whereby presidents

attempt to shape the foreign policy agenda and lead

systemic attention toward those issues the president

deems as important.

EVALUATING THE ECONOMY OF

ATTENTION TO FOREIGN POLICY

To what extent is presidential attention to foreign

policy issues a result of issue inertia or a continual

progression of stochastic events? To what extent is

systemic attention to foreign policy issues a result of

issue inertia or stochastic events? Does the president

respond to changing systemic attention to foreign

policy issues? Does the system respond to changing

presidential attention to foreign policy issues? These

are important questions for understanding the president's

role as foreign policy leader, as well as for

extending political science theories of agenda setting to

the foreign policy domain.

We address these questions by developing measures

of systemic and presidential attention for three foreign

policy issues and related events. In particular, we look

at issues involving the Soviet Union, the Arab-Israeli

conflict, and the more recent Bosnian conflict. We

chose these three because they have been the most

highly visible and enduring foreign policy issues for the

president over the last 15 years. Foreign policy issues of

lower visibility and endurance (such as the South China

sea, chemical and biological weapons) are also part of

the president's agenda and may be of considerable

importance. As a result, we suggest that future research

examine a diverse range of issues with differing visibility

and interest to the president.

We used weekly time-series data to capture the fine

time dynamic associated with responsiveness by both

the media and president to world events and also to

enable greater confidence in the findings due to the

larger sample size. We measured systemic attention for

issues involving the Soviet Union and Arab-Israeli

conflict as the weekly broadcast time devoted by television

news from the 27th week of 1984 through the

23d week of 1994. The Bosnian conflict, which has been

less protracted and is confined to the 1990s, is measured

as the weekly broadcast time from the 25th week

of 1991 through the 11th week of 1995.4 Rather than

counting the number of stories, as has been done in

some past research (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993;

Flemming, Wood, and Bohte 1995), we counted the

number of minutes devoted to each issue on the three

nightly television news programs. Specifically, we

searched the Vanderbilt Television News Abstracts using

keywords (listed in the Appendix) to capture stories

concerning the Soviet Union and Arab-Israeli and

Bosnian conflicts.5 We examined each hit of the key-

4 For post-Soviet Union observations after late 1991, we examined

relations between the United States and the states of the former

Soviet Union. The time frame studied was driven entirely by data

availability. The beginning and ending dates were constrained by the

PANDA events data (to be discussed below), which are continuously

being updated and extended toward the present by the project

directors. At the time we constructed the Soviet and Arab-Israeli

measures, the PANDA data were available only through mid-1994; at

the time we constructed the Bosnia measure, the PANDA data were

available only up to early 1995.

5The VanderbiAltb stractsa re available on the web at the following

address: http://www.TVnews.Vanderbilt.edu. The information

logged here comes in the same format as the hard copy versions

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The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting March 1998

words for validity concerning whether it dealt with

some facet of the foreign policy issue or whether some

isolated event affected the measure. Although the

nightly news programs are not the only television news

sources that may influence or be influenced by the

president, they do provide a consistent sample of

coverage and are also continuous for the period under

study. Each network spends about 22 minutes each day

delivering the news in half-hour programs (Tyndall

1995). This leads to a typical weekly news coverage of

roughly 150 minutes, or 450 minutes total for the three

networks.

Measuring presidential attention to these three issues

is more difficult. The president's public face may

not be a true reflection of what is actually being

attended to behind the scenes. Unable to know beyond

question what the president is doing, we must assume

that what he does and says publicly from week to week

reflects what is on his agenda.6 Cohen (1995) made this

assumption and measured presidential attention to

domestic policy issues by looking at State of the Union

addresses. These speeches are only made annually,

however, and may give an incomplete image of attention

as it changes due to events and shifting circumstances

during the year. It is also unclear that the

relative issue emphases in the State of the Union

address provide an accurate picture of presidential

priorities on foreign policy. Presidents make their

priorities known through a number of outlets, including

the State of the Union address, legislative proposals,

news releases, position taking, briefings, speeches,

press conferences, and letters.

To capture presidential attention registered through

all these diverse outlets, we used Public Papers of the

President, an annual compilation of activities during

each year. As with the TV news search, we used

keywords (listed in the Appendix) in the subject index

in each volume and searched the text for relevant

activities. Specifically, we counted the number of

paragraphs during each week of each year of the

Public Papers devoted to some facet of Soviet relations,

the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Bosnian

conflict. We also read each entry to assure that it was

pertinent to the keyword entry and the concept

under investigation.

We measured international events using the

PANDA events data set provided by the Program on

Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival from Haravailable

in most university libraries and has the advantage of

allowing electronic searches. We used NETSCAPE as a search

engine, which virtually eliminated the problem of double counts that

may plague the use of electronic searching in other contexts. The

cache file in NETSCAPE changes the colors (by default from blue to

pink) of all links previously accessed, until it is reset. Each story was

rounded to the nearest half minute.

6 We can argue the relative merits and demerits of this assumption

from either perspective. On the one hand, the president wants to

appear "on top of things" in order to garner public approval. As a

result, his public activities and statements should actually reflect what

is being attended to behind the scenes. On the other hand, there may

be occasions when secrecy is important, in which case public activities

and statements may be a facade that masks what the administration

is actually doing.

176

vard University (Bond and Bond 1995). PANDA uses

an artificial intelligence program (KEDS) to code

discrete events from Reuters news leads.7 "An event is

an interaction, associated with a specific point in time,

that can be described in a natural language sentence

that has as its subject and object an element of a set of

actors and as its verb an element of a set of actions, the

contents of which are transitive verbs" (Bond and Bond

1995, 5). In other words, PANDA events are reports of

discrete actions by a source country toward a target

country or discrete actions completely within a single

country, such as a civil war or rights violation. Using

keywords (listed in the Appendix) relating to the

three issues, relevant events were separated from the

entire data set. Of course, we could have coded a

dummy variable for the presence or absence of

international events based on the PANDA data set.

Using a weekly count of events, however, enabled

the measure to reflect the relative seriousness of

developing situations, as well as their presence. The

events were then counted by week to create a

consistent measure of exogenous events to match the

other two series. Both the TV news networks and the

president use Reuters to monitor world events, so it

is almost prima facie evident that there should be

some effect from this measure on media and presidential

attention to these issues. The question is

whether, independent of world events, effects exist

from the national media to the president or from the

president to the media.8

With measures in hand for systemic and presidential

attention to foreign policy issues, as well as exogenous

events, we used vector autoregression (VAR) methods

(Freeman, Williams, and Lin 1989; Simms 1980) to

evaluate the causal direction of attention and also to

provide evidence of the temporal dynamics associated

with the policymaking system. VAR is the most appropriate

method for circumstances in which theory provides

a weak rationale for imposing restrictions on the

parameters of a structural equation system. As our

theoretical discussion above indicates, we have no a

priori reason for imposing parameter restrictions in

either direction; yet, without them a structural equation

system is not identified. Thus, structural equations

are inappropriate. This does not mean, however, that

the approach we use is devoid of theory. Indeed, all

aspects of the reported VAR model have some theoretical

rationale. We merely ask the data to tell us

7KEDS stands for the Kansas Events Data System. This program

was developed by Philip Schrodt of the University of Kansas at

Lawrence. Schrodt and Gerner (1994) describe the program in detail

and also report validity tests of the machine-coded events.

8 In a strict sense, not all PANDA defined events are strictly

exogenous to the presidency. The president may take initiatives that

form "historical threads" which become part of event progressions.

In addition, some PANDA events may not be causally prior to

presidential or media attention. The president and media may

anticipate such events as elections, scheduled meetings, and the like.

In theory it would be possible to separate out such potentially

confounding influences if one had access to the text used to create

the PANDA data. Given that we do not have such access, we simply

acknowledge these potential confounding effects.

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American Political Science Review Vol. 92, No. 1

(given that theory does not) which, if any, parameter

restrictions are appropriate.

Another important advantage of VAR modeling

over the structural equation approach is that it provides

a strong control for history by including multiple

lags of each variable in all equations. This means that

problems of specification error are of less concern,

since the VAR disturbances are random with respect to

time.9 One way of viewing VAR modeling is as a

multivariate extension of the Granger (1969) approach

to causal inference. Each dependent variable is regressed

on lagged values of itself, as well as lagged

values of the other dependent variables in the system.

10 Causal relations are evaluated by conducting

joint hypothesis tests for blocks of lags associated

with each variable. What is interesting for us theoretically

is that the control for history provides a

representation of the degree to which issue inertia

affects attention by both the media and president. A

significant block of coefficients on the dependent

variable in each equation implies that issue inertia is

strong.

VAR methods typically exhibit high colinearity due

to the multiple lags included for each variable in the

system. For this reason analysts do not typically try to

interpret coefficient estimates but instead do simulations

to track out the system dynamics. We report

Granger tests and simulations using the moving average

response approach. That involves introducing a

shock to a variable in the system and tracking out

movements in the other variables using the VAR

estimates for computing a forecast. Shocking a variable

means successively multiplying the matrix of vector

autoregressive estimates by a simulation vector containing

changes in the variable of interest.1"

Based on theory, we also entered international

events into the VAR system as a single exogenous

variable with no lags. Such an approach is sometimes

9 We do not mean to imply here that the omission of relevant

independent variables is not a problem in VAR. It can be. Disturbances

can be random with respect to time but not random with

respect to the dependent variables. Relevant to this point is whether

the VAR should contain a congressional variable. Of course, theory

suggests that continuous congressional influence on foreign policy

attention should be less than that for the president. Edwards and

Wood (1997) tested for the presence of congressional influence for

two of the same issues and found none. See also Bartels (1996) for

similar null findings.

10 Based on Simms' (1980) methods for determining the appropriate

lag length, we included in the Soviet and Arab-Israeli VARs four

weekly lags for the media and presidential variables. We included

five lags of these variables for the Bosnian conflict VAR. The Simms

procedure entails sequentially adding lags to the VAR system and

testing the statistical significance of each additional lag using a

modified F test. We tested lags from 1 through 8 for the VAR system

and arrived at the lag lengths reported below. We also did sensitivity

testing to determine the effects of including additional lags up to

eight weeks. Longer lag lengths diminished marginally the probabilities

associated with the reported findings, but in all cases relations

were stable and consistent. Residuals from final analyses were

nonautocorrelated and normally distributed.

11 To facilitate interpretation of the moving average responses, and

because the variables had no natural metric, we standardized all

variables prior to the analysis. All initial shocks are one standard

deviation in magnitude. Because the innovations are correlated

between variables, we plotted Choleski orthogonalized responses to

simulated shocks of one standard deviation.

termed ARX modeling (Judge et al. 1988, 776). We

used no additional lags on the events variable, because

events are discrete occurrences that should affect the

media and president immediately, but once the events

have occurred, the stimulus is no longer present. The

system should be free to work itself out as the president

and media interact to interpret the relative significance

of the events. Thus, the events variable provides a

theoretical test for the manner and extent to which

events instantaneously shock attention by the media

and president to foreign policy issues. The events

variable is also a statistical control for the hypothesis of

spuriousness. That is, we can exclude the possibility

that events definitively shape systemic or institutional

attention, rather than the processes discussed above.

The question we address after controlling for events is

whether persistent attention by either the media or

president has long-term effects on attention by the

other actor.

THE DETERMINANTS OF U.S. FOREIGN

POLICY ATTENTION

The determinants of attention to Soviet, Arab-Israeli,

and Bosnian issues are so similar that a single discussion

can pertain to all three analyses.12 This similarity

in findings suggests a certain theoretical consistency for

the three issue areas. In particular, the analysis shows

that events were extremely important in driving contemporaneous

attention movements by both the president

and media. Attention inertia was strong for both

actors, and a definite pattern of influence emerged

from media attention to presidential attention, but not

in the opposite direction.

In all three vector autoregressions reported in Table

1, contemporaneous events are strongly significant at

less than the 0.01 level. Of course, this consistently

strong relationship shows that the economy of attention

is often determined by occurrences external to

both the media and presidency. Controlling for exogenous

events, how did issue inertia, media attention, and

presidential attention play out over time? Table 1 also

reports the Granger tests for attention to the Soviet

Union, Arab-Israeli conflict, and Bosnian conflict, respectively.

In each case, past media attention to an issue

Granger causes current media attention to the same

issue, and past presidential attention also Granger

causes current presidential attention.13 Thus, as our

12 The results were also reasonably consistent through time. In

testing for coefficient stability, we did Chow tests as well as separate

VARs for different presidencies. There were no substantively important

differences across presidencies, but there were some differences

in the magnitude of responses. Generally, President Reagan was

somewhat less responsive on all three issues to the media than were

presidents Bush and Clinton. All responses were in the same

direction, however, and fully consistent with results reported below.

13 A variable X Granger causes a variable Ywhen, controlling for the

history of Y, past lags of X covary with current values of Y. The

standard approach to Granger testing involves selecting an appropriate

common lag length to simulate an infinite order autoregressive

disturbancpe rocessa ndt hen doings ignificancete stingf or the effects

of lagged X on Y.

177

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The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting March 1998

TABLE 1. Granger Tests for Attention to Three Foreign Policy Issues, Controlling for Related

Events

Coefficient Soviet Arab-Israeli Bosnian

Dependent Variable Block Union Conflict Conflict

Media Attention Media 6.64 14.92 13.51

(0.00) (0.00) (0.00)

President 1.49 0.89 1.61

(0.20) (0.47) (0.16)

Events 371.71 129.96 70.73

(0.00) (0.00) (0.00)

Presidential Attention Media 2.63 2.81 1.95

(0.03) (0.02) (0.09)

President 5.21 2.40 5.31

(0.00) (0.05) (0.00)

Events 134.56 36.24 26.63

(0.00) (0.00) (0.00)

Note: The numbers in the tables are F statistics; p values are in parentheses. The Soviet and Arab-Israeli VARs contain four lags. The Bosnian conflict

VAR contains five lags. Events at lag 0 are included as an exogenous variable to control for the contemporaneous effect of events on both the media and

president. There were 514 weekly observations in the Soviet and Arab-Israeli series, running from the 27th week of 1984 to the 23d week of 1994.

theory predicts, much of what the media and presidents

attend to through time is determined by issue inertia

and what they have attended to in the past. As new

issues emerge, political actors are not free to choose

attention levels. Rather, they must attend to issues of

continuing importance until they are resolved or displaced

in the economy of attention.

The Granger tests are also consistent in showing that

media attention to the three issues is exogenous to

presidential attention. The president does not Granger

cause media attention to the Soviet Union, Arab-

Israeli conflict, or Bosnian conflict. Theoretically, this

implies that the president is not very successful in

directing media attention to foreign policy issues;

rather, issue inertia and the continual progression of

world events seem to drive media attention. Yet, the

media do Granger cause presidential attention for all

three issues. This is, of course, consistent with a model

of presidential attention that views the president as

responsive to those issues on the systemic agenda. It

also suggests a view of the president as responsive to

cues from the policy environment in deciding which

issues should receive priority in the economy of presidential

attention. As the media and mass public become

more concerned with an issue, the president also

becomes more concerned.

The Granger tests provide evidence concerning the

joint effects of lagged media attention while controlling

for attention inertia and exogenous events. They provide

no indication of the polarity of relations, however,

or the dynamics associated with evolving attention

processes. We can explore the dynamics of presidential

responsiveness to the media by tracking out simulations

from the VAR through time. Figure 1 plots the

moving average responses of the media and president,

respectively, when each variable is subjected to a

simulated shock for all three issues. The first row of

Figure 1 shows that a simulated shock to media attention

produces an increase in presidential attention. In

initial response to this shock, presidential attention to

the issues shifts upward by about 0.20 (for the Bosnian

178

conflict) to around 0.40 (for the Soviet Union and

Arab-Israeli conflict) standard deviations in the week

after. The increase in presidential attention due to the

media lasts for about two (for the Soviet Union) or

three (for the Arab-Israeli and Bosnian conflicts)

weeks, eventually returning to the preintervention

equilibrium. In the other direction, the second row of

Figure 1 shows that a shock of one standard deviation

in presidential attention produces no systematic response

by the media in either direction for any of the

three issues. Thus, the president responds to the media,

but the opposite relation does not occur.

COMPETITION IN THE ECONOMY OF

ATTENTION

If presidential attention is a scarce resource, and if

there is competition for presidential attention between

multiple issues, then attention to an issue should

change not only as a function of events, inertia, and

media coverage of that same issue but also as a

function of events associated with other issues. More

specifically, as competing issues become more prominent

in the economy of attention, attention to the

primary issue should decline. A similar logic should

also pertain to television news coverage and the media.

Given the limited amount of time the TV evening news

can devote to any one issue, it would not be surprising

that as one issue becomes more visible another is

squeezed out. For the president it is less clear that the

squeeze should be as serious as for the TV evening

news. The chief executive is under less pressure to

balance coverage between domestic policy issues and

foreign policy, so there may be attention to more than

one foreign policy at a time by simply diminishing

attention to domestic policy issues. The president also

has much more than the standard half-hour of coverage

for attending to foreign policy issues and may

speak to many topics in one briefing, news conference,

speech, or statement.

We can test the notion that competition exists

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American Political Science Review Vol. 92, No. 1

FIGURE 1. Simulated Moving Average Responses for Foreign Policy Attention Vector

Autoregressions

Soviet Union Arab-Israeli Conflict Bosnian Conflict

1.2 1.2 1.2

1 1 1

0.8 -0.8 -0.8 -

Shock 0.6 Media 0.6 0.6

to Ien

Media 0.4 -0.4 -0.4-

0.2 0.2 -0.2-

-0.2 -0.2 -0.2

0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10

1.2 1.2 1.2

0.8 - 0.8 - 0.8

Shock to 06Media0.06

PresidentPren

0.4 -0.4 -0.4-

0.2 0.2 0.2

0 1. (

-0.21 -0.2 -0.2L

0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10

among issues in the economy of attention using two

different approaches. First, we can enter the events

variable for competing issues exogenously into the

VAR system of interest. If competition affects attention,

then events from competing foreign policy issues

should Granger cause and reduce attention to the

primary issues. Second, we can identify some critical

event associated with a competing foreign policy issue

and do intervention analysis to determine whether the

event reduced systemic and presidential attention to

the primary issue. Using either approach, care is required

in designing the test to assure that issues are

orthogonal and actually competing for attention. For

example, the stream of events associated with the

Bosnian conflict may actually increase, rather than

decrease, attention to the Soviet Union because of

concerns that the former Soviet Union, due to long

cultural and political ties to the Serbs, would react to

U.S. involvement. Similarly, a critical event like the

Persian Gulf War could increase attention to the

Arab-Israeli conflict because of inseparability of the

war from long-term conflict between the Arabs and

Israelis. With these design constraints in mind, we

employed both approaches to test for competition in

the economy of attention.

We entered events for the Arab-Israeli conflict exogenously

into the VAR for the Soviet Union and

events for the Soviet Union and the Bosnian conflict

exogenously into separate VARs for the Arab-Israeli

conflict. Table 2 reports Granger tests from these

analyses. In the analysis for the Soviet Union, reported

in column 1, there is clear evidence that

competing events from the Arab-Israeli conflict affected

attention by the media and president to the

Soviet Union. The evidence is less clear from the

Granger tests for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Competing

events associated with the Soviet Union did Granger

cause presidential attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict,

but there is little evidence that competing events

from the Bosnian conflict caused either media or

presidential attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Granger tests are suggestive but do not reveal

the direction of relations, which should be negative if

the theory is correct. The simulation analyses reported

in Figure 2 show the dynamics associated with

shocks of one standard deviation to events from

competing systems. Consistent with the Granger tests,

column 1 of Figure 2 shows that both media and

presidential attention to the Soviet Union diminished

for some time after a positive shift in Arab-Israeli

events. Column 2 demonstrates that media attention

to the Arab-Israeli conflict diminished sharply when

there was a positive shift in Soviet events.14 It also

shows an initial decline in presidential attention to

the Arab-Israeli conflict in response to Soviet events

but suggests that three or four weeks later there was

a resurgence of presidential attention. Of course, this

14 Note that this large negative response was invisible to the

associated Granger test. Such a disparity may occur due to contemporaneous

feedback through the covariance matrix of errors.

179

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The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting March 1998

TABLE 2. Granger Tests for Attention to Two Foreign Policy Issues, Competing Events Included

Arab-Israeli Arab-Israeli

Soviet Union Conflict Conflict

Competing Events, Competing Events, Competing Events,

Dependent Variable CoefficientB lock Arab-IsraelCi onflict Soviet Union Bosnian Conflict

Media Attention Media 6.91 14.59 3.14

(0.00) (0.00) (0.02)

President 1.67 0.96 1.62

(0.16) (0.43) (0.17)

Competing Issue 2.14 0.20 1.51

(0.07) (0.94) (0.20)

Presidential Attention Media 2.47 2.61 1.38

(0.04) (0.03) (0.24)

President 5.17 2.18 0.72

(0.00) (0.07) (0.58)

Competing Issue 1.99 2.95 0.37

(0.09) (0.02) (0.83)

Note: The numbers in the table are F statistics; p values are in parentheses. All VARs contain four lags. As in Table 1, events at lag 0 are included as an

exogenous variable to control for the contemporaneous effect of events on both the media and president. There were 514 weekly observations in the

Soviet and first Arab-Israeli series, running from the 27th week of 1984 to the 23d week of 1994. There were 155 weekly observations in the second

Arab-Israeli series, running from the 25th week of 1991 to the 23d week of 1994.

resurgence is consistent with the long-term importance of

Arab-Israeli issues over the period of interest. Column 3

shows a consistently small but negative response by both

the media and president to events associated with the

Bosnian conflict. Thus, in all three issue areas the

simulations demonstrate negative movements, with responses

that remain negative with few exceptions.

We also did intervention analyses to test whether

single events associated with competing issues affected

media and presidential attention to primary

foreign policy issues. In order for such critical events

to have an effect they must be large in magnitude;

they must also be relatively orthogonal to the foreign

policy issue of interest. For the Soviet Union issue we

FIGURE 2. Simulated Moving Average Responses to Shocks in Exogenous Issues

Soviet Union Arab-Israeli Conflict Arab-Israeli Conflict

1.2 1.2 1.2

1 2I abIsr I ConflicMe12a Sovie Union Meia 1 BosniaConflictMeia

1 V H 1 0.088 H 01\ l

0.8 0.8

0.6

Shock to 06 Shock to Shock to 06

Arab-Israeli Soviet Bosnian

Conflict 0.4 Union 0.2 -Conflict 0.4

0.2 0.2-

0 0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-.

-0.4 0

-0.2 -0.6 -0.2

0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10

1.2 1.212

Arab-isrr ConflictPreSen 1 ovnionPredent |Bosnia ConflictPre'ent

0.8 0.8 0.8

Shock to 0.6 Shock to 06 Shock to 0.6

Arab-Israeli Soviet Bosnian

Conflict 0.4 Union 0.4

- Conflict 0.4

-

0.2 - ~~~-0~.2~- ~~~~0.2

1802 -0. -02

I ~~~~0~ ~2~ ~ 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10

180

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American Political Science Review Vol. 92, No. 1

TABLE 3. Effect of Critical Events in Competing Issue Areas on Foreign Policy Attention

Soviet Union Arab-IsraelCi onflict

Media Presidential Media Presidential

Variable/Parameter Attention Attention Attention Attention

Preinterventionm ean , 27.78*** 29.76*** 26.78*** 9.02***

(5.34) (2.61) (7.61) (6.03)

Critical event coo -28.45*** -28.44 -15.75* -8.26*

(-2.58) (-1.33) (-1.68) (-1.96)

51 0.97*** 0.96*** 1.00*** 1.00**

(40.79) (15.05) (38.37) (39.50)

(GulfW ar) ("Death"o f the Soviet Union)

Autoregressive 01 0.27* 0.58*** 0.21* 0.26***

(1.84) (4.26) (2.09) (2.58)

Box-Ljung Q with 23 d.f. 4.88 3.56 26.47 20.20

Note: There are 100 weekly observations in each series. The Soviet time series runs from the 1st week of 1990 through the 26th week of 1991. The

Arab-Israeli time series runs from the 38th week of 1990 through the 33d week of 1992. The interventions were pulses. The values of the dynamic

parameters (8) for the Arab-Israeli conflict were rounded upward to 1.00 and did not exceed the bounds of stability. The "death" of the Soviet Union

variable was lagged two weeks for the presidential attention equation. The numbers in parentheses are t-statistics.

Up < .05, ~*p < .01, i**p < .001 (one tailed).

selected the beginning of the Persian Gulf War as

having such characteristics.15 The Iraqi invasion of

Kuwait occurred on August 2, 1990, and we hypothesized

this date as the time attention should have shifted

away from the Soviet Union. For the Arab-Israeli

conflict we selected the announcement of the "death"

of the Soviet Union and formation of a commonwealth

of former Soviet republics. This announcement occurred

on December 21, 1991, and dominated the news

for the next several months. Accordingly, this competing

event should have produced a subsequent decline

in attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

We used Box-Tiao (1975) methods to evaluate how

these critical events affected attention to the primary

issues. The results for the Persian Gulf War, reported

in the first two columns of Table 3, show an immediate

and long-term decline in attention to the Soviet Union

by both the media and president. Media and presidential

attention to the Soviet Union (w0), dropped off to

near zero in the week of the invasion and recovered

very slowly through time. The results for the "death" of

the Soviet Union, reported in the third and fourth

columns of Table 3 (w0), show a similar negative

decline in attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict by both

the media and president following the announcement.

In all four analyses the near unity rate of recovery

parameters (81) show that the effects would have been

near permanent if other events had not occurred later

to restore the primary issue to prominence in the

economy of attention.'6 Thus, the results uniformly

15 One could argue that this event was not orthogonal and that an

increase in attention to the Soviet Union should have occurred at this

time. Although the Soviet Union had been an ally of the Iraqi regime

prior to the war, the changes occurring in the Soviet Union at about

this same time diminished the likelihood of a Soviet reaction.

Moreover, the Soviets actually cooperated with the United Nations

in removing Sadaam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. Thus, we are

comfortable in asserting orthogonality.

16 The level at any particular time after an intervention may be

computed recursively usingy, = wo + 8 y,-1 Thus, prior to the Iraqi

invasion of Kuwait, the amount of presidential attention to the Soviet

Union resulted in about 29.76 paragraphs per week. The week of the

invasion the number of paragraphs dropped to yt = -28.44 +

show that critical events associated with competing

issues diminish foreign policy attention to primary

issues by both the media and president.

CONCLUSION

The political science literature on agenda setting has

been directed at explaining how U.S. domestic policy

issues reach and remain on the systemic and institutional

agendas. Yet, foreign policy is an important

component of U.S. policymaking and has been largely

ignored. This is undoubtedly because foreign policy is

fundamentally different from domestic policy and requires

a different rationale for explaining the rise and

fall of issue attention. In this study we have advanced a

theory of attention to foreign policy issues and then

tested expectations that arise from that theory using

empirical data.

In contrast to domestic policy, foreign policy is

primarily centered on the presidency due to constitutional

obligations, the need for strong centralized

leadership, and expectations by the public and other

institutions. Yet, the president is not in full control of

what receives attention in the foreign policy domain.

There is an economy of presidential attention that is

governed by the realities of scarce resources and

rational efforts by the president to garner favorable

public approval and historical treatment. The chief

executive can occasionally establish issue priorities in

the economy of foreign policy attention (as Nixon did

with China) but may also have an agenda thrust on him

by problem persistence, a continual progression of

events, and a perception that he must attend more

heavily to those issues the public deems most important.

The economy of attention is stable so long as

29.76 = 1.32 paragraphs per week. Five weeks after the onset of the

Persian Gulf War the number of paragraphs had risen to 6.57 per

week; ten weeks after it was up to 10.85 per week; 26 weeks after it

was 19.92 per week. Of course, other events and interventions can

affect this mathematical sequence, moving attention either up or

down through time.

181

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The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting March 1998

issues persist and problems continue to be defined as

important. Disturbances to this stability may occur,

however, due to exogenous events or changing public

perceptions of the relative importance of foreign policy

problems.

Our empirical analysis is based on the three most

visible and enduring U.S. foreign policy issues over

the past 15 years. The limited number of issues that

we examine suggests a need for future research

which differentiates on the basis of issue salience,

importance, or issue type. The empirical findings

may also be limited because the measure for the

president depends on the president's public rather

than private or hidden agenda. Tentatively, however,

our study confirms expectations that flow from the

preceding theory.

Both presidential and systemic attention are highly

inertial. The president attends heavily to those issues

that have also been heavily attended to in the past, as

does the media, which is an indicator of systemic

attention. We presume that this observed inertia exists

because foreign policy problems are not easy to resolve

and because problems that are defined as important at

one point are likely to remain so defined. Such problems

also demand continuing presidential attention

because the system defines certain problems to be

important. Thus, presidents who want to be viewed in

a favorable light attend to those problems toward

which the system directs them.

Foreign policy attention is inertial, but this inertia is

often disturbed by a continual progression of events

associated with the issue itself. As foreign policy crises

emerge, attention becomes more intense to the issue in

proportion to the severity of foreign policy events.

Attention also shifts due to changing media interpretations

of events and the perceived relative importance

of an issue. Intense media coverage of an issue can

extend presidential attention to that issue for a longer

period than is normal. Because the economy of attention

involves scarcity, issue inertia is also often disturbed

by competition from other foreign policy issues.

Systemic and institutional attention shifts away from

one issue toward another due to world events that alter

perceptions of what issues are most important at the

time. As issues in one area are perceived as more

important, constraints imposed by limited time and

resources necessarily mean that issues in other areas

receive less attention.

In these regards, foreign policy differs sharply from

domestic policy, since the progression of events is far

more important. There is no analogous stream of

domestic policy events similar to those that determine

the context for attention to the Soviet Union, Arab-

Israeli conflict, and Bosnian conflict. Whereas critical

domestic policy events can occur and focus presidential

attention for a time on particular issues, the foreign

policy agenda operates in the context of a continually

unfolding international drama. The drama depends on

the media for production and interpretation. The

president is drawn into the drama as an integral part,

but he has no script and often must respond in

impromptu fashion to media interpretations and the

182

continuous progression of events affecting U.S. interests.

APPENDIX

The following keywords were used to search the Vanderbilt

Television News Archive. The list includes the words and

the corresponding years in which they were used. Not all

the stories that came up with these keywords were

counted. We read the abstracts and coded the variables so

that only those stories related to the Soviet Union, Arab-

Israeli conflict, or the Bosnian conflict were part of the

measure.

Year Vanderbilt Key Words

Soviet Union

1984 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons

1985 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons

1986 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons,

Chernobyl, Gorbachev

1987 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons,

Gorbachev

1988 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons,

Gorbachev

1989 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons,

Gorbachev

1990 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons,

Republic, Gorbachev

1991 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons,

Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Republic,

Commonwealth

1992-94 USSR, Soviet, Russia, Moscow, US-USSR rels.,

arms control, summit, nuclear weapons,

Yeltsin, Gorbachev, plus all 16 former Soviet

states, besides Russia: Latvia, Lithuania,

Estonia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Kazakhstan,

Tajikistan, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia,

Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,

Kyrgzstan, Georgia, Kurdistan

Arab-Israeli

1984-94 Israel, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Syria, Lebanon,

Jordan, Egypt, PLO, Arafat, Palestine,

Palestinian, Arab-Israeli, terrorism, intifada,

W. Bank, Gaza, Golan, occupied

Bosnia

1991-95 Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,

Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Sarajevo, civil war,

embargo, ethnic cleansing, Moslem, Croat,

Serb, Balkans

The keywords for the index of the Public Papers of the

President are provided in the following list. All the entries

mentioned in the index were read to ensure validity for

inclusion as attention to the Soviet Union, Arab-Israeli

conflict, and Bosnian conflict.

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American Political Science Review Vol. 92, No. 1

Year Public Papers Key Words

Soviet Union

1984-90 United Soviet Socialist Republics (all

concurrent listings), nuclear weapons (all

concurrent listings), arms control,

Afghanistan, any mention of Soviets in any

other listing in the Index (i.e., Middle East-

Soviet Role)

1991-94 Same as above, except no Afghanistan, and

included: Commonwealth of Independent

States (all concurrent listings), Estonia,

Latvia, Lithuania

Arab-Israeli

1984-94 Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Middle

East (having to do with conflict or terrorism),

terrorism (dealing with the Middle East), and

all "see also"

Bosnia

1991-95 Bosnia (all subheadings), Macedonia, Croatia,

Serbia, Yugoslavia, Montenegro

The following keywords were used for searching the

PANDA events data set within a database environment

(Microsoft Access). Abbreviations were used per the codes.

These correspond to targets, sources, and places.

Year PANDA Key Words

Soviet Union

1984-94 Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia,

Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, Kyrgystan,

Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia,

Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine,

USSR, Uzbekistan

Arab-Israeli

1984-94 Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon

Bosnia

1991-95 Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Serbia,

Montenegro, Macedonia

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