AGENDA AND MEDIA

The media determine the agenda of the control sessions of the
parliamentary groups in the opposition.

References to foreign policy issues in prime ministerial speeches
have fallen exponentially in the last decade to less than 5
percent of speech-time.

People who get their information from traditional media, such as
print media or television channels with highly professionalised
news production processes, tend to have a greater knowledge
of political reality than other news consumers.

Digital media have a greater weight in the information diets of
Spaniards than in those of citizens in most central and
northern European countries. However, the contribution of
Spanish digital media to levels of political knowledge is lower
than that of digital media in those countries.

Individuals who are exposed to politically-diverse information diets
are more likely to participate than those who are informed
through ideologically-close media outlets.

AGENDA AND MEDIA

Q-Dem studies the extent to which the agenda and content of the mainstream media in Spain affect citizens' political preferences, knowledge and behaviour. It does so by comparing levels and patterns of exposure to different types of media (partisan, alternative, public, digital) in Spain with other European realities, as well as by analysing the contribution of different information diets to levels of political knowledge and participation.

AGENDA AND MEDIA

One of the goals of Q-Dem is to explain the interrelationship between the political agenda and the media agenda. This involves analysing under what conditions the print media determines the patterns of prioritisation of issues for citizens, members of government and political representatives in the parliamentary arena. Similarly, Q-Dem analyses the ability of political elites to influence the issues that appear on the front pages of the written press. The analyses carried out so far show that the front pages of the mainstream media in Spain discuss a rather limited number of issues (basically related to government administration, political corruption scandals, political parties and unemployment) often with a partisan bias; likewise, we show that MPs follow the media more intensely when they are in the opposition, and especially on issues that generate conflict, in order to attack their political opponents. The data generated by Q-Dem allows us to identify which issues have been reported on the front pages of El País and El Mundo from 1996 to the present day.