Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada

Why do public issues like the environment rise and fall in importance over time? To what extent can the trends in salience be explained by real-world factors? To what degree are they the product of interactions between media content, public opinion, and policy-making? This book surveys the development of eight issues in Canada over a decade - AIDS, crime, debt/deficit, the environment, inflation, national unity, taxes, and unemployment - to explore why information about certain issues and not others is made available to the public in a democracy. Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada offers one of the first empirical analyses of the interaction of the media, the public, and policy-makers in Canada and, more generally, makes a contribution to the study of political communications and policy-making that are important well beyond the Canadian context.