The literature on agenda setting has gathered momentum in recent years by tapping into garbage-can models, exploring the dynamics of policy subsystems and decision making, and relying on increasingly sophisticated empirical techniques. Stuart Soroka makes two important contributions with this book: First, he develops an integrating framework for the sprawling literature on agenda setting, and second, he attempts to measure and test hypotheses on agenda-setting dynamics in a parliamentary and federal political system.

The book generally aims to explore why “media, public and policy agendas move together on certain issues and not on others” and the extent to which they relate to real-world indicators (p. 3). Two goals driving the study are to “empirically map relationships between the media, the public, and policy institutions in Canada using an agenda-setting framework,” and to confirm “the role of agenda-setting as a coherent and useful model of communications” because the “literature reflects an unfortunate combination of diversity and division” (p. 4).

The first chapter provides a succinct review of the literature and persuasively calls for an expanded model of agenda setting that encompasses the media agenda (e.g., news media, influential media, polling agenda, and entertainment media), public agenda (e.g., interest groups, influentials, family/groups/friends, issue publics), policy agenda (e.g., president/prime minister, lower house, committees, political parties, upper house, bureaucracy), and real-world factors. These factors, in principle, can exert influence in almost any direction, but what animates this basic integrating and organizing framework is that different issues should result in different patterns of causal influence.

Chapter 2 reviews previous work on issue types and proposes a new typology of issues—prominent, sensational, and governmental—each hypothesized to have different patterns of causality among media, public, and policy agendas and real-world factors. It briefly introduces the cases chosen for each issue type: prominent (inflation, unemployment), sensational (AIDS, crime, environment), and governmental (deficit/debt, national unity, taxes). The issues are tracked from 1985 to 1995 for several data-related reasons. The next three chapters review past approaches to collecting data, discuss strategies and choices for operationalizing variables in a Canadian context, and test hypotheses for the media, public, and policy agendas, respectively. Chapter 6 sets out the general model for estimating results; provides time-series data for the media, public, policy, and real-world indicators associated with each case; and probes the directions for causality and the extent of autocorrelation. Chapter 7 steps back and explores how issue prominence might affect different patterns in causality, how issue duration might affect media coverage, whether there exists a leading newspaper in Canada, and—given the nature of many of the case issues—whether the New York Times might stand as an important cross-border influence.

This study is rich in findings, and this brief review cannot do justice to them. Using data selected from eight Canadian newspapers, Soroka finds convergence on issue salience (as opposed to content) across Canada, and there is “little evidence of regional or ownership-biased trends” (p. 44). Where the public agenda is concerned, issue salience consistently rises and falls across Canada, despite regional variation in opinions. On issue types, he finds that the hypothesis of prominent issues driven by real-world indicators is supported in the case of inflation and unemployment, but the results are decidedly mixed in the case of sensational issues: The model of media-led change works well in the case of the environment but not so for AIDS and crime. For governmental issues, the 1989 Throne Speech moved the issues up the media agenda, which, in turn, led the public agenda, but for national unity, the media led the policy-agenda indicators. Using an exploratory two-stage approach, Soroka finds that changes in issue prominence and duration affect the findings on issue dynamics from the basic model set out in Chapter 6.

The findings are macro in nature; there is little detailed discussion on how each case evolved, which is not surprising, given that Soroka did not aim to track and discern the role of interest groups, entrepreneurs, think tanks, and policy processes, or how decisions were made. This study does not explore whether some provincial governments and newspapers treated specific case issues differently (e.g., in the case of AIDS, the media and the cities of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver and their provincial governments should have been more alarmed than counterparts elsewhere in Canada); whether there were important differences between elite agendas and those of the broader public; whether think-tank press releases led media reporting and exerted more direct influence on decision makers through other channels; and whether the impact of U.S. government decision-making (the Reagan tax cuts precipitated debate in Canada) was as important as media reporting. Budgetary decisions could be better understood by examining how specific agencies reallocated funds to deal with emerging demands and by modeling multiyear commitments in key program areas. Still, this study covers a phenomenal amount of ground, and its framework can integrate these and other research questions.

At the outset, the author makes brief but sweeping claims that Agenda Setting Dynamics in Canada “tells the story” of eight issues and will “merge disparate fields of political science and empirically map the structure of political communication” (p. 3), claims out of character in this otherwise balanced, focused, and tightly written study. The empirical exploration is not sufficiently lengthy or rich to increase understanding of the cases on their own terms, nor does the book fundamentally reshape our understanding of policymaking in the manner of John Kingdon's seminal Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (1984). Nevertheless, Soroka makes valuable contributions by articulating a framework linking related fields of research, developing an approach for tracking agenda setting in a parliamentary and federal context, and making several empirical probes. He concisely and transparently reviews the challenges and choices for measuring variables and estimating relationships and effects; the book would be an excellent resource for stimulating discussion in a research design seminar. Soroka identifies several specific conceptual and empirical issues to take up in future studies, and these results should be well worth waiting for.