9320922 Jones This research focuses on the creation of a large, comprehensive database. When complete, it will allow users to trace public attention, media coverage, congressional attention, legislative action, and budgetary outlays in the federal government to every major social problem that the U.S. government has faced since World War Two. With this dataset, the researchers will answer a central question of American politics: why do out political leaders attend to certain problems while they ignore others? This topic, generally called agenda-setting within the political science research community, has proved surprisingly difficult to study in a systematic manner. By gathering information on public opinion polls, media coverage, congressional hearings, statutes and federal budgetary outlays, the researchers will attend to this question. Essentially, this is a project on the setting of governmental priorities. The investigators want to know whether public concerns, as reflected in polls and in media coverage, are translated into governmental attention, law-making, or changes in the federal budget. There are strong reasons to suspect that the process is not the simple unidirectional model of flow of public concern to government action. Rather, governmental actions themselves may help determine the list of problems that the public deems important. With the creation of this large dataset, the investigators will sort out these questions. By developing a topic-coding system and by applying it uniformly throughout the project, they can show when attention ah shifted to any of a number of new problems. For example, they can trace when attention has risen or fallen on the topic of environmental controls, race relations, housing, crime, or any of a number of topics. With this information, they will be able to see to what extent congressional hearings, statutes, and budgetary allocations stem from, lead to, or are independent from media attention and pub lic concern. ***
