Agenda-Setting, Priming, and Framing Revisited: Another Look at Cognitive Effects of Political Communication

TLDR: This article revisited agenda-setting, priming, and framing as distinctively different approaches to effects of political communication and argued against more recent attempts to subsume all three approaches under the broad concept of agenda setting and for a more careful explication of the concepts and of their theoretical premises and roots in social psychology and political psychology.

Abstract: Agenda-setting, priming, and framing research generally has been examined under the broad category of cognitive media effects. As a result, studies often either examine all 3 approaches in a single study or employ very similar research designs, paying little attention to conceptual differences or differences in the levels of analysis under which each approach is operating. In this article, I revisit agenda-setting, priming, and framing as distinctively different approaches to effects of political communication. Specifically, I argue against more recent attempts to subsume all 3 approaches under the broad concept of agenda-setting and for a more careful explication of the concepts and of their theoretical premises and roots in social psychology and political psychology. Consequently, it calls for a reformulation of relevant research questions and a systematic categorization of research on agenda-setting, priming, and framing. An analytic model is developed that should serve as a guideline for future resear...