Comparing Agenda-Setting Effects for the Issue of Migration Measured with Three Different Indicators of the Public Agenda

Abstract

Abstract Recent agenda-setting studies have increasingly replaced survey data with readily available, nonreactive data that at first glance might serve as indicators of the public agenda to the same extent: the amount of online search queries regarding an issue and the volume of donations for non-profit organizations that are collecting money for problem solving related to an issue. This raises the question of whether the results of agenda-setting studies depend on which of these indicators is used to measure the public agenda. In this study, we compare the agenda-setting effect of media coverage of migration on the public salience of this issue in Germany between 2015 and 2020 as measured by three different indicators of the public agenda on a monthly basis: survey data, Google Trends data, and fundraising data. Our analyses show significant simultaneous correlations between the media agenda and all three indicators of the public agenda, with a smaller influence of the media agenda on fundraising data than in the other two cases. However, when Granger causality is used to identify causal relationships, a positive influence of the media agenda on the public agenda is only found when the public agenda is measured with survey data.