Public Opinion Quarterly 59:495-525 (1995)
© 1995 American Association for Public Opinion Research
CAPACITY, DIVERSITY, AND VOLATILITY OF THE PUBLIC AGENDA
TRENDS FROM 1954 TO 1994
MAXWELL MCCOMBS is the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, and Jian-Hua Zhu is associate professor of Communication Sciences at the University of Connecticut. The authors would like to thank Marylin Potter of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research for providing the data and the editor and three anonymous reviewers for comments on the earlier versions of the article. The study was supported by a grant to Jian-Hua Zhu from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation (no. 440632). Correspondence should be addressed to Maxwell McCombs, Department of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712.
Correspondence should be addressed to Maxwell McCombs, Department of Journalism, University of texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712
This study examined three intertwined hypotheses about long-term trends in the American public's issue agenda: increases in (1) agenda capacity, (2) agenda diversity, and (3) issue volatility. These hypotheses were tested with aggregate time series data covering 40 years of Gallup Poll Most Important Problem questions. The first two hypotheses also were replicated with cross-sectional data at the individual level consisting of 15,000 cases from three different years stretching across 4 decades. While no significant linear increase in the carrying capacity is found, our results provide unambiguously strong evidence for an increase in both agenda diversity and issue volatility. These findings about the public agenda are consistent with the proffered explanation that the volatility of contemporary public opinion is the result of a collision between two opposing forces, the expansive influence of education on awareness of public issues and the constraint imposed by the public agenda's limited capacity.
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