Concept
public agenda
The ranking of the issues that the public (or a sample) considers important; usually measured by survey.
The public agenda is the ranking of the issues that the public (or a sample) considers important. To measure it, a survey question is asked; in Chapel Hill this was an open-ended question of the kind “regardless of what the politicians say, what are the two or three main things the government should be dealing with?”
The public agenda is not measured in a single way either: according to McCombs’s 1976 review, McLeod, Becker and Byrnes distinguished an intrapersonal agenda (the issues the person personally finds most important) from an interpersonal agenda (the issues most talked about with others); the two overlap to a large extent but not completely.
Nor is the public agenda merely a mirror of the media agenda. Winter and Eyal found a strong agenda-setting effect on civil rights in national public opinion data for 1954–1976; the best effect span was four to six weeks before the survey. According to Behr and Iyengar, real conditions influence public opinion both directly and indirectly, by shaping news coverage.
The public agenda is one of the three agendas, with the media agenda and the policy agenda; the main concept is agenda-setting. For whose agenda will resemble the media’s more, see need for orientation.
Example
In Chapel Hill, 100 undecided voters were asked an open-ended “trouble” question; the answers were classified by the campaign’s main issues and compared with media emphasis.