Two Levels of Agenda Setting Among Advertising and News in the 1995 Spanish Elections

This study had two goals: to replicate research by Marilyn Roberts and Maxwell McCombs on intermedia agenda setting in a Spanish election and to explore that pattern of intermedia relationships at both the first and second levels of agenda setting. Similar to Roberts and McCombs' findings in a Texas gubernatorial election, the newspaper agenda in Spain did influence the agenda of issues in television news. At the second level of agenda setting, two agendas of descriptive attributes were examined, the substantive agenda and the affective agenda of candidate attributes. For substantive attributes, newspaper political advertising influenced both the television and newspaper news agendas. TV news, in turn, influenced the TV political advertising agenda. Examination of the affective agenda revealed mostly reciprocal relationships.