The Fragmenting Public Agenda: Capacity, Diversity, and Volatility in Responses to the “Most Important Problem” Question

Abstract

This study documents the fragmentation of the American public’s agenda. Updating work by McCombs and Zhu (1995), it measures the carrying capacity of the public agenda, the degree of diversity, and the rate of turnover in issues named by Gallup survey respondents asked Gallup’s classic question, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?,” from 1975 through 2014. Assuming the public agenda’s capacity to be relatively fixed, scholars have argued that increasing agenda diversity must exert upward pressure on volatility, generating issue competition. This study reveals that the public agenda has continued to diversify, but volatility has changed little; indeed, the agenda was less volatile in 2014 than it had been in decades. Moreover, issue-carrying capacity has grown, raising questions about the traditionally posited limits of the public agenda’s issue-carrying capacity. Issue-carrying capacity is positively related to agenda diversity and negatively related to volatility.

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