Agenda Setting, Dialogue and Mediation: A Data-Driven Cognitive Probe in the “Global Community” Framework

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-238-5_17How to use a DOI?

Keywords

big data; agenda setting; dialogue and mediation; framing; mapping; mental space

Abstract

Meaning and Purpose: Media may not change what people “think”, but they affect what people “think about”. It is observed that social media has become a powerful tool in China to empower the public, particularly we-media users to frame issues and consequently promote the agenda setting. However, due to data limits, there still remains a gap that little attention has been paid to the cognitive level at which how items make issues onto the policy agenda and how do they exert influence on what people think about. Methodology: Taking the “Global Community” initiative as an example, the current research employs IBM statistical software SPSS and corpus-based quantitative analysis together with qualitative methods to investigate how items make it onto the international policy agenda and who makes these decisions. At a macro level, a data-driven qualitative analysis methodology was taken based on SPSS 22.0 and particularly two powerful databases, Baidu and COCA were employed for data mining. At a micro level, as the framing of policy issues and policy problems shapes the perception in the policy process, the cognitive framing devices were analyzed in detail to investigate how frames were prioritized and activated in the mental spaces that drive agenda setting qualitatively drawing on the cognitive framing and Kingdon’s multiple streams theory. Results and Conclusions: With the help of the big data, it is found that the “Global Community” concept has been listed not only on the Chinese government’s top agenda, but also on the list of numerous main stream social media and popular we-media platforms. The governmental stream and mass media interact and act synergistically in agenda setting. The SPSS-based quantitative analysis reveals that the mean difference among the 3 different groups is not statistically significant at the 0.05 level, and all participants contribute equally to moving the “Global Community” initiative onto the international agenda regardless of the agency running difference. Cognitively, framing has become an important tool for policy-makers and stakeholders to gain or preserve influence. The framing of policy issues and policy problems shapes the perception in the policy process. By such cognitive framing devices as metaphorical mapping and story-telling, frames were prioritized and activated to drive agenda setting. A new “dialogue” path thus has been found to make the three streams – problem, politics and policy – converge to form “policy windows”.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xueyan Yin
AU  - Guihang Guo
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/09/26
TI  - Agenda Setting, Dialogue and Mediation: A Data-Driven Cognitive Probe in the “Global Community” Framework
BT  - Proceedings of the 2023 4th International Conference on Big Data and Informatization Education (ICBDIE 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 121
EP  - 137
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-238-5_17
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-238-5_17
ID  - Yin2023
ER  -