THE DYNAMICS OF FOREIGN-POLICY AGENDA-SETTING

Theoretical and empirical work on public policy agenda setting has ign ored foreign policy. We develop a theory of foreign policy agenda sett ing and test the implications using time-series vector autoregression and Box-Tiao (1975) impact assessment methods. We theorize an economy of attention to foreign policy issues driven by issue inertia, events external to U.S. domestic institutions, as well as systemic attention to particular issues. We also theorize that the economy of attention i s affected by a law of scarcity and the rise and fall of events in com peting issue areas. Using measures of presidential and media attention to the Soviet Union, Arab-Israeli conflict, and Bosnian conflict, we show that presidential and media attentions respond to issue inertia a nd exogenous events in both primary and competing issue areas. Media a ttention also affects presidential attention but the president does no t affect issue attention by the media.