Measuring issue salience

The concept of issue salience has figured prominently in many studies of Am erican political life. Long lines of research have taught us that both citi zens and political elites may respond differently to issues that are salien t to them than to those that are not. Yet analysts making such claims elite actors face a fundamental problem that their counterparts in mass behavior do not: they cannot survey, say, members of the Supreme Court to ascertain those cases that are especially salient to the justices. Rather, scholars must rely on surrogates for issue salience-surrogates that are fraught with problems and that have led to disparate research results. Accordingly, we other an alternative approach to measure issue salience for elite actors: the coverage the media affords to a given issue. We argue th at this approach has substantial benefits over those employed in the past. Most notably, it provides a a reproducible, valid, and transportable method of assessing whether the particular actors under investigation view an iss ue as salient or not. In making the case for our measure we focus on Suprem e Court justice but we are sanguine about its applicability to other politi cal actors.