Setting the agenda of attributes in the 1996 Spanish general election

We advance the central proposition of agenda-setting theory-that elements p rominent in the mass media's picture of the world influence the salience of those elements in the audience's picture-through the explication of a seco nd level of agenda setting: attribute agenda setting. This preliminary rese arch on candidate images during the 1996 Spanish general election simultane ously examined 2 attribute dimensions-substantive and affective description -to test the hypothesis that media attribute agendas influence the voters' attribute agenda. Empirically, a high degree of correspondence was found be tween the attribute agendas of 7 different mass media and the voters' attri bute agenda for each of the 3 candidates. The median correlation from these 21 tests of the hypothesis is +. 72. Sixth-order partial correlations in w hich the influence of the other 6 mass media are removed from the correlati on between a medium's agenda and the voters' agenda for a particular candid ate have a median value of +.73. Additional analyses of the attribute agend as of each medium's primary audience in comparison with its principal compe titor also yielded evidence of second-level agenda setting. Future research should pursue complex longitudinal designs tracing the impact of media con tent on voters' images at both the aggregate and individual levels as part of the continuing scholarly dialogue on competing approaches to framing res earch and attribute agenda setting.