México 2012: la revisión de las agendas

Abstract

The topic of this research is Mexico 2012: reviewing agendas. The main goal is to diagnose the public opinion of the Mexican population in the framework of the 2012 federal election within “agenda setting theory” approach by Maxwell McCombs. However, while this theory emphasizes the agenda setting by media, here a prominent role has been given to citizens' agenda problems, in order to assess their judgment about the most significant problem that the country should solve. The civic agenda was built through the analysis of two surveys (one pre-election and other post-election). And by analyzing the content of the news of three newspapers as well as the electoral platforms of the three parties with more presence in the country, the political and the media’s agendas were joined. As a variation to the theory of McCombs the central objective of this analysis was not to identify the agenda establishment of media, but the media coverage on the issues most important for people, this is, to determine if the media collect social reality or report on the concerns that matter most to population. The same scheme was applied to the agenda of political campaigning. Questions that guided this research were: What are the main problems that build the public agenda? Is there a convergence point or agreement between the different agendas (media and politics) calendar? Which agenda sets the pace? Are they independent? And finally, in the context of new technologies, do social networks gather citizen agenda? And do new technologies -through social networks- foster the influence of civic agenda into public and media’s agendas? The hypothesis to answer these questions was: The political elite in Mexico uses media to set the public agenda and thus influence public opinion; but new technologies and the diversity of sources of information available can reverse this trend...