Abstract
Agenda-setting research has expanded the McCombs and Shaw paradigm during the past thirty years by investigating how the agenda is set. The pursuit of this question has lead to the development of the single-issue, longitudinal approach, which grasp the three main agendas (the media agenda, the public agenda, the policy agenda) and analyzes their interrelations. This essay examines the usefulness and the limits of this approach, comparing it with the traditional hierarchical approach. Based on research on dioxin cases in Japan and other scholarly studies in the United States, the author concludes that when one issue is traced over time with the longitudinal approach, the influence of one agenda upon another is better explained.
