The Duality of Agenda-Setting: The Role of Information Processing

The purpose of this article is to investigate the dual nature of agenda-setting processes as they can either occur on a deliberate level or on an automatic one. At present, the factors that lead to one of the processes rather than to the other are almost unknown. From studies on dual processing theories comes evidence that whether information is processed with high or with low cognitive effort strongly depends on the involvement with a certain issue. For that, we assume that the duality of agenda-setting reflects an involvement-determined duality of the underlying learning processes. In line with dual processing theories, we assume a more thoughtful agenda-setting process, if issue involvement is high and a more automatic one, if issue involvement is low. We tested these assumptions with two experimental panel studies. It can be concluded that the duality of agenda-setting processes is a result of different types of information processing.