Summary
Why do public issues like the environment rise and fall in importance over time? To what extent can the trends in salience be explained by real-world factors? To what degree are they the product of interactions between media content, public opinion, and policymaking? This book surveys the development of eight issues in Canada over a decade: AIDS; crime; the debt/deficit; the environment; inflation; national unity; taxes, and unemployment. These issues are explored regarding how the salience of issues changes over time, and to examine why these changes are important to our understanding of everyday politics.