Why are political actors interested in certain issues rather than others? For example, the French presidential campaign that has just ended has been criticized for not paying enough attention to climate issues. However, in the democratic models promoted by politicians themselves, supported by parts of political theory, politicians only respond to signals emerging from society and the ballot box. In other words, if we don’t talk about climate issues, it’s because voters, or at least a large majority of them, aren’t really interested in these issues.

In a recent book, Isabelle Guinaudeau (December 2021) and I show that political competition is in fact subject to more endogenous dynamics. Candidates or their parties do not know for sure what will tip the balance in favor of their party or their rivals in the ballot box. In the short term, the main source of information available are the other parties’ strategies and the media attention they generate. The result is a natural tendency for parties to mimic their rivals in terms of issue attention. The main consequence of these individual strategies is systemic issue convergence, a phenomenon that we call the “tunnel of attention”.
Following up on this work, I now want to turn to the capacity of governments to manipulate this tunnel of attention. Research in political communication has long demonstrated that governments have an advantage when it comes to political information. The media turn to them first and tend to highlight information and explanations put forward by governments. This seems natural, since governments tend to have access to more political information, are responsible for decision-making and, in democratic regimes, are also more legitimate than their political rivals. The changing media landscape is weakening governments’ capacity to steer public attention and may be changing the fundamental dynamics of political communication.