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Unemployment and urban congestion, especially in the old quarter of the city during the weekends, topped the public agenda in Pamplona, Spain, during the spring of 1995.²³ Comparisons between all six major concerns on the public agenda and local news coverage in the preceding fortnight found high degrees of correspondence. The match with the dominant local daily newspaper was +0.90; with the second Pamplona daily, +0.72; and with television news, +0.66.

Agenda setting also occurred in a 1986 mayoral election in Machida City, a municipality of 320,000 residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area.²⁴ Comparison of the public agenda, which had seven issues in all, with the coverage of the four major newspapers serving Machida City, yielded a modest, but significant, correlation of +0.39. Although there were no significant variations in the strength of this relationship among persons differing in age, sex, or level of education, Chapter 5 will take up a psychological factor that does provide an explanation for this relatively low correlation.

Local agenda-setting effects also were found in the 1997 legislative elections in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area.²⁵ In September, the correlation for the top four issues of the day was +0.20 between the public agenda and the combined issue agenda of five major Buenos Aires newspapers. However, as election day approached in October, the correspondence between these agendas for the top four issues soared to +0.80, an increase that suggests considerable learning from the news media in the closing weeks of the election campaign.

Additional evidence of significant agenda-setting effects in Argentina was found during the 1998 primary election held to select the presidential candidate for a major political coalition. For the six major issues of the day, the correspondence between the public agenda at the time of the election and the newspaper agenda of the previous month was +0.60. For television news, the correspondence was even higher, +0.71.²⁶