# Agenda Setting

> Agenda Setting is mapped as the lever: it moves an issue from agenda through formulation, authorization, implementation, feedback, and revision.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:policy-change:agenda-setting` |
| Family | Policy Change Mechanisms |
| Domain | Policy |
| Kind | process |
| Archetypal function | The Lever |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Agenda Setting belongs to the **Policy Change Mechanisms** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Agenda Setting moves an issue from agenda through formulation, authorization, implementation, feedback, and revision, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Agenda Setting, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Lever.** Agenda Setting is mapped as the lever: it moves an issue from agenda through formulation, authorization, implementation, feedback, and revision.

## Gift

turns political demand into durable material effect; through Agenda Setting, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

creates symbolic wins, implementation gaps, and benefits captured by organized interests; Agenda Setting can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Agenda Setting to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Lever enters through Agenda Setting. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Agenda Setting becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**role.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Agenda Setting; another player names a countermove. Initiative 5.

## Relationships

- **mobilizes — Policy Window:** Agenda Setting mobilizes Policy Window by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **enables — Majority-Minority District:** Majority-Minority District enables Agenda Setting by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **depends on — Regulatory Capture:** Agenda Setting depends on Regulatory Capture by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Agenda Setting from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Agenda Setting is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Agenda Setting: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Introduction to Political Science](https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-political-science) — OpenStax, 2022. Comparative institutions, political behavior, and public policy foundations.
- [Preventing Policy Capture](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/preventing-policy-capture_9789264065239-en.html) — OECD, 2017. Mechanisms and safeguards concerning capture of public decision-making.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
