Agenda is simply a list of things to be done. Yet, a great affliction of democracy is that issues cumulate. Consequently, responsiveness to multitudes of demands must be associated with willingness and ability to impose constraints on the time, place and manner of the conversion of issues into legitimate public policy. That can be considered the critical function of the agenda in political theory.

The vertical axis runs the gamut from the most tentative and casual of interests -- mere opinion -- to interests that have been refined, rationalized, researched, and assimilated into the most formal of agendas, fully articulated policies. The horizontal axis, media-to-party, captures the dimension or function of aggregation, which is a mix of communications from varieties of sources, of which the most institutionalized and most proximate to the political process are media and party.