Revisiting Agenda-Setting Across Media Systems and Regime Types: Levels of Influence, the Need for Orientation, and the Algorithmic Turn in a Networked, Polarized Age

Agenda-setting theory has anchored communication research for five decades, yet algorithmic curation, audience fragmentation, and a wave of autocratization have unsettled its founding assumptions. This critical integrative review connects three research traditions that have developed in parallel: the three levels of agenda-setting (object salience, attribute salience, and Network Agenda-Setting, NAS), the Need for Orientation (NfO) as the theory’s psychological mechanism, and comparative scholarship on media systems and regime types. Drawing on 108 sources assembled through structured searches and citation tracing, it traces the migration of agenda-setting from a linear, institutionally governed transfer of salience toward a recursive, algorithmically mediated process, and reassesses the evidence on echo chambers and algorithmic amplification against recent platform experiments. It then examines networked agenda-building in three polarized cases of democratic erosion—Türkiye, Hungary, and India—where state-aligned media bundle national identity with support for incumbents in their coverage, and where direct evidence that these associative networks are adopted by audiences is confined to the Turkish case, in which transfer occurred only among pro-government respondents. The synthesis yields an integrative multilevel model, specified as six testable propositions, in which micro-level orientation, meso-level networks, and macro-level institutions jointly shape salience and in which the media system is expected to condition whether NAS effects are convergent or divergent. It closes with a research agenda centered on networked measurement, algorithmic auditing, NfO–NAS integration, and comparison beyond Western democracies.