Citizen Action Explainer: Agenda Setting

The Issue:

We often lack the power to immediately pass legislation. But it is essential to lay the groundwork by setting a progressive agenda on major issues.

In fact, failing to set the agenda on many issues in advance of power shifting hands often prevents major advances. The only time in the 21st Century the Democrats had control of both chambers of the State Legislature and the Governor’s Office, 2009-2011, very little major legislation was passed because support and commitment had not been established in advance for redistricting reform, climate legislation, automatic voter registration, and many other critical reforms. In fact, the Democratic legislature reduced public school general aid!

Although it is often ignored in organizing methodology, agenda setting is the one of the most powerful strategic tools available. Citizen Action of Wisconsin is a national leader in using agenda setting as an effective strategy for building grassroots power, expanding our inside influence with elected officials, and laying the groundwork for future breakthroughs.

How Agenda Setting Works:

The agenda setting bills Citizen Action advances with our legislative allies shift power from corporate interests to the people, and are steps towards system transformation. Read more about this in our Radical Pragmatism Explainer.

It is surprising to many activists that the general public does not usually consider the major challenges they face as political issues. When people can’t afford the rent, can’t find a decent job, struggle to pay their utility bills, or are forced to choose between skipping needed health care and running up medical debt, people do not necessarily see these problems as issues their government should address. To influence voting behavior or their attitude towards their elected representatives, a problem must be understood as an issue that people expect the government to remedy.

Agenda setting seeks to transform problems into public issues people expect their elected officials to address, and extend people’s conception of what is possible. There are several closely related types of agenda setting:

1. State Legislative Agenda Setting: In a State Legislature it is common for neither party to introduce bills that meaningfully address major social and economic problems facing their constituents. The path of least resistance is small bills that do not challenge and major corporate interests. When the problem is of high importance to voters, this vacuum is an opportunity to fill the void. Typically agenda setting occurs in roughly the following stages:Surfacing Community Problems as Public Demands: Grassroots leaders and organizers within democratic organizations like Citizen Action come together to define a problem that they know from direct public engagement and research is vexing their communities and ought to be addressed by the government. Many Citizen Action members first joined because they want to take meaningful action on the health care cost and access crisis, and believe health care is a right not a commodity.

• Engagement of Legislative Allies: Organizers and leaders bring issues and major policy solutions to legislative allies. Usually organizers and grassroots leaders make a specific ask for a Legislator to develop and sponsor a bill.
• Legislative Drafting Process: The process of drafting major legislation is a learning experience for legislators, organizers, and grassroots leaders on how the system is structured, the legal and financial barriers, and usually how the system is rigged against average people.
• Introduction of the Bill: If a bill is drafted, introduction is the first opportunity to reach the general public through the news media. However, not all bills are equally newsworthy and community organizing. Bills that meet Citizen Action’s definition of radical pragmatism by addressing major problems in a comprehensive way are more interesting to the media and the yet to be organized public, as are bills with demonstrated community and legislative support.
• Co-Sponsorship. Grassroots lobbying of potential co-sponsors is a huge organizing opportunity and a test of elected leaders. If elected leaders have not been asked to support challenging bills they are largely untested. Local activists are often surprised which lawmakers will support such bills once the question is called, and which will duck.  Public pressure can be exerted to push legislators towards support. This stage of the agenda setting process also provides a measure of the current popularity of a proposal, and the political power of the opposition. If only a handful of senators and representatives will co-sponsor a bill, it shows much more organizing and power building is neede2.

2. Electoral Agenda Setting: This phase picks up where legislative agenda setting leaves off. Issues that are actually discussed in elections, and are seen as helping a candidate win election, are much more likely to be vigorously pursued in the next Legislative session. We call this “electoralizing” an issue. Because of limited public attention, most campaigns focus on 3-5 issues at most. Therefore, most issues before the Legislature never come up in election communications. The sequence of this phase is usually as follows:

• Endorsement Process: Citizen Action uses its endorsement process in each region of the state to establish the positions of candidates on major agenda setting policies. Candidates seeking our endorsement have an incentive to support our major agenda setting initiatives.
• Campaign Support: Citizen Action focuses on supporting candidates who both strongly support issues, and especially those that will run on them, which will increase public support and put us in a better position to pass the legislation when the Legislature reconvenes.
• Next Legislative Session: If we are successful in electing more candidates committed to our major agenda setting bills, our chances of passing these measures, or building much broader support,  is greatly enhanced. It may take several election cycles and legislative sessions, and a switch in partisan control, to actually pass structural reform legislation.

3. Local Agenda Setting: Local government action can set the agenda for the State Legislature. Examples include:

• Local Advisory Referenda: When local governments put major issues on the ballot, especially when it is done by many local governments in different regions of the state, a positive public vote can help set the agenda for State Legislators.
• Trigger Bills: The preemption of local control by the State Legislature is a big problem in Wisconsin and around the country. In Wisconsin, local governments have been preempted from raising the minimum wage, requiring paid sick days, and improving building standards to address the climate crisis, to name a few preemptions. But local governments can pass these and other measures with trigger provisions, where they only go into effect if the state preemption law is repealed. This can signal to local legislators that they should fight to end these state preemptions.

4. Brief Case Studies

Healthy Wisconsin (2005-2007). Few remember that Wisconsin is the only state to ever pass a fully funded single payer health plan through any chamber of the Legislature. The bill was Healthy Wisconsin and it was passed by the State Senate in 2007.  Agenda setting was a key strategy in making this breakthrough possible.

• After the failure of the Clinton health care plan in 1994 there was little interest in the Democratic Party in universal health care proposals.
• In Wisconsin in the early 2000s, a broad coalition was organizing for comprehensive health care reform, but it lacked a consensus on legislation. In fact there were three competing health care plans supported by various aspects of organized labor, the senior and disability rights community, Citizen Action, single payer advocates, and many others.
• Agenda Setting Bill: An agenda setting bill called The Action Plan for Affordable Health Care bridged this divide by forcing legislators to commit to the outcome of guaranteed health care. All it said was that the next Legislature should guarantee health care for every Wisconsinite as good as Legislators received within two years. It was agnostic on what policy to adopt to achieve this outcome. This agenda setting bill received universal support among all Senate Democrats, starting to set the agenda for the next session if Democrats were to take control in the next election.
• Local Agenda Setting: During the 2006 elections, Citizen Action organizers and coalition partners lobbied cities and counties to put the same demand of guaranteed health care within two years on the ballot as advisory referendums. This gave the public the ability to show overwhelming support, and forced candidates for State Legislature to indicate whether they supported or opposed the referendum. News media covered these referenda at the local level and reported the statewide results as a public mandate for health care reform.
• Electoral Agenda Setting. Organizers and coalition partners pushed candidates to run on the pledge to guarantee health care to every Wisconsinite. Many candidates for State Senate ran on this pledge, making the center-pieces of their campaigns. Many ran television ads featuring this commitment. Several Republican Senators were attacked for not supporting local health care advisory referendums. Some even tried to dodge or flip flop on the issue.
• Legislative Action. Democrats took control of the State Senate with a perceived public mandate to guarantee quality affordable healthcare to every Wisconsinite. New Senate Majority Leader Judy Robson, a nurse, structured a process where all stakeholders were heard and a strong single payer health care bill with a funding mechanism was worked out. It passed with unanimous Democratic support and was added to the State Budget. It failed when the Republican Assembly and Democratic Governor refused to support the bill. To this day, the passage of Healthy Wisconsin in the State Senate is the highest legislative water mark in the U.S. for single payer health care policy

BadgerCare Public Option (2017-Present)

• After the failure of Healthy Wisconsin, the battle to pass the Affordable Care Act and bruising fights over state implementation dominated the  health care agenda. In Wisconsin, no new major comprehensive health care proposals were introduced for a decade.
• In the 2017-2018 Legislative Session, Citizen Action worked with progressive legislators to develop the BadgerCare Public Option as an agenda setting bill. It garnered good media coverage.
• During the highly competitive Democratic Primary for Governor, Citizen Action used its endorsement process to push for support of the BadgerCare Public Option bill. Ultimately every Democratic candidate endorsed it, and some actually included it in their television ads and other paid media.
• Citizen Action members have organized to build support during every subsequent legislative session. The proposal has been included in every state budget proposed by the Governor, and has built more and more support in the legislature. Citizen Action has also used state legislative primaries and general elections to promote the proposal. In the last legislative session, all but two Democrats Senators and Representatives co-sponsored the BadgerCare Public Option bill (43 of 45), making it far more likely that a Democratic Legislature will seriously work to pass it if partisan control switches hands.
• The 2026 election, with an open Democratic primary for Governor and the first chance to flip partisan control of the Legislature in 15 years, is a golden opportunity to organize the agenda set for the BadgerCare Public Option proposal.

Climate Accountability Act (2025)

• Citizen Action leaders and members became frustrated that despite the settled science that carbon emissions must be cut in half by 2030 to have the best chance to head off catastrophic climate change, that no proposals to do so were introduced in the Legislature or advocated by the Governor.
• The Climate Accountability Act was developed by Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde and Senator Chris Larson working closely with Citizen Action. There was internal pressure both from the Governor’s office and even some environmental groups to withhold the bill, but the sponsors with the strong support of Citizen Action pressed forward.
• Despite the internal opposition, the introduction of the bill drew large scale media coverage, and 33 State Senators and Representatives quickly co-sponsored it. With the first stage of agenda setting a success, Citizen Action members are working to add to the co-sponsor list while preparing to “electoralize” the issue in the 2026 elections.