SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER The role of emotional intelligence in agenda setting: A study of social media Rabia Rahim 1 | Sajjad Ahmed Paracha 1 | Jawad Iqbal 2 | Muhammad Imran 2 1 Department of Media Studies, The Islamia University Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan 2 School of Business Management & Administrative Sciences, The Islamia University Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan Correspondence Rabia Rahim, Department of Media Studies, The Islamia University Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan. Email: jisiddiqui4@gmail.com Multiple studies were conducted to measure the effect of emotional intelligence (EI) with respect to Religion, Locality, Medium of Learning, Gender, Occupation, Family, Status, and so forth, however, investigating the role played by emotional intelligence in defusing the effect of agenda setting is rare. In this study, it is investigated whether EI has any role in defusing the agenda setting effect through social media. However, this study used the questionnaire to collect the 300 responses from universities students. The current study has employed the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software to empirically evaluate the data by using independent sample t-test which identifies that people with a high level of emotional intelligence defuses the effect of agenda setting and vice versa. Therefore, this study found that Social media influences the opinion of the common person. This research identified a key approach, that is, emotional intelli- gence that may take part in understanding how agenda setting through social media message can be avoided. 1 | INTRODUCTION The emergence of online media, nowadays, had been used for political purposes. The idea of the web-based social networking, which individ- uals use, offers chance to every political opponent to exploit and use for their own particular political plans, which becomes possible by using agenda setting practices. The agenda setting theory says that media do not generally influence what one thinks, but instead control our psyches on what to think about (Baran, 2009). McCombs and Shaw (1972) argued that the media has a vital role in molding political reality by deciding the “significance” of specific issues through “the portion of facts in a news story and its position” (Baran, 2009). This demonstrated that media had been utilized as an instrument for set- ting political plan. McCombs and Shaw (1972), the advocate of Agenda Setting the- ory, noticed that “the plan is not what to think but rather what to con- sider about. Mass media has the capability of transferring the prominent items on their news agendas to the general public agendas” (McCombs & Shaw, 1974). One of the features in the idea of agenda setting role of mass media is the time frame. Additionally, every media has its own and unique agenda setting potential. This theory enables us to better comprehend the inescapable role of the media (for instance on political communication system). According to Davis (2009) in political news coverage, the fight over agenda setting between journalists and their sources has been described using numerous descriptions and ideas. Online networking has become news beats for picking stories, reaching, and accessing sources casually or formally (Broersma & Graham, 2013). For sources, in our discussion characterized as political actors such as parties, politicians and the like, social media have turned out to be the substitute for speaking with citi- zens and also for “dodging the gatekeepers” of mainstream media by issuing stories that can be chosen up by journalists or citizens (Skovsgaard & Dalen, 2013). As the message dispersed widely, the mes- sage or information has more or less impact depending upon its content. The information that carries negative emotion have an immense effect (Naveed et al., 2011) and also if represented in a particular way (Liu & Kim, 2011). Various theories dealing emotion have brought up and stud- ied mostly, in social media, the study of emotion has incredible potential. The purpose of this study is to identify the role played by social media in setting the political agenda by the political parties and to identify the role played by the emotional intelligence in defusing the agenda setting affect through social media. Received: 2 June 2020 Revised: 8 August 2020 Accepted: 19 August 2020 DOI: 10.1002/pa.2421 J Public Affairs. 2020;e2421. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 of 11 https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2421