Christoffer Green-Pedersen

• Aarhus University

One of the most significant changes in West European politics in the past 40 years is the emergence of the new cultural divide. However, there is substantial variation in how the issues comprising this new divide have manifested themselves in party systems. This raises the question of what mechanisms bring these issues into established party system...

Indicators are important sources of information about problems across many policy areas. However, despite a growing number of indicators across most policy areas, such as health care, business promotion, or environmental protection, we still know little about if, how, and when such indicators affect the policy agenda. This article develops a theore...

Issue competition theories posit that political parties have little incentive to emphasize the same issues, because they mostly benefit from emphasizing issues where they are viewed as more competent. In contrast, a number of empirical studies find considerable overlap in parties’ issues emphasis. Aiming to bridge this peculiar gap, this paper sugg...

This paper investigates MPs’ questions in Denmark. The paper focuses on the role of the “partisan context” for their questioning behavior. This refers to three aspects. First, the status of the party in terms of government versus opposition. Second, it refers to the issues a party finds important to focus on, as measured by its party manifesto. Thi...

Agenda-setting theory has a long tradition within policy studies but took a major leap forward with the work of Baumgartner and Jones and their formulation of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET). Since then, an extensive literature has developed, both evaluating the notion of punctuated equilibria from a comparative perspective and providing ideas...

The Irish party system has been exceptional both for the weakness of its left-right conflict and for its long-run stability. How then can party competition on policy, and particularly competition between the main parties, be characterised? This study examines the Irish party system from an issue competition perspective, examining the party system a...

How cross-nationally similar or different are political agendas when it comes to their issue content? Does one country discuss health care, another the environment, and a third one immigration? Though studies of issue competition and political agenda setting more broadly have flourished in recent years, this important question has gained surprising...

The ‘two worlds of morality politics’ framework suggests that the historical structure of the party system has a major influence on the politics of morality issues. This study uses the case of Ireland to examine that proposition. Ireland is unusual in that it combines the absence of an historical church-state conflict in its party system with an hi...

An extensive body of research documents how governing parties generally suffer electoral defeats. Varying explanations have been offered, most of which touch upon the liabilities of policy responsibility. Although media coverage is generally acknowledged as one of these liabilities, few empirical studies have examined how news content affect govern...

This article analyses the conditions under which political parties spend attention to labour issues. This article compares the dominant partisan perspective, which proposes that attention to issues is shaped by party competition, to an interest group perspective, which proposes that strong interest groups, in particular when their power is institut...

A number of studies have investigated when parties change their policy positions. However, this growing body of research has had limited interaction with the literature on issue competition. To bring these two perspectives together, this article investigates how and when parties adjust their respective policy positions on immigration, the environme...

The Danish Policy Agendas Project was initiated in 2002. This chapter presents the dataset included in the Danish Policy Agendas Project. The major time series cover parliamentary activities, party manifestos, radio news, and the council agendas of local governments. All important aspects of the Danish political system are thus covered. The chapter...

The article investigates how parties compete over the welfare state by emphasising specific welfare state issues. The core argument is that two issue-specific factors determine how much parties emphasise individual welfare state issues: the character of policy problems related to the policy issues and the type of social risks involved. To test the...

Despite coalition governments being the most widespread form of government, many aspects of coalition politics are still poorly understood. This is especially true for questions relating to the role of the prime minister party within the coalition. Being the prime minister party seems to imply considerable influence, but little evidence actually ex...

This chapter focuses on the political tone of news coverage. Three issues are examined. First, we find that news is always more negative than positive from the point of view of the government, although the degree of negativity varies across issues. Second, results show that incumbents appear more often in the news when the tone of the coverage is p...

Studying the party politics of immigration is one of the fastest growing bodies of research within the study of West European politics. Within this literature, an underlying assumption is that immigration has become one of the most salient issues. However, this is rarely documented, let alone explained. Drawing on a new coding of party manifestos i...

Issue ownership theory posits a positive relationship between electoral support and public attention to issues that a party “owns;” that is, issues that the party is perceived to be best at handling. We investigate this key prediction of the issue ownership theory in a dynamic analysis of 20 years of party support and media coverage across multiple...

Review of the development and major claims of and the debates surrounding punctuated equilibrium theory for a handbook on public policy agenda-setting.

It is not until recent decades that an extensive empirical research tradition has emerged in relation to policy agenda-setting. The starting point for this research has been the agenda-setting models of Kingdon as well as Baumgartner and Jones. The concepts and ideas of these two models have led to empirical investigations of many aspects of policy...

The literature on media appearances of political actors have repeatedly documented the so-called “incumbency bonus”, meaning that parties and politicians in government have more media coverage than those of the opposition. This bias is normally attributed to news criteria that reflect political power, such as relevance and the elite status of actor...

All democratic countries have ministries for issues like foreign affairs, defense, transportation, education, and social affairs. Yet, we know little about what determines the number and issue content of ministries. Why do some policy issues have their own ministry while others do not and when are new ministries created? The article offers a theore...

A substantial literature claims that political parties compete over issues by selectively emphasizing favorable issues and avoiding issues emphasized by their opponents. In recent years, this understanding of issue competition has been challenged by empirical studies showing issue engagement to be the rule rather than the exception. To move the dis...

One of the many ways in which politicians seek to respond to economic austerity pressure is to cut or even completely remove public policies that were introduced in better times. Yet, despite the many advances that have been made in policy research, relatively little is known about why, when, how and with what effects politicians engage in policy d...

The growing interest in morality politics has spurred a large number of studies on individual morality issues and the gradual shift from restrictive to permissive regulation across Western Europe. Several studies have further pointed to the changing role of religion as the main cause of permissive policy shifts. However, seen in a comparative persp...

This final chapter summarizes what has been learnt about policy dismantling in two different fields of policy-social and environmental. It reminds us of the challenges that had to be overcome in the pursuit of a more comparative approach, chiefly developing definitions, measures, and categorizations that 'travel' more easily between the two fields....

This chapter focuses on the indexation of social benefits (i.e. adjustments in line with inflation or real wage development) in Denmark, Sweden, the UK, and Germany. It is argued that studying indexation rules is central to a fuller understanding of the changing substantial intensity of welfare benefits. It offers insights into politicians' prefere...

Policy dismantling has been studied from several perspectives, with analysts sitting at separate tables and employing different concepts. This first chapter sets out to overcome this fragmentation and develop a more comparative approach. For this purpose, it first explores the evolution of academic work on dismantling from its origins in the early...

Hooghe and Marks recently introduced a new research agenda for the study of European integration focusing on politicisation, that is, the inclusion of mass public attitudes in the politics of European integration. The overall aim of this article is to respond to this new research agenda. Unlike the existing literature, which focuses on Euro-sceptic...

The preceding chapters have outlined the idea of the ‘two worlds of morality politics’ as a theoretical framework for studying conflict definition — including both agenda setting and issue framing — around morality politics.1 The chapters focused on Western Europe, but in Chapter 9 the idea was expanded to the USA. The case studies have also shown...

Before analyzing morality politics in the five countries chosen — the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and Denmark — a series of questions about operationalization and definitions need attention.

As a secular society with a long-standing liberal tradition, the UK is often considered to be among the most permissive countries on morality issues.1 This view of the UK2 often refers to the mid- to late 1960s known as a ‘permissive’ period where several forms of social and moral regulation underwent a substantial liberalization including capital...

Even though they have never been among the most studied policy issues, two strands of literature on morality issues do exist. One is a long-standing tradition of studying morality issues and morality politics in a US context (e.g. Meier 1994; Mooney 2001a; Tatalovich and Daynes 2011). The other strand is a comparative literature, which has only bee...

Denmark is a clear example of the ‘secular world’.1 Morality issues are almost never politicized in Denmark. The political parties devote very little attention to such issues, and they do not necessarily have clear and stable party positions. Thus, the potential for intense political conflicts over morality issues is small, and policy decisions are...

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The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized a...

At the beginning of each Parliamentary session, almost all European governments give a speech in which they present the government’s policy goals and legislative agenda for the year to come. Despite the enormous body of literature on governments in European parliamentary democracies, systematic work on these executive policy agendas is surprisingly...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Claims regarding the power of the mass media in contemporary politics are much more frequent than research actually analysing the influence of mass media on politics. Building upon the notion of issue ownership, this article argues that the capacity of the mass media to influence the respective agendas of political parties is conditioned upon the i...

The literature on Western European parliaments has long pointed to an increase in non-legislative activities, including questions to the minister and interpellations; however, it has struggled to explain this development. This paper argues that the explanation ought to be sought in the increased importance of issue competition among political parti...

Inspired by the agenda-setting literature, this article outlines a model of issue competition focusing on the interaction between government and opposition parties through the party-system agenda. Unlike previous studies of issue competition, the model makes it possible to answer questions such as why some parties have greater success than others i...

This article analyses the multi-level dynamics of the environmental agendas between the European Union and its Member States. The issue is to determine whether these agendas interact, and how. Starting from data on the legislative agendas of the EU and four of its Member States (Denmark, France, Spain and the United Kingdom), the article concludes...

The Comparative Agendas Project brings together researchers who are developing systematic indicators of the attention given to political problems in their own national political systems. The main objective of the project is to build up a standardised taxonomy, in order to compare the activities linked to these problems over time and space. The cons...

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This article studies the effect of changes of government on the development of government agendas from the “Speeches from the Throne” in the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark. In addition to the theory of the mandate, the explanations in terms of political heritage and the intrusion of issues are also tested. Despite their undeniab...

Sur quels enjeux politiques les parlements légifèrent-ils ? Cette interrogation d’apparence anodine n’a que rarement fait l’objet d’une attention soutenue, particulièrement dans une perspective comparée. Pourtant la production des lois constitue l’un des éléments structurants d’une communauté politique et de la compétition démocratique. Dans cet ar...

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western d...

The European countries have surpassed the United States with regard to comprehensive and stringent environmental regulation. This policy pattern has become very visible in the international debate about reduction of CO2 emissions. From a comparative public policy perspective, the recent difference is interesting because it restates the question abo...

We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along th...

Over the last three decades many Western European social democratic parties have been challenged by populist radical right parties. The growth and success of parties on the right flank of the party system represents a triple challenge to the social democrats: they increase the salience of issues traditionally ‘owned’ by the right; they appeal to wo...

The news media are frequently accused of portraying politics as a strategic game rather than focusing on political issues. However, the understanding of the prevalence of different news frames in the media coverage of politics is limited in several respects. This article seeks to contribute to remedying this by (1) conducting a longitudinal analysi...

  Studies of party politics and party competition in West European democracies all point to diversification. Non-economic issues such as the environment, refugees and immigrants or law and order have become increasingly central to party politics. However, there has been surprisingly little interest in explaining variation across time and countries...

This contribution analyses centre-right parties' attitudes and positions on immigration and integration in Denmark and Sweden. Despite the two countries being socio-economically and culturally similar, there are some significant political and structural differences which help to explain why immigration has played a much more prominent role in Danis...

Das Jahr 1982 war in vielerlei Hinsicht ein entscheidendes Jahr für den dänischen Wohlfahrtsstaat. Die Probleme der dänischen Wirtschaft, die seit der ersten ölkrise kontinuierlich zugenommen hatten, entwickelten sich zu einer ernsten Wirtschaftskrise, die von hoher Arbeitslosigkeit, einer hohen Inflation sowie einem Haushalts- und einem gro\en Lei...

Political science has never paid much comparative attention to what Schattschneider called the "conflict of conflicts." However, this question is becoming increasingly important as the conflict structure in many western countries is breaking up. Is the ability to link an issue to an already existing conflict in the party system crucial for it to be...

This article represents one of the first attempts to study agenda setting and policy processes in a cross-national perspective, and we do so by examining the issue of tobacco consumption in Denmark and the United States over the last half-century. There are similarities in the ways that the political systems have responded. In both countries politi...

Changes in Western European political parties in general have attracted considerable scholarly interest, whereas changes in party competition have been almost overlooked in an otherwise extensive literature. Using the party manifesto data set, this article documents that party competition in Western Europe is increasingly characterised by issue com...

Studying agenda setting and policy dynamics is a well-established research tradition dating back to the work of Bachrach and Baratz and Schattschneider. The research tradition provides considerable insights into how changes in agendas and political attention affect public policy. However, the research tradition has been strongly dominated by studie...

We propose a new approach to the study of comparative public policy that examines how the agenda-setting attributes of an issue combine with problems to drive political attention. Whereas existing comparative policy studies tend to focus on how institutional or programmatic differences affect policy and politics, we begin by asking how the issue it...

In Denmark and Norway, major research programmes known as the ‘power and democracy studies’ have evaluated the functioning of the political systems and democracy in general, highlighting numerous changes in both Danish and Norwegian politics over recent decades. However, despite the broad range of studies that characterize both programmes, it is st...

This article investigates earnings-related pension schemes in Denmark and Sweden with a focus on the last two decades. It takes the path dependency idea as its starting point and develops it further with regard to pension politics. In the Danish case, the article shows that existing funded, occupational pension schemes precluded a pay-as-you-go (PA...

div>Why did some economies experience a boom in the 1990s? Discussing this crucial question, Employment 'Miracles' comparatively analyzes select "miracle" economies. The contributors critically analyze how the small sizes and institutional structures of seven countries-including the Netherlands.

Many scholars have found the working of Danish parliamentarism puzzling. It seems to be a peculiar mixture of cooperation and conflict. Based on an analysis of both the causes and consequences of bloc politics – or the lack of it – in Denmark from 1973 to 2003, this article argues that bloc politics is the precondition of the cooperation that many...

The aim of this article is to account for the differences in electoral support for social democratic parties in Scandinavia in recent years. The main argument put forward is that the relative success of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) in preserving voter support compared to the major decline for both the Danish and Norwegian social democr...

Since the publication of Pierson's seminal work, a scholarly debate about welfare state retrenchment has emerged. One of the debated issues has been the “dependent variable problem”: what is welfare state retrenchment and how can it be measured. In particular the pros and cons of different types of data have been discussed. The argument of this art...

Centripetal party competition is traditionally associated with the need to capture the median voter in a two-party system, whereas the existence of center parties is associated with centrifugal party competition. This article argues that the existence of a ‘pivotal center party’ leads to centripetal party competition in multiparty systems. A pivota...

What has happened and what is happening to welfare states in advanced industrial countries is one of the big research questions within many branches of the social sciences. The reasons for the interest are evident. First, welfare states — of different kinds — are among the core features of the political economies of all advanced industrial countrie...

Theory argues that Social Democratic parties strive for more universal welfare benefits. However, this paper argues that universal welfare benefits are also attractive to right-wing parties because of their market conformity. Further, Social Democratic and other left-wing parties may argue against universal benefits based on arguments about redistr...

Résumé L’analyse théorique suggère que les partis sociaux-démocrates aspirent à des prestations sociales plus universelles. Cet article propose cependant que, en raison de leur conformité avec la logique du marché, les prestations universelles retiennent également l’attention des partis de droite. De surcroît, les sociaux-démocrates et autres force...

In recent years, a wave of publications within comparative political economy has focused on patterns of adjustments of the political economies of advanced industrial countries to such recent conditions as globalization and the effects of these adjustments with regard to macroeconomic outcomes. This article argues that a way to enhance the understan...

From 1982 to 1993, a decade of tight economic constraints, the Danish welfare state was governed by bourgeois parties. The expectation of the power resources model, the most prevalent theory about the Scandinavian welfare states, was that the Danish welfare state would be turned further in a residual direction. Those expectations were, however, nev...

This article investigates market-type reforms of the service welfare states in Sweden and Denmark. Sweden has implemented such reforms to a greater extent than Denmark. The explanation should be found in the different responses of the Social Democratic parties to the NPM agenda in general and market-type reforms in particular. In Denmark, the Socia...

The development of European Social Democracy has once more attracted significant scholarly attention. This time, the debate is centred around the 'third way' as the catchphrase for the transformation of European Social Democracy. Based on the experience of the Danish and Dutch Social Democrats, two questions are raised in this article, namely what...

Introduction The development of the advanced welfare states has long been an issue attracting enormous scholarly attention within both political science and sociology. For a long time, the welfare state literature was about explaining the growth of modern welfare states in general as well as variation across OECD countries. However, since the publi...

The literature on welfare-state retrenchment generally argues that economics and institutions matter for the retrenchment scale in different countries. This article argues that politics, in the sense of party competition and consensus, also matter. A study of retrenchment in Denmark and the Netherlands from 1982 to 1998 shows a greater extent of re...

In the literature on welfare state retrenchment and in the general emphasis on the resilience of welfare states, the Dutch case appears puzzling by virtue of the fact that significant retrenchments have actually taken place in the Netherlands. The Dutch case appears even more puzzling considering that the arguments in this literature as to the diff...

After the wave of conservative or neo-liberal governments in Europe in the 1980s, social democratic parties are back in government in most European countries. At the same time, with the 'third way' as its catch phrase, European social democracy seems to have regained the ideological upper hand. The questions posed in this article are, first, whethe...

The successful performance of the Danish economy in the 1990s has encouraged scholars to talk about a . This article investigates why Danish governments have been able to govern the economy so successfully in the 1990s. It argues that two factors have been important. First, the bargaining position of minority governments has been strengthened. Toda...

Abstract Governments,of today are caught,in a difficult dilemma,between,the new political economy,and the new politics of the welfare state. It is argued that two types of factors matter for the way governments respond to this dilemma, namely economics and institutions. This paper argues that, besides economics and institutions, politics, in the se...