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Issue salience, issue ownership, and issue-based vote choice
Abstract
According to the issue ownership theory of voting, voters identify the most credible party proponent of a particular issue and cast their ballots for that issue owner. Despite the centrality of this voter-level mechanism to ownership theories of party behavior, it has seldom been examined in the literature. We explore this model and offer a refinement to its current understanding and operationalization. Returning to the roots of ownership theory, we argue that the effect of issue ownership on vote choice is conditioned by the perceived salience of the issue in question. Through individual-level analyses of vote choice in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, we demonstrate that issue ownership affects the voting decisions of only those individuals who think that the issue is salient.
... The issues shaping an election campaign may determine election victory or defeat. Due to increasing dealignment (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2002) in recent decades, the influences of voters' party identifications as long-term factor affecting voting behavior have weakened tremendously (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008), while those of short-term factors, such as issues and candidates (Campbell et al., 1960), have increased (Karlsen & Aardal, 2016). This highlights the importance of political actors carefully deciding which issues to incorporate into their campaigns. ...
... Voters in multiparty systems often trust different parties to solve the same problems (Karlsen & Aardal, 2016). This provides room for campaign maneuvers: parties can try to occupy new or previously ignored issues (issue entrepreneurship ;Baumann et al., 2021) or "steal" issues from each other through reframing (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008). Research has shown that parties can enhance their issue ownership by engaging in communication regarding particular issues (Dahlberg & Martinsson, 2015), particularly in the short term, which is highly relevant to election campaigns (Sandberg, 2022). ...
... There are two main research directions regarding issue ownership: Research on voting behavior focuses on the criteria underpinning voters' decision-making, showing that issue ownership significantly influences individuals' voting decisions (Walgrave et al., 2015), including in Norway (Karlsen & Aardal, 2016). Research on the supply side-which our study aligned with-focuses on the issues addressed in parties' manifestos or campaign materials (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Walgrave et al., 2015). Studies have repeatedly, widely, and consistently shown that the issues parties address in their campaigns reflect their issue ownership (e.g., Budge & Farlie, 1983;Green-Pedersen, 2020), including on social media (Haßler et al., 2021;Plescia et al., 2020;Sandberg, 2022). ...
Citizens’ well-informed decision making requires information on diverse policy issues which they, among others, can find on political parties’ social media accounts. However, as strategic actors, parties carefully weigh up which issues to highlight and which to neglect rather than addressing the full range of issues in their campaigns. Taking Norway as an example, we investigate the hitherto neglected question which issue diversity parties provide on their social media accounts and which factors systematically influence it. We answer it by means of a standardized content analysis of the official Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of ten parties and their party leaders during the 2021 national election campaign. Our analyses indicate that political factors – issue-related campaign strategies and party characteristics (governing/opposition parties, mainstream/challenger parties) exert a more systematic influence on parties’ issue diversity than characteristics of the social media platforms. There seem to be interaction effects between some of these factors that should be examined more closely in future research.
... This choice procedure is connected to the issue-ownership theory, according to which parties and candidates seek to mobilize voters by emphasizing issues on which they have a reputation and competence. Voters, in turn, tend to reward candidates or parties that are regarded as owners of those issues that are key to them (BÉLANGER and MEGUID, 2008;KIOUSIS, STRÖMBACK and MCDEVITT, 2015). ...
... Amid this discussion, Bélanger and Meguid (2008) ...
... According to previous studies on issue ownership (BÉLANGER and MEGUID, 2008), voters' opinions on the relevance of issues and the candidate who has the most competence and reputation to deal with each of them should be considered as independent variables. Following previous studies (BÉLANGER and MEGUID, 2008;KIOUSIS, STRÖMBACK, and MCDEVITT, 2015), the first independent variable is issue salience and it derives from the following question: 'considering a score from 0 to 10, where 0 is not important and 10 is very important, how important do you consider it that the next president of Brazil is prepared to take care of the environment?' ...
... Greater concentration of legislative specialization might bring parties either short-term or longterm benefits. In the short term, showing policy preferences in highly salient policy jurisdictions might help parties gain support, especially electoral advantages during campaigns (Rabinowitz et al., 1982;Budge and Farlie, 1983;Edwards et al., 1995;Fournier et al., 2003;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008;Walgrave et al., 2012;Klüver and Sagarzazu, 2016;Schröder and Stecker, 2018). Some studies report that issue voting is gaining increasing importance when explaining citizens' voting decisions (Lefevere et al., 2015;Bos et al., 2016). 2 Further research is needed to determine to what extent greater concentration of legislative specialization helps parties achieve greater electoral support by targeting highly salient issues. ...
... Specifically, parties could seek to increase support from focusing on highly salient policy jurisdictions in congress that voters consider to be the most important areas for enhancing their welfare. In fact, previous studies find that issue saliency can have a relevant effect on voting behaviour (Rabinowitz et al., 1982;Budge and Farlie, 1983;Edwards et al., 1995;Fournier et al., 2003;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008;Walgrave et al., 2012;Lazarus, 2013;Klüver and Sagarzazu, 2016). ...
... The selection of these strategies can produce important effects on the types of linkages parties hold with voters. Previous studies already report that in relatively more fragmented party systems, parties own fewer issues (usually at most one or two issues) than in two-party systems, and most of the policy issues are not owned by any party (Petrocik, 1996;Walgrave and De Swert, 2007;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). My study sheds light on the causal mechanisms that could explain why this occurs. ...
This article explains why there is important variation in the degree of concentration of legislative specialization across legislative parties. Greater concentration of legislative specialization leads parties to concentrate their legislative efforts on a smaller set of policy jurisdictions. Through enhancing their concentration of legislative specialization in certain policy areas, parties might more clearly signal their policy concerns and interests to voters. This study argues and shows that party size alters the concentration of legislative specialization. In particular, I find that a U-shaped curve defines the relationship between party size and the degree of concentration of legislative specialization: niche parties and the largest parties choose higher levels of concentration of legislative specialization.
... We know that parties improve their electoral results by emphasising the issues they 'own' (Dennison, 2019: 441) and that issue ownership can be electorally advantageous, especially when the issue is considered important at election time (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). Consistent literature also argued that Eurosceptic voters tend to defect from mainstream to far-right parties (Hobolt and Tilley, 2016), especially when mainstream parties advocate similar positions to each other and are further away from the positions of the far right (Spoon and Klüver, 2019). ...
... Consequently, the contemporary structure of political conflicts is seemingly grounded in issue competition, with parties drawing attention to the conflicts on which they expect to receive more votes (Green-Pedersen, 2007). Indeed, political actors tend to mobilise voters by prioritising the issues they own, and shelving those issues that could provide electoral advantages for their opponents (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). ...
In the past two decades, radical right parties gained ground, becoming relevant political actors in several European countries. This article presents an intriguing study on their voting preferences in Western Europe. It analyses whether and to what extent the effect of the distance between individual and party positions on the European Union, immigration and the Left–Right positioning has changed over time (between 2009 and 2019). This is examined by combining data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the European Election Studies. The results suggest that the distance between Left–Right self-positioning and party position has become more important in explaining voting for radical right parties over time.
... Parties mobilise voters by competing for their votes through taking different positions on electorally relevant issues and assigning various levels of salience to these issues through a process of selective issue emphasis (Bélanger and Bonnie 2008;Budge and Farlie 1983). The combination of the positions taken, and the issues focused on by parties, create their public image. ...
... Parties choose to dismiss certain conflicts, which could potentially jeopardise their electoral stability or, vice versa, they assign salience to conflicts that could constitute an electoral asset. Political actors tend to mobilise voters by prioritising the issue they own, and shelving those issues that could provide electoral advantages for their opponents (Bélanger 2003;Bélanger and Bonnie 2008). So, for example, by emphasising EU issues, parties have the ability to alter the systemic salience of European integration in the domestic agenda and transform it into a dimension of political contestation (Hooghe and Marks 2009;Hutter and Grande 2014). ...
In the member states of the European Union (EU), there are increasing signs of waning EU support, particularly in the form of anti-EU sentiment and voting. Yet, the salient role of pro-EU voting has not been side-lined entirely. Using a combination of data from EES and CHES that estimates the positional distance between voters and parties on the EU, the results suggest that voters are significantly mobilised on support for the EU. This is congruent to recent evidence that has shown that voters have rewarded parties with more polarised stances on the EU and, contrary to Eurosceptic party mobilisation, those parties with a more extreme pro-EU stance. Here, the more vocal a Europhile party, the more likely that citizens will vote for that party given their positional closeness to the EU. The findings in this article suggest the (re-) emergence of an EU dimension with mobilising effects on parties and voters and serious consequences for the dynamics of party competition.
... Finally, we consulted 100 students (M age = 21.8, 60.9% female) about the importance of these six issues (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008; 1 = not care very much, 7 = care very much). The results indicated a sequential decrease in perceived importance for ...
... Participants were then asked to answer the relevant manipulation questions about message framing (as in Study 1a) and issue salience (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008; 1= not care very much, 7 = care very much). The results showed that the activism message framing and issue salience were successfully manipulated (see Table 4). ...
Brand activism is a widespread phenomenon, yet strategies for leveraging activism messages to yield positive consumer responses and enhance brand equity are not well understood. This study investigated the effects and mechanisms of activism message framing (hope vs. frustration) from the perspectives of message and inspiration. The results of five experimental studies revealed that (hope‐framed vs. frustration‐framed) activism messages can inspire consumers and enhance their purchase intentions towards related brands. The stimulation of growth mindsets among consumers amplifies the positive effects of activism message framing, while the salience of activism issues can reverse the negative reactions caused by frustrating messages and consumers' fixed mindsets. These insights not only contribute to existing brand activism literature by explaining the psychological mechanisms and influential elements of activism message framing effects, but also provide valuable guidance to marketers in developing brand activism strategies and effectively communicating relevant information.
... There is also a vast literature on the other question, the determinants of the vote choice or vote for the different options. For example, the theory that voters cast their ballots to the most credible party proponent of a particular issue is refined by Bélanger & Meguid (2008). Other related topics in the context of multiparty systems have also been studied. ...
... Thus, they may include, as well as the questions on the participation on the election and which candidate or list they will vote or voted for (depending on being a pre-or a post-electoral survey), other questions reflecting the values of some variables related to the first ones. Studies based on these surveys are countless; just a few examples are Bélanger and Meguid (2008), Gelman et al. (2010), Geys et al. (2022), and Maldonado & Hernandez (2020). But the electoral surveys suffer from some problems (Barber & Holbein, 2022;Healy et al., 2016;Stocké & Stark, 2007;Wiese & Jong-A-Pin, 2017). ...
The problem of finding the factors influencing voting behavior is of crucial interest in political science and is frequently analyzed in books and articles. But there are not so many studies whose supporting information comes from official registers. This work uses official vote records in Spain matched to other files containing the values of some determinants of voting behavior at a previously unexplored level of disaggregation.
The statistical relationships among the participation, the vote for parties and some socio-economic variables are analyzed by means of Gaussian Bayesian Networks. These networks, developed by the machine learning community, are built from data including only the dependencies among the variables needed to explain the data by maximizing the likelihood of the underlying probabilistic Gaussian model. The results are simple, sparse, and non-redundant graph representations encoding the complex structure of the data. The generated structure of dependencies confirms many previously studied influences, but it can also discover unreported ones such as the proportion of foreign population on all vote variables.
... When climate change becomes salient, parties with positive environmental reputations attract the voters' attention. Voters routinely use heuristics, such as issue ownership, as shortcut ways to decide where to take their concern about political issues (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Petrocik, 1996). When the perceived salience of climate risks increase, voters may simply vote for issue owners with pro-climate reputations, for instance the paradigmatically pro-environmental green parties. 1 Whereas parties' issue ownership can assist voters in their choice of party list, other heuristics are needed to discriminate among election candidates. ...
... For example, left-wing parties are traditionally more likely to focus on issues of redistribution or the environment, while right-wing or more conservative parties place more emphasis on economic liberalism. Bélanger and Meguid (2008) looked specifically at how the importance (or "issue salience") attached to different issues by the parties is likely to determine voting behaviour. Indeed, voters are able to position parties ideologically, and make their voting choices, based on their perceptions of the issues that are traditionally most salient or important to parties. ...
p>Research on data-driven campaigning has mostly focused on the strategies of central campaign teams. However, there is a lack of evidence explaining how parties and supporters use data-driven campaigning techniques to organise their social media campaigning. Do user engagement metrics influence the choice of campaign themes by encouraging political parties to concentrate their communication on issues that are most liked, commented on, and shared? Our study focuses on the use of Facebook by French political parties and their supporters during the 2022 presidential election campaign. We conducted a supervised content analysis based on machine learning to examine their Facebook posts (n = 17,060). We also conducted interviews with 26 page managers. Our results show that political parties did not address the political issues that generated the most user engagement, in particular because the engagement of followers is more likely to be stimulated by divisive issues. The parties' electoral communication is always organised at the intersection between their traditional issues, those that most distinguish them in the political landscape, and some divisive issues that emerged during the campaign. Finally, we argue that campaign strategies are not fundamentally changed by social media metrics. Rather, they differ significantly according to the status of the parties (governing VS opposition parties), which influences the way they manage their Facebook pages during the presidential campaign.</p
... In both the proximity and directional models, voters' ideological positions are a key component in determining the voter utility function (Adams et al., 2005;Enelow & Hinich, 1984;Rabinowitz & Macdonald, 1989). Recent studies have expanded the concept of issue voting, accounting for factors such as valance (Adams & Merrill, 2009;Ansolabehere & Snyder, 2000;Stone, 2017), issue salience (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Mauerer et al., 2015;Moniz & Wlezien, 2020), and party leader performance (Garzia, 2013). ...
What happens when voters' policy preferences point them to one party and their affective attachments to another? This paper identifies and defines a new type of cross-pressured voters, ones who face cross-pressures between their ideological and affective preferences. After surveying their scope and distribution, I examine the individual and contextual characteristics associated with being cross-pressured. Drawing on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I find that cross-pressured voters' share of the electorate is greater in countries with a greater fragmentation of the party system. Also, voters who report higher rates of individual-level affective and ideological polarization have higher chances of experiencing cross-pressures. Electorally, descriptive statistics show that cross-pressured voters tend to prioritize affective over ideological considerations. This tendency may have considerable consequences for electoral competition and representation.
... To start, issue voting is a relevant way by which agenda-setting can be relevant in political terms. We know that some people tend to cast their vote for the party they believe will best deal with/own the issues that they find to be important (Petrocik, 1996;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008; see also Weaver, 1991). There are hints that positions on issues matter considerably in terms of voting behavior, being more important today than in the past (e.g., Schulman and Pomper, 1975;Ansolabehere, Rodder and Snyder, 2008;Hellwig, 2014). ...
... Evidence suggests that prosocial action is driven by what is currently top of mind, which is often stimulated by environmental cues 13,14 . For instance, the death of George Floyd in May 2020 led to a signi cant increase in online searches and posts related to Black Lives Matter the following month. ...
For-profit companies are increasingly advocating for controversial social causes (e.g., climate change, reproductive healthcare), but how this affects the general public’s support for these issues is unclear. Four experiments (n = 1,141) demonstrated that brand activism can increase or decrease monetary support for endorsed nonprofits, depending on the strength of individuals’ self-brand connection (SBC)—the extent to which a brand is integrated into the consumer’s self-concept. When SBC is high, brand activism (vs. no activism) enhances the salience of endorsed causes, resulting in increased support. Conversely, when SBC is low, brand activism (vs. no activism) reduces cause salience, resulting in decreased support. Additionally, brand activism’s effects diminish among individuals who strongly oppose the endorsed cause and the effects also weaken over time. These findings highlight the influence that for-profit companies can exert on public monetary support for sociopolitical issues and offer guidance for organizations aiming to leverage this influence effectively.
... What links this literature to our paper is the idea of cohesion and its role for the benefits of agents. Cohesion contributes to a political agent's issue ownership, i.e., how competent they are perceived to be in tackling specific issues (Petrocik, 1996;Van der Brug, 2004;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). In some sense, political agents in our model have a "brand value" to protect (Snyder Jr and Ting, 2002). ...
Agents with different ideologies often form alliances to achieve their goals. Paradoxically, ideologically similar agents are often opponents. In this paper, ideologically heterogeneous agents choose the ideological composition of their neighborhood, their tolerance, and invest into connections. The resulting weighted network describes allies, opponents, and strengths. Disputes with opponents determine benefits, which increase in an agent's strength and cohesion. Cohesive agents have fewer mutual allies with opponents. In equilibrium, the network is segregated when cohesion is effective enough and some agents tolerate ideologically distant types to oppose closer ones. Subsidizing connections dampens polarization in societies on the verge of segregation.
... The junior partner's selective emphasis on policy topics as well as the overlooking of some policy agendas are legitimatized through the party's "issue associations," the party's established reputation of policy competence in particular fields (Budge 2015, 771). Cultivated through long-term attention to specific policy areas that are targeted primarily to appease the party's core supporters (Bélanger and Meguid 2008), an established issue association allows smaller parties to concentrate their electoral and political resources on a limited number of issues. Such linkage to specific policy fields works to the small party's advantage in two ways. ...
This study examines the Kōmeitō's strategies for policy influence within the coalition framework with its coalition partner, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) during the period of Second Abe Administration (2012–2020). As a junior coalition partner, Kōmeitō faces unity–distinctiveness dilemma, where it must accommodate policy demands of the senior partner while appeasing its core support base, Sōka Gakkai. This article argues that the junior partner's strategies for policy influence are determined by two factors: overlap/distinctiveness of policy inclinations and the positive/negative issue associations measured by the level of involvement in decision-making, i.e. portfolio allocation. Three cases are analyzed to elucidate the diversity of Kōmeitō's policy influence, the strategies of which range from corrective moderation, to nudging, to threats, all utilized to maintain a balance between reinforcing “distinctiveness” from the senior partner and consolidating coalition coherence to sustain competence within the coalition framework.
... There are two types of issue ownership: competence and associative. Competence issue ownership asserts that when an individual views the successful track record of a political party on an issue, they then associate this party with that issue (Belanger and Meguid 2008). Associative issue ownership, however, suggests that individuals can sporadically associate political parties with issues they assume these parties align with in their minds (Walgrave, Lefevere, and Nuytemans 2009). ...
This article explores how Scottish political parties frame their owned issues on social media to persuade voters during the run-up to elections. Through a qualitative analysis of 150 Twitter and Facebook posts from five major Scottish parties, the study reveals that parties employ threat and victim framing to bolster their vote share. Opposition parties predominantly portray the Scottish National Party (SNP) as a threat, while all parties frame the electorate as victims. The extent and focus of these frames vary based on parties' parliamentary strength and government/opposition status. The SNP, holding a strong governing position, focuses on advancing its independence agenda, while other parties critique the SNP and then promote their own priorities. This article contributes to framing theory by highlighting the nuanced relationship between issue ownership, threat, and victim frames in shaping electoral outcomes. The findings underscore the strategic use of social media by parties to influence voter perceptions and decisions.
... Voters' opposition to wind energy expansion thus leads them to favor parties less inclined to pursue further expansion (Belanger and Meguid, 2008;Wagner and Meyer, 2014). This perception may result in a milder electoral backlash against parties that have initiated wind energy projects but are perceived as less supportive of ongoing expansion. ...
... Ce faisant, la perception qu'aurait l'électorat envers un parti face à un enjeu donné pourrait les influencer, les amenant ainsi à voter non seulement pour le parti qu'ils pensent le plus crédible, mais aussi selon la saillance qu'ils ou elles accordent à ce même enjeu (Bélanger et Meguid, 2008). L'affiliation partisane influence ainsi fortement et positivement le choix de l'électeur-trice pour chacun des partis, surtout si le parti soutenu est reconnu comme le plus compétent (Bélanger et Meguid, 2005). ...
Résumé
Comme l'illustrent Bélanger et Nadeau (2009), l'axe identitaire traditionnel au Québec apparait de moins en moins prédominant sur la scène politique québécoise. Cette situation impose l'adoption d'une stratégie différente de la part des divers partis dits souverainistes. Comment se sont articulées ces tentatives de repositionnement au sein du Bloc québécois? Afin d'explorer cette question, nous avons amassé plus de 7500 communiqués de presse diffusés par le parti entre 2002 et 2021. À l'aide de méthodes d'analyse automatisées et une approche de Latent Semantic Scaling développée par Watanabe (2020), nous illustrons et discutons de la prédominance de l'enjeu souverainiste à travers cette période, ainsi que le ton du parti quant à cet enjeu. Les résultats indiquent que les élections et les résultats de celles-ci jouent un rôle crucial dans la stratégie communicationnelle du Bloc québécois à l’égard de la souveraineté. De façon plus générale, nous observons certaines fluctuations importantes de l'attention accordée à cet enjeu et des variations importantes quant au cadrage de cet enjeu autour des élections. Cette note de recherche apporte un éclairage méthodologique nouveau quant aux théories entourant le réalignement politique en cours au Québec et la saillance qu'occupe le clivage de la souveraineté.
... Based on a rich literature on issue salience and vote choice, we may expect particularly those citizens who find the merger issue important to base their vote choice on the merger issue (H2). (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Dennison, 2019, p. 441;Walgrave et al., 2020). Hence, we can formulate the following three hypotheses ( Fig. 1): ...
... The more salient an issue is among the population, the more necessary it is for parties to address it in their political agenda-especially when problems become too severe to further ignore them (Kristensen et al., 2022). Even though the electorate is not a homogeneous group, parties electorally benefit when they are seen as competent in offering solutions for an issue (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008). In their election rhetoric, parties focus on issues that are generally salient in the population and set priorities according to their own ideological profile (Budge, 2015, p. 767). ...
Germany is in a time of social upheaval. When the new ‘Traffic-Light’ coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP under the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz came to power, an era ended. The incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had been Chancellor for sixteen years, had decided not to stand for another term. The race for the chancellorship was on. While Merkel had long been accused of mainly avoiding substantive policy debates in Germany, the expectation of the 2021 federal election campaign was that it would be a fireworks display of substantive discussion. But that was only partly the case; instead the election was mainly about the candidates for Chancellor and their performance in the election campaign. Nevertheless, it was also crucial in political debates how Germany would position itself in terms of policy reforms after the Merkel era. This thematic introduction provides an insight into the role of popular issue salience in 2021 German national election and how it compared to the 2017 federal election year. It also outlines, based on a Twitter data analysis, which content-related priorities the German parties set in their digital campaigns during the federal election campaign.
... This is because citizens tend to pay closer attention to issues they prioritize and hence have more knowledge about and accessible attitudes of these particular issues (Krosnick et al., 2005;Luskin, 1990;Sears et al., 1980;Lavine et al., 1996). In other words, the salience of a political issue shapes citizens support for specific political institutions including the president (Edwards III et al., 1995) or a political party (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Fournier et al., 2003;Singer, 2011). However, the key role of issue salience has rarely been considered for political trust. ...
Political trust is a critical facet of the democratic legitimacy of political institutions. A vast body of research convincingly demonstrates that political trust is responsive to actual political performance, where citizens trust their government if it performs well and vice versa. However, if political trust is based on citizens’ evaluations of government performance, this raises the question what type of performance citizens take into consideration. This research note demonstrates that citizens’ bases of political trust vary as they emphasize different policy issues, and that perceived issue salience can explain this variation. Using a combination of longitudinal cross-sectional data from EU member states and novel multi-level Dutch data, it models both collective and personal issue salience as key conditions for performance-based political trust. In doing so, this research note generates new insights into the formation of political trust.
... In the former, parties seek support by presenting issue positions to an electorate with a specified distribution of policy views (positions) along the relevant dimensions. In the latter, parties seek to alter the salience of issues to the electorate by setting 'the terms of the debate' in national election campaigns, emphasizing issue areas they see as electorally advantageous while downplaying other issue areas (Belanger & Meguid, 2008;Petrocik, 1996). We build on a mathematical simulation approach that has been extensively used to study parties' positional strategies (e.g., Adams et al., 2005) but modify this approach to project the expected effects of national shifts in voters' issue attention. ...
Extensive research applies counterfactual simulation methodology to study parties’ optimal policy positions in multiparty elections. In recent years, this methodology has been extended to the study of variation in issue salience. We employ this method to estimate the electoral effects of changes in the salience of specific positional issue dimensions on parties’ success. Applied to British Election Study survey data from 2017 and 2019, we find that plausible issue salience changes could have shifted the parties’ projected vote shares by several percentage points. Our approach implies that the governing Conservative Party had electoral incentives to downplay positional issues, to magnify the relative effects of its non‐policy advantage due to perceived competence and performance, among other factors. Labour would also have benefitted from reduced salience of Left‐Right ideology. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats had strong electoral incentives to emphasize their moderate Left‐Right position.
... Early scholars observed that political parties tend to emphasize different issues in electoral campaigns, rather than offering different positions on similar issues (Budge and Farlie 1983;Petrocik 1996;Petrocik, Benoit, and Hansen 2003). Public opinion surveys find a consistent and stable set of issues that the public trusts one party to handle over the other, known as issue ownership (Banda 2019;Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Walgrave, Tresch, and Lefevere 2015). At the same time, political parties prioritize the same issues when in government (Egan 2013;Green and Jennings 2017). ...
This paper examines the relationship between gender, partisanship, and authorship of partisan think tank reports. Scholars often observe a gendered dimension to issues, where women are associated with issues related to child-rearing, education, and social welfare while men are associated with issues related to violent state action, such as foreign policy and crime. However, these studies are often limited by the confounding variable of partisanship, where political parties tend to prioritize certain issues. We solve these problems by analyzing the policy content and authors of partisan think tank reports in the United States. We introduce a dataset of 16,229 authors of 10,386 reports from partisan think tanks in the U.S., coded for their policy content using the Comparative Agendas Project subtopic coding system. We find that while women elites tend to prioritize issues often associated with women in both parties, prioritization of issues by sex is more complicated.
Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of two studies on the connection between party behaviour and perceptions of issue ownership, with an empirical focus on issue competence reputations of parties. In Study 1, we combine party‐level information about issue attention, positions and performance with data on competence perceptions from a wide range of national election studies. Study 2 is a pre‐registered conjoint experiment designed to examine the causal link between party behaviour and perceived competence. Our results point to significant effects for all three hypothesised sources of competence reputations. Moving beyond previous work that has argued that competence reputations are mostly stable over time, after accounting for the variation due to parties' popularity, our results show that they fluctuate in the short term and that parties have some level of control over how they are perceived.
Election pledges are a key topic in democracies, as well as in both public and scientific debates. They constitute an integral part of the representative relationship between political parties and citizens. There is kind of a “natural expectation” that electoral promises are meant to be kept. Especially before elections, the public and media show a high interest in parties’ election pledges and their performance in fulfilling or breaking their promises.
Is there such a thing as retrospective pledge voting (RPV)? Thus, are government parties rewarded for pledge fulfilment? And do they have to fear electoral punishments if they fail to deliver on their election pledges? While there isn’t ample evidence supporting a reward effect, there is strong evidence of a punishment effect. This happened not only to the German liberal party FDP, that was sure of victory, but experienced a tremendous electoral loss in 2013 after having failed to keep many of its pledges.
Objective
This study aims to test whether the American public is polarized and/or parallel in its assessments of the most important problem.
Methods
We use compositional time series models and new data on public opinion to test for differences between subgroups.
Results
We find inconsistent evidence of polarization for some issue areas but not others and remarkably robust evidence of parallel reactions across subgroups to economic and international shocks.
Conclusion
The U.S. public is remarkably consistent in terms of its assessments of the most important problem and in how subgroups shift their perceptions of issue importance in reaction to changing circumstances.
Niche parties have gained substantial political ground in many liberal democracies. While party behaviour scholars have examined which strategies these parties can use to increase their electoral success, less is known about the individual-level determinants of support for niche parties. In this study, I investigate why voters support niche parties. Building on previous research, I hypothesise that niche voting can be driven both by ideological considerations and by voter discontent. Analyses on 61 elections in 28 countries show that voters support niche parties mostly because of policy considerations – such as their ideological position and core issues – and less because of dissatisfaction with mainstream parties. These results show that a niche vote is in the first place a policy-driven vote and not a sign of protest with mainstream politics, and this finding holds important implications for our understanding of electoral results.
In this article we provide a novel framework and empirical test of the strategic trade-offs of political parties' programmatic appeals. In a pluralized issue space, political positions have the potential to create severe strategic trade-offs for political parties, with gains among one group of voters offset by losses among another. Existing research assumes that these trade-offs are especially prominent for Social Democratic parties, but does not directly test whether different sub-electorates indeed respond differently to particular programmatic appeals. To identify trade-offs for Social Democratic parties, we ran con-joint experiments in 6 Western European countries. Respondents could choose between programs that varied on a number of issue dimensions. We find that trade-offs among potential social democratic voters are less pronounced than expected in the literature, especially with regard to economic policies. Yet, our findings also establish two underrated challenges for Social Democrats: the existence of stronger trade-offs between age groups, and the potential longer-term consequences of salience trade-offs.
Extensive media coverage of immigration, that is, media salience, has been thought to heighten anti‐immigrant attitudes among native‐born citizens by creating an information environment that portrays immigration as society's greatest problem. However, past empirical findings on the relationship between media salience and anti‐immigrant attitudes have been mixed. Some studies have observed that media salience increases hostility towards immigrants, while others have found it has no significant influence. This study investigates the underlying reasons for these inconsistent findings and demonstrates the need to revisit the meaning of issue importance. It employs the concept of public issue salience, the perception that immigration is the most important problem or concern about immigration, to find evidence. It argues that when the immigrant issue is a pivotal point of political competition, the immigration issue signals conflicts, connoting negativity so public issue salience and anti‐immigrant attitudes are closely related. On the other hand, in an environment where political elites reach a consensus, the immigration issue remains neutral so that they can be disentangled. The scope of media salience changes accordingly as well. This study chooses the United Kingdom and Germany for comparative research due to their similarities in immigration histories and the success of far‐right parties as well as differences in their major political parties' reactions to the issue. I match individual‐level longitudinal survey data to media article data and find clear country differences. In the United Kingdom, where political parties are polarized over the issue, public issue salience and anti‐immigrant attitudes are closely related so that media salience heightens them. In Germany, where political elites across different ideologies hold welcoming stances, their relationship is moderate. Media salience merely increases the perceived importance and does not increase anti‐immigrant attitudes. Contributions and implications are discussed with respect to political elites' role.
Political polarization has been a growing concern in Japan, particularly in recent years with the upsurge of nationalism and populism. However, little research has examined how it relates to the political behavior of the Japanese people. Using data from the 2005–2019 Japanese Electoral Studies (JES), this study shows that political polarization manifests itself in different ways depending on the specific policy domains that citizens perceive as divergent. Specifically, I discover that people who perceive higher levels of policy divergence between left- and right-wing parties on domestic and international policies are more likely to vote and participate in politics through publicly accessible networks, while there appears to be no evidence showing that perceiving high levels of policy divergence on economic issues has a meaningful effect on any type of political participation. Implications of these findings as well as directions for future research are discussed.
While the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the lives of many people worldwide, it is debated whether it led to the defeat of incumbent Donald Trump in the 2020 American presidential election. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic had a significantly negative impact on Trump’s support due to his conflicting and populist rhetoric, which culminated in contradictory behavior at a time when Americans sought a consistent leader to “rally round the flag.” We use both waves of the ANES 2020 Survey to determine what support for Trump would have looked like if the COVID-19 pandemic had lower influence in citizens’ electoral decision-making compared to real world conditions using regressions and a counterfactual strategy. Our findings suggest that Trump’s electoral defeat depended on multiple factors, with aggregate-level analyzes suggesting that Trump would have received more support had the management of the health crisis mattered less in voting decisions.
A blooming research agenda has begun examining the influence of party competition dynamics on politician social media behaviour. Most studies focus on the US context, generally finding little evidence that party competition dynamics influence which policy issues politicians attend to on these platforms. Instead, I turn to the Danish context and show how party competition dynamics exert a substantial influence on politicians' attention to issues in their tweets. First, I map the level of politician issue attention on Twitter across several years outside election campaigns. Second, I show that party issue ownership and the status of a party as a government or opposition party strongly influence politicians' attention to issues on the platform. Third, I provide novel insights into how the interplay between party issue ownership and internal party organisation influences politician issue attention on Twitter. The findings indicate that the tweets posted by politicians are an integral aspect of contemporary party competition.
Despite the increased importance of environmental issues across Europe, there was considerable regional variation in the successes of green parties during the 2019 Belgian federal elections. While the green party in Wallonia (Ecolo) performed electorally well, the green party in Flanders (Groen) was not able to reach a similar success. In the current study, we investigate to what extent two classic voting models (the spatial model and the issue salience model) can explain the regional difference in the success of the green parties in the 2019 federal elections in Belgium. Our analyses, relying on data from the 2019 EOS RepResent post-election survey, show that voters who considered the green issue salient and who were in favour of environmental protection supported green parties, in particular when they also associated green issue ownership with green parties. This pattern holds in both Flanders and Wallonia, though Ecolo seemed more successful in attracting these voters than Groen did. This may at least partly explain the regional difference in the success of the green parties. In addition, the green issue was more salient in Wallonia than in Flanders.
This research aims at understanding the potencial effects exerted by the introduction of a new subject in the political agenda - the crisis - over the dynamics of competition of political parties, as this competition embodies the interactional dimension of party systems, allowing simultaneously to observe the stategically assumed positions of each party and its systemic effects.
The empirical analysis was designed to inquire on the way in wich the parliamentary parties appeopeiated the new topic of the agenda. The observation was thus segmented as follows: i) individual positions taken by the parliamentary parties on the causes of crisis; ii) individually submitted proposals for a solution; iii) the cooperation and competition relations wich they considered to be the most suitable to develop in the exceptional situation of crisis.
It was verified that the main line of cleavage of the Portuguese party system remained unchanged, that is, the government dispute between PS and PSD, and no new lines of cleavage emerged. The exogenous "crisis" factor was absorved, individually, by each party of the system, without significant changes in its competition strategy.
The polarization of positions, even when anchored in the normative assessment of the measures, was sufficiently clear to maintain the decidability of the offer. This fact denotes the parties' ability to adapt to the new context, despite the exceptionality of the subject, and they have developed the appropriation strategies that they considered to be the most adequante to their objectives.
This study assesses whether the Democratic Party holds issue ownership over science in the United States. We analyze data from a national survey that asked 1041 adults questions specifically designed to measure perceptions of science ownership. While the results suggest that the Democratic Party does hold a significant advantage in ownership of science in an abstract sense, perceptions of ownership of specific types of science vary across the two parties. Those who identify as Independents drive much of the aggregate perceptions of ownership of science, whereas partisans' perceptions of issue ownership of science are mostly driven by in-party favoritism. Post hoc analyses suggest that news media use contributes to perceptions of science ownership and reinforces affinity-party preference.
Scholars agree that digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) pose a political challenge. In this article, we study empirically how different actors in the German political system define AI as a policy problem. We use an original data set of 6421 statements by representatives of political parties, interest groups, scientific experts, and public officials in parliamentary debates, government consultations, and quality newspapers. Through Discourse Network Analysis and quantitative text analyses we show that most actors define AI as technology (innovation) policy and link it to government operations, international cooperation, and macroeconomics. Although they are present, consumer protection, labor, and education seem to be less important policy issues concerning AI. The results imply that the capacity of the national government to reduce problem definition uncertainty and to steer the political agenda is difficult and that most actors focus on technological innovation rather than civil rights‐related aspects.
How much of a role did the COVID-19 pandemic play in determining the 2020 General Election outcome? Just as the state of the economy influences candidate vote choice, we argue that concerns over personal and public health can affect candidate vote choice in the presidential contest. We argue that voters who are concerned about becoming ill will be more likely to alter their vote choice to better protect themselves from the disease, and that those who value public health over the economy will be less likely to support the reelection of an incumbent whose duties include overseeing the response to the pandemic. Using survey data from the 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES), we find that irrespective of partisan ties, voters adjust their candidate preferences when taking into consideration their health. Health concerns were important predictors of candidate vote choice in the 2020 presidential election.
Previous research on the voting behavior of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) in Europe showed that LGB people favor left-wing or progressive parties (Turnbull-Dugarte 2020; Hunklinger 2021; Wurthmann 2023). Furthermore, Turnbull-Dugarte (2021) showed that LGB voters are, possibly due to their socialization, supportive of social liberalism and progressive issues. As we know from classic voting theory, there are different explanations for voting behavior, e.g. issue orientation, candidate and party preferences. This paper explores why LGB persons vote for left-wing parties in Austria. We use a sample among LGB persons conducted upfront the 2019 national elections in Austria. We test to what extent issue and candidate orientations (including LGB issues) as well as group identity affect LGB persons' intended voting behavior for left-wing parties in Austria. Our results show that instead of group-specific issue orientations, a general issue orientation, and socio-cultural attitudes are crucial for LGB persons to vote for left-wing parties.
Enflasyonist risk süreçlerinin seçmen davranışında yaptığı etkinin temelinde seçmelerin refah paylarını kaybetmesinin sonucu olarak aşınan satın alma güçleri sorunu yatmaktadır. 2013 yılı sonrası gelişmekte olan ülkelerde artan finansal kırılganlık nedeniyle enflasyonist şok dalgaları başlamıştır. 2020 yılında başlayan COVID-19 pandemisi sonrası küresel tedarik zincirlerinin kırılması sonrasında küresel ölçekte de maliyet baskısı tabanlı bir enflasyonist süreç başlamıştır. Bu çalışmanın amacı; Türkiye Cumhuriyetinde 2018 parlamento ve cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimlerinin ardından günümüze dek yapılan seçim anketlerinde ekonomik kriz koşullarında enflasyonist süreçlerin siyasi partilerin oy oranlarına etkilerini tespit etmektir. Araştırma aylık frekansta yapılacak olup, yöntem olarak VAR (Vektör Oto Regresif) metoduna dayalı olarak varyans ayrıştırması, etki-tepki analizi ve tarihsel ayrıştırma metotları seçilmiştir. Elde edilen sonuçlara göre enflasyonist süreç iktidar partilerin oy oranlarında azalma ve muhalefet partilerinin oy oranlarında artışa sebep olabilmektedir. Yani enflasyonist süreç partiler arasında oy geçişkenliğini de etkilemektedir. Bununla birlikte; maliyet enflasyonunun seçmen davranışı üzerindeki etkilerinin, talep enflasyonundan daha yüksek olduğu gözlenmektedir.
The article investigates roll‐call request and its effects on opposition‐voting behavior. It argues that parties use roll‐call votes (RCVs) as a position‐taking instrument to boost public attention for issues they care about. This argument implies that RCVs are requested strategically but opposition behavior should not differ systematically between recorded and nonrecorded votes. Studying all voting activities of the 19th German Bundestag (2017–21), the analysis shows that RCVs are more likely on high‐salience issues, more important motion types, and to some extent opposition motions. Voting conforms to the position‐taking model as opposition parties are less likely to vote with the government on their own motions and more important motion types. However, opposition behavior does not differ systematically between recorded and nonrecorded votes suggesting that parties act consistently across all votes. Thus, RCVs provide valid measures for studying interparty competition in parliament despite their selective sampling properties.
l processo di integrazione europea è sempre più al centro del dibattito pubblico, ai sostenitori dell'UE si contrappongono gli euroscettici e sono inoltre presenti posizioni miste. In che misura l'UE, oltre a rappresentare un tema molto dibattuto, è anche al cuore dei processi di politicizzazione? Nel volume, approfondiamo la questione guardando sia al versante della domanda (cittadini) sia a quello dell'offerta politica (partiti). In particolare, la nostra analisi considera l'enfasi che i partiti pongono sul tema, le posizioni che essi assumono e se la vicinanza di posizioni sull'UE tra elettori e partiti è correlata alle scelte di voto. Attraverso l'uso di una molteplicità di dati, la nostra analisi restituisce chiare evidenze a sostegno della politicizzazione dell'UE, nel tempo diventata una questione più controversa e saliente, così come la trattazione che ne hanno fatto i partiti è risultata più decisa ed enfatica, oltre che polarizzante. L'analisi dei dati elettorali suggerisce che la congruenza di posizioni elettori-partiti sull'UE sia diventata, nel tempo, sempre più importante per spiegare i comportamenti di voto dei cittadini. Questi risultati, che nel volume documentiamo a livello comparato per i paesi dell'UE, trovano un forte riscontro anche nel caso italiano, dove il prima-to dei partiti euroscettici nella politicizzazione dell'UE appare essersi saldato con la mobilitazione a livello elettorale.
Issue importance mediates the impact of public policy issues on electoral decisions. Individuals who consider that an issue is important are more likely to rely on their attitudes toward that issue when evaluating candidates and deciding for whom to vote. The logic behind the link between issue importance and issue voting should translate to a link between issue importance and performance voting. Incumbent performance evaluations regarding an issue should have a stronger impact on the vote choice of individuals who find that issue important. The analysis demonstrates that there is a significant interaction between performance evaluations and issue importance. People concerned about an issue assign more weight to their evaluations of the government's performance on that issue when making up their mind.
The Liberals almost lost their parliamentary majority in June 1997. This article argues that preceptions of the unemployment situation hurt the Liberals and cost them the support of almost three percentage points of votes. We examine the reasons why Canadians did not render a more positive judgement on the job situation despite a decrease of the official unemployment rate in Canada during the Liberal mandate. The results of this study raise a number of questions about voters' behaviour, about the diffusion and penetration of both general and economic information within the electorate, about the criteria with which voters use to judge governments, and on the incentives these governments might have to manufacture political business cycles.
This article uses a regression decomposition approach to explore the meaning of the gaps in electoral support for the federal Liberal party between Ontario, the West and Atlantic Canada, as well as the gap in Reform party support between the West and Ontario in the 1997 federal election. The analysis proceeds in two stages. The first stage involves determining whether the regional vote gaps reflect “true” regional differences or whether they can be explained simply in terms of differences in the sociodemographic makeup of the regions. Having ascertained that the gaps are not spurious, the second stage of the analysis probes the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them. The authors conclude that the gaps are driven not just by differences in political orientations and beliefs from one region to another, but also by more fundamental differences in basic political priorities.RésuméCet article a recours à la régression de décomposition pour expliquer l'écart entre le vote libéral lors des élections fédérales canadiennes de 1997 dans les provinces de l'Ontario, de l'Ouest et de l'Atlantique, de même que l'écart entre le vote pour le Parti réformiste en Ontario et dans les provinces de l'Ouest. Dans un première temps, les auteurs déterminent si les différences dans le vote peuvent s'expliquer par le profil socio-économique des différentes régions. Les données indiquent que ce n'est pas le cas. Dans un deuxième temps, l'analyse porte sur les attitudes qui sous-tendent ces écarts. Il est démontré que l'écart du vote découle non seulement de différences dans les orientations idéologiques, mais aussi, et surtout, de différences dans le poids de ces orientations sur le vote.
This study examines perceptions of party competence in four issue areas: inflation, unemployment, international affairs and Canadian unity. Using Gallup poll data from a 35-year period, the study shows that in three of the four issue areas Canadians clearly distinguish between parties. These distinctions do not merely reflect party popularity and are durable rather than immutable; perceptions change slowly but do respond to government performance. Canadians see the greatest differences between parties with respect to international affairs and Canadian unity; the Liberals enjoy a substantial lead on these two questions. On inflation, perceived competence tends to reflect popularity while on unemployment, Canadians have greater confidence in the New Democratic party. On all issues, the Conservative party image has substantially improved under the Mulroney government.
A large body of literature explains the growing electoral volatility in Western democracies by the decline of “cleavage voting” and the rise of “issue voting” Franklin et al., 1992. Citizens are supposed to become more autonomous and more critical of political elites because they are more educated, more exposed to information and more influenced by post-materialist values Nye et al., 1997; Norris, 1999. They would tend to vote less according to their party identification and their class or religious affiliations, but they would be more responsive to the political supply and the issues at stake. The last French presidential and parliamentary elections offer a good opportunity to explore such trends, with the help of the “2002 French Electoral Panel” survey data. Ten thousand interviews were conducted in three waves, on national samples representative of the French registered voters, before the first round of the presidential election, after the second presidential round and after the parliamentary second round.1
Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason.
Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the
institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional
hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition
quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models
is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political
world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented
in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.
This article investigates patterns in audience reception of 16 news stories that received prominent media coverage in the
summer and fall of 1989. Using a national sample of American adults, it compares education, self-reported rates of media use,
interpersonal communication, and prior levels of general political knowledge as predictors of individual differences in recall
of current news events. Results indicate that respondents' background level of political knowledge is the strongest and most
consistent predictor of current news story recall across a wide range of topics, suggesting that there is indeed a general
audience for news and that this audience is quite sharply stratified by preexisting levels of background knowledge. Thus,
in survey research applications that require estimates of individual differences in the reception of potentially influential
political communications, a measure of general prior knowledge—not a measure of news media use—is likely to be the most effective
indicator. The article further concludes that the tendency of individuals to acquire news and information on a domain- or
topic-specific basis fails to undermine the value of political knowledge as a general measure of propensity for news recall.
This article develops a simultaneous equation model of the voting decision in a form thought to mirror the main lines of cognitive decision-making processes of individual voters. The model goes beyond earlier efforts in two respects. First, it explicitly represents the causal interdependence of voter assessments in the election situation, permitting such estimations as the degree to which correlations between voter issue positions and issue positions ascribed to preferred candidates arise because of projection onto the candidate or persuasion by the candidate. Secondly, the model is truly dynamic, in the sense that it is dependent on longitudinal data for its proper estimation. The utility of the model is certified by the goodness of fit achieved when applied to 1972-76 panel data for a sample of the national electorate.
Common conceptions of the electoral connection often make two assumptions about the behavior of candidates and voters. The first is that candidates focus their campaigns on their records. The second is that voters evaluate candidates on the basis of their campaign messages. This article explores how candidates' backgrounds influence these two components of representation. The main premise is simple: Campaign messages are more effective if they emphasize issues on which candidates have built a record that appears favorable to voters. Consequently, candidates tend to focus on this type of issue when choosing campaign themes. Candidates are less successful in winning favorable evaluations if they stray from their records and make unsubstantiated claims.
Political Choice in Britain uses data from the 1964 to 2001 British election studies (BES), 1992 to 2002 monthly Gallup polls, and numerous other national surveys conducted over the past four decades to test the explanatory power of rival sociological and individual rationality models of electoral turnout and party choice. Analyses endorse a valence politics model that challenges the long-dominant social class model. British voters make their choices by evaluating the performance of parties and party leaders in economic and other important policy areas. Although these evaluations may be largely products of events that occur long before an election campaign officially begins, parties’ national and local campaign activities are also influential. Consistent with the valence politics model, partisan attachments display individual- and aggregate-level dynamics that reflect ongoing judgements about the managerial abilities of parties and their leaders. A general incentives model provides the best explanation of turnout. Calculations of the costs and influence-discounted benefits of voting and sense of civic duty are key variables in this model. Significantly, the decline in turnout in recent elections does not reflect more general negative trends in public attitudes about the political system. Voters judge the performance of British democracy in much the same way as they evaluate its parties and politicians. Support at all levels of the political system is a renewable resource, but one that must be renewed.
Petrocik's theory of issue ownership maintains that candidates use campaigns to strategically emphasize issues on which their parties are perceived as more competent; that, in essence, issue agendas have partisan effects on electoral outcomes. This research reexamines the theory of issue ownership using public opinion data from ten Senate races in 1998. While findings from this research largely support the issue ownership hypothesis, they also point to new insights. In particular, there is evidence that candidate records of innovation and issue attentiveness to opposing party issues can undermine the traditional party basis of the vote. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this paper finds that candidates are able to outflank their opponents on issues typically owned by the opposing party if their personal legislative records warrant it.
Theory: This paper develops and applies an issue ownership theory of voting that emphasizes the role of campaigns in setting the criteria for voters to choose between candidates. It expects candidates to emphasize issues on which they are advantaged and their opponents are less well regarded. It explains the structural factors and party system variables which lead candidates to differentially emphasize issues. It invokes theories of priming and framing to explain the electorate's response. Hypotheses: Issue emphases are specific to candidates; voters support candidates with a party and performance based reputation for greater competence on handling the issues about which the voter is concerned. Aggregate election outcomes and individual votes follow the problem agenda. Method: Content analysis of news reports, open-ended voter reports of important problems, and the vote are analyzed with graphic displays and logistic regression analysis for presidential elections between 1960 and 1992. Results: Candidates do have distinctive patterns of problem emphases in their campaigns; election outcomes do follow the problem concerns of voters; the individual vote is significantly influenced by these problem concerns above and beyond the effects of the standard predictors.
This effort examines the dynamics of the agenda-setting process in presidential campaigns by assessing the conditions that motivate candidates to discuss issues associated with their opponent's party. The article's argument contends that occurrences of issue trespassing are a function of the context in which a campaign is occurring and factors stemming from the campaign process. The hypotheses are tested against data collected from all available campaign advertisements produced by major party candidates competing in the 1976 through 1996 presidential elections. The results of the logit analysis indicate that candidates' decisions to address issues owned by their opponent's party are a function of their competitive standing, their partisanship, the importance of an issue to the electorate, and the tone of their campaign messages.
Much theory and research shows that information about candidates' issue positions is often difficult for members of the public to obtain: candidates typically do not go out of their way to make their positions clear; the media devote little time to covering candidates' stands on the issues; and many voters have little interest or motivation to search out information about the candidates' positions. Despite this, by election day a substantial number of voters are willing to identify the issue positions of the candidates, and these perceived positions are often good predictors of vote choice. In this paper we consider the question of how voters perceive candidates' issue positions given limited information and high information costs. Our model posits that voters use previously acquired information to infer where candidates stand on the issues. In addition, characteristics of the candidates serve as cues that allow voters to make inferences from specific categories of people and politicians. Our analysis of panel data from the 1976 presidential election demonstrates the influence of these cues in the perception of the candidates and the role of the campaign in structuring the cues that voters use.
Methodological problems associated with selection bias and interaction effects have hindered the accumulation of systematic knowledge about the factors that explain cross-national variation in the success of extreme right parties. The author uses a statistical analysis that takes account of these problems to examine the effect of electoral institutions, unemployment, and immigration on the support for these parties. The data set used in this analysis is new and spans 19 countries and 165 national elections. There are four substantive conclusions. The first is that it is important to distinguish between neofascist and populist parties on the extreme right because their fortunes depend on different factors. The second is that populist parties do better in countries where the district magnitude is larger and more seats are allocated in upper tiers. The third is that although immigration has a positive effect on populist parties irrespective of the unemployment level, unemployment only matters when immigration is high. Finally, there is evidence that the permissiveness of the electoral system mediates the effect of immigration on populist parties.
Though typically they have not been the subject of systematic analysis, political cues are often depicted as having a major influence on voters' perceptions of political candidates. In this regard, different interpretations have been offered by those adopting perceptual balance and rational choice perspectives. After reviewing the points of controversy separating these two approaches, a more comprehensive explanation of political cues is offered. In particular, the use of political cues is depicted as involving two key elements: the political cue and the political stereotype with which the cue is associated. The implications of this perspective for voter rationality are then discussed. Finally, some of the key hypotheses are tested, and found to be supported through the use of experimental data.
This study presents an empirical test of the extent to which the “issue ownership” model explains the electoral decisions of individual voters. The model has been tested mainly by its ability to predict aggregate election results by issue salience (e.g., Budge and Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996). Applications of the theory for explaining individual voting behavior were restricted to two-party systems. This study makes use of innovative survey questions contained in the Dutch Parliamentary Elections Study 1998, which allow for appropriate tests of the model in the context of multi-party systems. The results show that issue voting — indicated by the direct effect of issues salience on party preferences — occurs only to a very limited extent. However, evidence is found for an indirect effect of issue priorities on party preferences, which is mediated by ideology. By selectively emphasizing issues, a party may alter its ideological position. Since ideological proximity is the main determinant of party choice, changes in ideological positions make a party more attractive to some voters and less attractive to others. In the conclusions it is thus argued that the issue ownership model — which is mainly a model of party behavior — is compatible with ideological voting as conceptualized by Downs (1957) and which provides a good explanation of the behavior of voters.
The use of spatial ideas to interpret party competition is a universal phenomenon of modern politics. Such ideas are the common coin of political journalists and have extraordinary influence in the thought of political activists. Especially widespread is the conception of a liberal-conservative dimension on which parties maneuver for the support of a public that is itself distributed from left to right. This conception goes back at least to French revolutionary times and has recently gained new interest for an academic audience through its ingenious formalization by Downs and others. However, most spatial interpretations of party competition have a very poor fit with the evidence about how large-scale electorates and political leaders actually respond to politics. Indeed, the findings on this point are clear enough so that spatial ideas about party competition ought to be modified by empirical observation. I will review here evidence that the “space” in which American parties contend for electoral support is very unlike a single ideological dimension, and I will offer some suggestions toward revision of the prevailing spatial model.
Though the inclusion of multiplicative terms in multiple regression equations is often prescribed as a method for assessing interaction in multivariate relationships, the technique has been criticized for yielding results that are hard to interpret, unreliable (as a result of multicollinearity between the multiplicative term and its constituent variables), and even meaningless. An interpretation of a multiple regression equation with a multiplicative term in conditional terms reveals all these criticisms to be unfounded. In fact, it is better analytic strategy to include a multiplicative term than to exclude one. Complicated as quantitative political analysis may seem to the uninitiated, one of the most telling criticisms made against it is that it often oversimplifies an exceedingly complicated political reality. The penchant for simplicity and generality of explanation is, of course, one of the driving forces of science, and unfortunately, it sometimes drives too far. But oversimplification sometimes also occurs because political researchers do not know about or hesitate to use techniques that would allow them to detect more complicated patterns of relationship in data. A prime example of this is the technique considered in the following pages: the inclusion of multiplicative terms in multiple regression equations. Perhaps the most common simplification in quantitative analysis is the assumption of additivity-the assumption that the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable is always the same, regardless of the level of other variables. The familiar multiple regression equation
Preface Note on documentation Note on tables Part I. Political Context and Electoral Change Ivor Crewe: 1. The flow of events 2. The flow of the vote 3. The lockgates on the vote Part II. Issues, Opinion and Party Choice in the 1979 Election Bo Sarlvik: 4. Opinions on political issues and voting - the directions of the enquiry 5. Why the parties were liked and disliked 6. Managing the economy - the Labour government's record and the Conservative alternative 7. Responses to social and cultural change 8. Nationalisation and social welfare policies - a rightward shift in electoral opinion 1974-1979 9. Policy alternatives and party choice in the 1979 election 10. Ambiguity and change in party positions: three special cases 11. The impact of the issues - an overall account 12. The electorate and the party system 13. The making of voting decisions: political opinions and voting intentions during the campaign Part III. A Turning-Point?: 14. At the end of a decade Postscript: realignment in the 1980s? Appendix. Constructing the flow-of-the-vote tables Notes Index.
From Stokes's (1963) early critique on, it has been clear to empirical researchers that the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed. Yet fully a quarter century later, that theory remains the dominant paradigm for understanding mass-elite linkage in politics. We present an alternative spatial theory of elections that we argue has greater empirical verisimilitude.
Based on the ideas of symbolic politics, the directional theory assumes that most people have a diffuse preference for a certain direction of policy-making and that people vary in the intensity with which they hold those preferences. We test the two competing theories at the individual level with National Election Study data and find the directional theory more strongly supported than the traditional spatial theory. We then develop the implications of the directional theory for candidate behavior and assess the predictions in light of evidence from the U.S. Congress.
Some scholars have argued that the American public is minimally engaged in foreign policy issues and rarely makes use of them when making vote choices in elections. This article takes a novel approach to revisiting this issue in the context of the 2000 presidential election: focusing on Ameri- cans' attitudes toward the goals of foreign policy (e.g., preventing other countries from polluting the environment, converting nondemocratic governments into democratic ones) rather than on the spe- cific procedural means for achieving those goals. The authors find that citizens' evaluations of foreign policy goals appear to have had considerable impact on their candidate preferences, especially among members of a goal's "issue public" and among the segment of the public most generally attentive to public affairs, and when candidates took clear and distinct stands on the issues.
Salience is an important concept throughout political science. Traditionally, the word has been used to designate the importance of issues, particularly for voters. To measure salience in political behavior research, scholars often rely on people's responses to the survey question that asks about the “most important problem” (MIP) facing the nation. In this manuscript, I argue that the measure confuses at least two different characteristics of salience: The importance of issues and the degree to which issues are a problem. It even may be that issues and problems are themselves fundamentally different things, one relating to public policy and the other to conditions. Herein, I conceptualize the different characteristics of MIP. I then undertake an empirical analysis of MIP responses over time in the US. It shows that most of the variation in MIP responses reflects variation in problem status. To assess whether these responses still capture meaningful information about the variation in importance over time, I turn to an analysis of opinion-policy dynamics, specifically on the defense spending domain. It shows that changes in MIP mentions do not structure public responsiveness to policy or policymaker responsiveness to public preferences themselves. Based on the results, it appears that the political importance of defense has remained largely unchanged over time. The same may be true in other domains. Regardless, relying on MIP responses as indicators of issue importance of any domain is fundamentally flawed. The responses may tell us something about the “prominence” of issues, but we simply do not know. The implication is clear: We first need to decide what we want to measure and then design the instruments to measure it.
For an issue to have a significant influence on evaluations of the president, it must be salient to people and people must evaluate the president in terms of his performance regarding it. Issues vary in salience to the public over time; evaluations of the president's performance on issues vary in their impact on presidential approval over time; and evaluations of the president's performance on issues have more impact on presidential approval when the issues are salient to the public. Content analysis of media coverage of issues; cross-sectional multichotomous logit-regression analysis of 25 national public opinion polls; and time-series regression analysis of the relationship between issue salience and their impact on presidential approval. Issues vary over time in their salience to the public and in their impact on presidential approval; and the salience of issues to the public directly affects their impact on the public's evaluation of the president.
The 1979 NES Pilot Study and the 1980 National Election Study included new items intended to measure the importance of different issues to individual respondents. Theory suggests that voters should weigh more important issues more heavily than less important issues in arriving at candidate evaluations and vote choices. However, no such differential weighting is evident using the new measures of issue salience in either the Pilot Study or the 1980 Election Study. A variety of question formats, samples, and coding schemes all lead to the conclusion that the new salience items add little or nothing to our ability to account for electoral behavior.
Issue ownership refers to political parties' recognized capacity or reputation to deal competently with a number of issues and problems. Canadian perceptions of party competence in five issue areas are examined: unemployment, inflation, national unity, public finance management and international affairs. Using aggregate-level Gallup poll data from a 50-year period, the study shows not only that Canadians distinguish between federal parties based on their issue-handling capabilities, but also that party images are not impervious to change. Two particular moments of realignment in party images are identified: the beginning of the 1960s, and the early 1990s. The image of the federal Liberal party clearly benefited from both periods. Beyond the expected projection effect of party popularity, two factors are shown to account at least partially for these variations over time in issue ownership. The parties' performance while in office and the arrival of new competitors within the party system in the 1993 election are both found to significantly affect perceptions of party competence in Canada.
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 democrats should be understood by focusing on two factors, both related to the phenomenon of issue-voting. We argue that the relative success of the SAP must been seen in light of the way in which traditional political issues, like employment and social welfare, have continued to dominate Swedish political debates, whereas in Norway and Denmark, new political issues, particularly immigration, have sailed up the political agenda and paved the way for new right-wing parties which attract social democratic voters. Secondly, we believe that one issue in particular, that of the future of the welfare state, is important for preserving social democratic support. Therefore, it is also relevant that the Swedish Social Democratic Party appears to have been more successful than social democratic parties in the neighbouring countries in convincing voters that it is the party best suited to preserve the existing welfare system.
After a discussion of the role of ‘issues’ in models of voting behaviour, this article focuses on the degree of homogeneity of issue evaluations on the one hand and the match between issue evaluations and vote choice on the other. Three major conclusions emerge from cross-national comparative analyses. First, and quite generally, a large segment of the national electorates does not perceive any particular party as best able to handle any of the problems they personally feel most important. Second, when particular parties are considered as best able to handle the problems seen as most important, then uniform - or homogeneous - evaluations outnumber more varied choices by far. And third, overall vote intention matches the competence evaluation much more often than not. These results give little support for the cognitive, rational choice approach to issue voting, but, still issue competence evaluations may be more than merely a reflection of affective ties.
This paper presents findings from a study of the role of ''party competence'' as an explanatory variable of voting choice. Arguing that party competence can find an independent status in explaining voting choice, and a place in the reasoning of voters, it is shown that it can be distinguished from issue-ownership. Further, it has both a cognitive and affective componentsdthrough the role, respectively, of retrospective performance evaluation and of leadershipdand exerts a significant independent impact on voters' choice. The analysis is carried out on post-election surveys conducted by Italian (Itanes) and British (Bes) election study in 2001.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This effort examines the dynamics of the agenda-setting process in presidential campaigns by assessing the conditions that motivate candidates to discuss issues associated with their opponentk party, The article's argu-ment contends that occurrences of issue trespassing are a function of the context in which a campaign is occur-ring and factors stemming from the campaign process. The hypotheses are tested against data collected from all available campaign advertisements produced by major party candidates competing in the 1976 through 1996 presidential elections. The results of the logit analysis indicate that candidates' decisions to address issues owned by their opponent's party are a function of their competitive standing, their partisanship, the impor-tance of an issue to the electorate, and the tone of their campaign messages.
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UsingPetrocik's (1996)theory of issue ownership as a point of departure, I develop and test a theory of “trait ownership” that provides an explanation for the origins of candidate trait perceptions and illustrates an important way that candidates affect voters. Specifically, I argue for a direct connection between the issues owned by a political party and evaluations of the personal attributes of its candidates. As a result, the American public views Republicans as stronger leaders and more moral, while Democrats hold advantages on compassion and empathy. I also draw on “expectations gap” arguments from psychology and political science to demonstrate how a candidate may gain an electoral advantage by successfully “trespassing” on his opponent's trait territory. National Election Studies data from the 1980–2004 presidential elections are used to demonstrate the existence, durability, and effects of trait ownership in contemporary American political campaigns.