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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.
... [31, 36-39]) as they constitute the "glue" that makes coalitions stable [38]. In contrast, other established explanations, such as individual-level issue salience as a potential channel through which beliefs and preferences may influence support (which features prominently in electoral theories) [40][41][42][43][44][45], is of relatively weak predictive power compared to beliefs and preferences. A promising avenue for future research is examining the extent to which political campaigns may enable changes in beliefs-for instance, through the strategic ordering of climate policies into sequences [46][47][48][49] that initially create positive beliefs and subsequently foster the introduction of increasingly ambitious policies over time. ...
... Voters evaluate politicians' performance more vigorously in relation to issues that they perceive as important [43]. Political parties often mobilize based on issues that are salient to voters since they are more likely to evaluate the performance of the former based on these issues [44]. Research on individual-level issue salience has used 'most-importantproblem' or 'most-important-issue' questions in public opinion surveys [60,92]. ...
... Research on individual-level issue salience has used 'most-importantproblem' or 'most-important-issue' questions in public opinion surveys [60,92]. Explanatory research shows that greater issue salience often fosters policy change [42][43][44], including in the domain of climate policies [93]. Although survey respondents may conflate most-importantissue and most-important-problem questions and thus there may be conceptual differences between the two question types [60], results do not vary substantially between operationalizations. ...
Public support and political mobilization are two crucial factors for the adoption of ambitious climate policies in line with the international greenhouse gas reduction targets of the Paris Agreement. Despite their compound importance, they are mainly studied separately. Using a random forest machine-learning model, this article investigates the relative predictive power of key established explanations for public support and mobilization for climate policies. Predictive models may shape future research priorities and contribute to theoretical advancement by showing which predictors are the most and least important. The analysis is based on a pre-election conjoint survey experiment on the Swiss CO 2 Act in 2021. Results indicate that beliefs (such as the perceived effectiveness of policies) and policy design preferences (such as for subsidies or tax-related policies) are the most important predictors while other established explanations, such as socio-demographics, issue salience (the relative importance of issues) or political variables (such as the party affiliation) have relatively weak predictive power. Thus, beliefs are an essential factor to consider in addition to explanations that emphasize issue salience and preferences driven by voters’ cost-benefit considerations.
... Provided that a party has credibility in dealing with an issue, voters will logically associate that party's handling reputation with the issue (Damore, 2004:391). As empirical evidence shows, considering a party to be competent does increase its electoral fortunes (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008;Green and Hobolt, 2008). We therefore generally expect that the attribution of competence over niche parties' policy issues explain the vote-switching in the European elections. ...
... There is no consensual definition of niche party in the literature (Hobolt and Tilley, 2016:4;Meyer and Miller, 2015;Wagner, 2011). So far, Meguid's (2005Meguid's ( , 2008 baseline classification is preferred over others. She claims that niche parties share three characteristics: they reject the traditional class cleavage (that is, they neglect economic issues); they bring forth novel issues to the public debate cross-cutting party alignments; and they campaign on a limited set of issues. ...
... In line with Meguid (2005Meguid ( , 2008 and Meyer and Miller (2015), we concur that niche parties can be found in the following party families, even though parties from these categories are not necessarily niche: green, anti-immigration, ethno-territorial, and special-issue parties (i.e. cyberlibertarian, feminist and religious parties). ...
This article investigates the reasons underlying mainstream-niche parties switching in second-order elections. We generally claim that vote switching is mostly due to voters' acknowledgment of issue competence assigned to niche parties and concomitant signalling of support for these issues to mainstream parties. Using data from the 2019 European Election Study we were able to demonstrate that: i) perceiving a mismatch between a mainstream party one feel close to and a niche party one considers to be the best at handling the most important issue leads mainstream-voters to switch to niche parties in European elections; ii) vote-switching to niche parties seems, to a great extent, to signal the importance of niche issues-such as the environment and immigration-to mainstream parties; and, finally, iii) mainstream vote loyalty does not hold when voters acknowledge niche parties' higher competence.
... [31,[36][37][38][39]) as they constitute the "glue" that makes coalitions stable [38]. In contrast, other established explanations, such as individual-level issue salience as a potential channel through which beliefs and preferences may influence support (which features prominently in electoral theories) [40][41][42][43][44][45], is of relatively weak predictive power compared to beliefs and preferences. A promising avenue for future research is examining the extent to which political campaigns may enable changes in beliefs -for instance, through the strategic ordering of climate policies into sequences [46][47][48][49] that initially create positive beliefs and subsequently foster the introduction of increasingly ambitious policies over time. ...
... Voters evaluate politicians' performance more vigorously in relation to issues that they perceive as important [43]. Political parties often mobilize based on issues that are salient to voters since they are more likely to evaluate the performance of the former based on these issues [44]. Research on individual-level issue salience has used 'most-important-problem' or 'most-important-issue' questions in public opinion surveys [60,93]. ...
... Research on individual-level issue salience has used 'most-important-problem' or 'most-important-issue' questions in public opinion surveys [60,93]. Explanatory research shows that greater issue salience often fosters policy change [42][43][44], including in the domain of climate policies [94]. Although survey respondents may conflate most-important-issue and most-important-problem questions and thus there may be conceptual differences between the two question types [60], results do not vary substantially between operationalizations. ...
Public support and political mobilization are two crucial factors for the adoption of ambitious climate policies in line with the international greenhouse gas reduction targets of the Paris Agreement. Despite their compound importance, they are mainly studied separately. Using a random forest machine-learning model, this article investigates the relative predictive power of key established explanations for public support and mobilization for climate policies. Predictive models may shape future research priorities and contribute to theoretical advancement by showing which predictors are the most and least important. The analysis is based on a pre-election conjoint survey experiment on the Swiss CO2 Act in 2021. Results indicate that beliefs (such as the perceived effectiveness of policies) and policy design preferences (such as for subsidies or tax-related policies) are the most important predictors while other established explanations, such as socio-demographics, issue salience (the relative importance of issues) or political variables (such as the party affiliation) have relatively weak predictive power. Thus, beliefs are an essential factor to consider in addition to explanations that emphasize issue salience and preferences driven by voters' cost-benefit considerations.
... In other words, citizens are likely to consent to their personal data being used for a highly important policy issue, but they will be strongly reluctant to allow the State to process their personal data to address a policy problem of low priority. Previous studies have identified 'issue importance' as a strong predictor of political behaviour such as voting: Citizens elect candidates from the party that addresses the policy issues they consider most important to their personal lives (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008;Budge and Farlie, 1983). By analogy, we assume that citizens will accept to share their data with the State only if public bureaucracies focus on a policy problem that citizens deem important. ...
... Third, the findings also show that individuals tend to share their personal data for public policy if they consider that the policy problem the data ought to help address is an important issue (as expected by our second hypothesis). This result lends support to the argument that citizens are willing to share their data if the latter helps resolve problems they consider important to their personal life, in the same way, that they support politicians who promise to address these issues (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008;Budge and Farlie, 1983). ...
... This explanation is plausible because our analyses also clearly indicate that citizens are more willing to share their data with the State if they already use apps developed by private businesses (e.g., health insurers' apps) or public agencies (e.g., the SwissCovid App) (Lupton, 2016;Lyon, 2002). In addition, respondents are more prone to sharing their data for policy-making if they trust their government (Debus and Tosun, 2021;Wynen et al., 2022) and if the specific policy in need of their data addresses an important issue (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008;Budge and Farlie, 1983). In contrast and quite surprisingly, party politics and ideological preferences about the targeted policy objectives less clearly predict citizens' attitudes towards data sharing. ...
The digitalisation of public policy requires that the State uses citizens’ personal data. Although researchers agree that data privacy is important, we know little about the conditions under which citizens approve of their personal data being used in different policy domains. This study relies on data from original surveys conducted in Switzerland to demonstrate that citizens’ willingness to share their data with the State is low and varies across policy domains. Support for sharing is significantly higher when the data are used to prevent benefit fraud in social assistance or to improve health research than when they are used to fight tax evasion or to prevent crime and terrorism. Nevertheless, we also argue that the more citizens trust government and the more important they consider a policy issue to be, the more likely they are to share their data with the State officials in charge of the relevant policy. Previous use of apps also increases citizens’ agreement for the policy-related use of their personal data.
... When parties 'own' issues, their electoral outcomes become linked with the public issue salience of those issues, regardless of their strategic approach (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). This 'ownership' has been shown to result from two concepts: perceived competence and broader association. ...
... Recent findings, and the above considerations, are therefore highly supportive of the original assumptions of both issue voting and cleavage theory. Regarding issue voting, as Budge (2015: 766; see also Bélanger and Meguid, 2008) stated, 'election issues appeared as the result of external developments rather than party manipulation. Parties might try to emphasise favourable issues to suit prevailing circumstances. ...
... We show that public issue salience of immigration increases the vote share of the radical right and reduces that of conservative, social democrat, and radical left parties; the salience of unemployment increases the vote share of the radical left and social democrats and reduces that of radical right and green parties; while the salience of the environment increases the vote share of the greens and reduces that of the social democrats and radical left. These findings support and expand the well-known claims of issue voting theory and findings regarding the centrality of salience to the effects of issue ownership (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). The party system issue agenda's emphasis on immigration and the environment has weaker and only intermittent effects, while its emphasis on unemployment has large and consistent effects for respective party families as we would theoretically expect. ...
What has caused the marked, cross-national, and unprecedented trends in European electoral results in the 21st century? Scholarly explanations include social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We argue that these electoral changes more proximally result from public issue salience, which results from societal trends and mainly affects rather than is caused by party agenda setting. We use aggregate-level panel data across 28 European countries to show that the public issue salience of three issues—unemployment, immigration, and the environment—is associated with later variation in the results of the conservative, social democrat, liberal, radical right, radical left, and green party families in theoretically expected directions, while the party system issue agenda has weaker associations. Public issue salience, in turn, is rooted in societal trends (unemployment rates, immigration rates and temperature anomalies), and, in some cases, party agenda setting. We validate our mechanism at the individual-level across 28 European countries and using UK panel data. Our findings have implications for our understanding of the agency of parties, the permanency of recent electoral changes, and how voters reconcile their social and political worlds.
... These changes, in turn, may have brought about shifts in voters' perceptions of which parties were most competent to address the problems dominating their agenda. As competence attributions provide clear cues for electoral choices (e.g., Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Green and Hobolt 2008), these changes may finally have led to shifts in voters' choices and, consequently, also in aggregate electoral outcomes. This would be well in line with the observation that this period was characterized by high inter-election volatility. ...
... Values and policy-related predispositions appear to make voters chronically attentive to certain topics, and inattentive to others (Boninger et al. 1995;Kratz and Schoen 2017;Rössler 1997). Voters might also follow party cues when identifying political problems, particularly during campaigns (Bellucci 2006;Bélanger and Meguid 2008; also see, e.g., Clarke et al. 2004;Damore 2004). This suggests that voters' problem perceptions not only might have been responsive to the three crises but also were conditioned by policy-and party-related predispositions. ...
... To avoid conceptual confusion, we do not use the term "issue ownership" to denote competence attributions of individual voters (e.g.,Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Stubager 2018) but to describe a party's advantage in the distribution of competence attributions at the aggregate level. ...
This concluding chapter discusses changing German voters’ behavior in the context of changing parties, campaigns, and media during the period of its hitherto most dramatically increased fluidity at the 2009, 2013, and 2017 federal elections. It summarizes the book’s findings on three questions: How did the turbulences that increasingly characterize German electoral politics come about? How did they in turn condition voters’ decision-making? How were electoral attitudes and choices affected by situational factors that pertained to the specifics of particular elections? Discussing the consequences of these developments the chapter finds that the ideological and affective polarization of the party system has increased, leading to a dualistic structure that pits the right-wing populist AfD against all other parties. It also shows how the formation of governments under the German parliamentary system of governance gets increasingly difficult. The chapter closes with speculations about the prospects of electoral politics in Germany.
... Second: What are the main drivers of sovereignist entrepreneurship and what is the specific role played by public attitudes in this respect? Parties compete by assigning salience to different matters through a process of selective issue emphasis (Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Budge and Farlie 1983). The concept of salience in party competition hinges on the notion of issue ownership or credibilitythat is, the degree to which a party has developed a good public image in handling a certain policy issue (Petrocik 1996;Van der Brug et al. 2007). ...
... Parties choose to dismiss certain conflicts that could potentially jeopardize their electoral stability or, vice versa, they assign salience to conflicts that could constitute an electoral asset. Political actors tend to mobilize voters by prioritizing the issue they own and shelving those issues that could provide electoral advantages for their opponents (Bélanger 2003;Bélanger and Meguid 2008). Thus, by emphasizing it, parties have the ability to transform sovereignism into one of their signature issues for political contestation. ...
In this article we examine the phenomenon of the use of sovereignist claims, not only by nationalist or populist leaders but also by actors who would not normally fall into these categories. We zoom in on two different cases: France and Italy. Through an analysis of Twitter we examine the discourse of the political leadership in election campaigns. We document some interesting commonalities, as well as some differences, concerning the emphasis on sovereignist claims. We produce an account of the patterns of use of sovereignist issues, we identify which parties/leaders have been the main promoters of sovereignist claims and how their competitors have responded to this challenge. Finally, we analyse the main drivers of sovereignist party discourses. Through regression analysis we show how, both in France and in Italy, the sovereignist supply has been influenced by ideology and citizens' demands.
... Parties have been theorized as competing for votes by taking different positions on the same issues and by assigning salience to different matters through a process of selective issue emphasis (Budge and Farlie, 1983;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). The combination of the positions taken and the issues primed by parties create their public image. ...
... Parties choose to dismiss certain conflicts, which could potentially jeopardize their electoral stability or, vice versa, they assign salience to conflicts that could constitute an electoral asset. Political actors tend to mobilize voters by prioritizing the issue they own, and shelving those issues that could provide electoral advantages for their opponents (Bélanger, 2003;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). By emphasizing EU issues, parties have the ability to alter the systemic salience of European integration in the domestic agenda and transform it into one of their signatory issues for political contestation (Hooghe and Marks, 2009;Hutter and Grande, 2014). ...
This article analyzes the influence of the EU party-voter distance on party support moderated by the impact of EU salience. To this goal, we focus on the party-voter dyad and we analyze patterns of EU issue voting in first-order national elections in five EU countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) between 2017 and 2018. We make use of a combination of data from CHES and a public opinion survey to construct the distance measures, and a mix of CHES and Twitter data to measure EU salience. We show that voters are mobilized on the EU, with EU party positions operating as a driving factor of the voting preferences of the electorate and EU salience moderating this relationship.
... Moreover, as Catherine De Vries and Sara Hobolt argue, voters choose challenger parties 'on the basis of high appropriability issues and motivated by antiestablishment considerations' (2020: 183). According to the issue-ownership theory of voting (Budge and Farlie 1983;Lefevere et al. 2015;Petrocik 1996), voters will cast a ballot for the party that is the most credible proponent of a particular issue (Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Neundorf and Adams 2018). By way of example, through individual-level analyses of vote choices in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, the effect of issue ownership on vote choice was found to be ultimately conditioned by the perceived salience of the issue in question (Bélanger and Meguid 2008). ...
... According to the issue-ownership theory of voting (Budge and Farlie 1983;Lefevere et al. 2015;Petrocik 1996), voters will cast a ballot for the party that is the most credible proponent of a particular issue (Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Neundorf and Adams 2018). By way of example, through individual-level analyses of vote choices in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, the effect of issue ownership on vote choice was found to be ultimately conditioned by the perceived salience of the issue in question (Bélanger and Meguid 2008). In sum, we focus on issue-specific mechanisms because, depending on the issue at stakehowever it was made salient, we only capture if issue saliency has changed, not whyand the part of the electorate concerned with that particular issue, the impact of increased concern on volatility might differ. ...
Political participation and party attachment in Western democracies have become more and more volatile. In turn, political campaigns seem increasingly dependent on short-term discursive windows of opportunity opened by dynamic debates on issues such as migration, climate, employment and economic policies. Based on panel data from nine European countries, we investigate how patterns and changes in the materialist and postmaterialist concerns of respondents affect electoral turnout and party switching. By relating these variables, we aim to uncover whether and to what extent underlying concerns – and thus short-term politicization – account for short-term patterns of electoral volatility. We pay special attention to young respondents, who are often framed as being particularly dynamic and less bound to traditional political loyalties. Our findings offer insights into short-term change in discursive opportunities for political mobilization and broader democratic engagement.
... 1 Parties improve their electoral results by emphasizing the issues they 'own' (Dennison 2019: 441). Issue ownership can be electorally advantageous, especially when the issue is considered important at election time (Bélanger and Meguid 2008). Yet, issue ownership affects the voting decisions of 'only those individuals who think that the issue is salient' (Bélanger and Meguid 2008: 447). ...
... There is plenty of evidence to suggest that individuals' grievances over alleged out-groups 1 Issue salience can refer to both the public and the elites (Dennison 2019). In this article, we focus on the electoral consequences of changes in citizens' issue salience because (1) there is inconsistent evidence regarding the reactions of voters as a response to parties' shifts (Adams 2012); and (2) public issue salience is an important moderator of vote decisions (Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Dennison 2019). This choice is also in line with our empirical strategy. ...
We argue theoretically and demonstrate empirically that to understand the electoral fortunes of far-right parties in Western Europe, we need to consider the advantages and disadvantages these parties encounter in the multidimensional political issue space. We argue that salience changes among the electorate benefit far-right parties more than shifting far-right parties’ policy positions. We further posit that changes in the public salience of European integration are more important for far-right success than other issues -- including immigration. Utilizing similar survey questions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) about parties’ positions and the European Election Studies (EES) about voters’ policy preferences, we estimate multidimensional voting models in 12 West European countries. We then use mathematical simulations to show that the issue that matters most for far-right success is European integration. This research has important implications for the study of electoral competition, parties’ campaign strategies, and voting behavior.
... Consequently, the contemporary structure of political conflicts is seemingly grounded in the issue competition, with parties drawing attention to the conflicts where 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). Our empirical analysis uses issue-voting as an indication of the transformation of relevant political conflicts in SE based on the observation of the party-voter positional congruence on a set of issues -EU integration, immigration and economic interventionism. ...
... The scholarly discussion on the impact of party cues has been based on the assumption that citizens use party endorsements when shaping their policy opinions (Adams et al., 2011). In line with several studies concluding that policy shifts guide opinions (Bisgaard and Slothuus, 2018) and that citizens do respond to party strategies of selective emphasis (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008), we predict an increasingly close match between party policy positions and voter policy opinions. In short, the crises and the resulting cueing activity of parties may have sparked off more intense electoral responses on the issues of European integration, immigration and economic interventionism. ...
This research analyses the demand-side of politics in Southern European countries, investigating how three relevant voting determinants have changed throughout time. The focus is on Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and the examined variables are the European Union, immigration and state intervention in the economy. The period of analysis is 2009–2019 and we identify the structure of political conflicts from the point of view of voters. We find that the electoral support of parties has been increasingly influenced by party positions on immigration (with the partial exception of Portugal), but not on the European Union. Moreover, the issue of ‘state control and regulation of the economy’ is boosting its explanatory power in all the countries investigated in this study. Thus, new issue determinants have gradually reshaped the system of voting preferences across Southern Europe, with voter demands becoming more likely to match party supply on immigration and economic interventionism.
... Empirically, voter perceptions of issue ownership influence voting behavior, next to factors such as ideological proximity and general party and candidate sympathy (e.g., Van der Brug 2004;Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Green and Hobolt 2008;Walgrave et al. 2012;Lachat 2014). Any form of issue ownership may help to give profile to political parties, making it more likely not only that they will be elected (Karlsen and Aardal 2016; Petitpas and Sciarini 2022) but also that voters include them in their choice sets. ...
... However, these effects are unlikely to be unconditional. Voters will be particularly swayed by ownership of issues that they consider salient (Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Walgrave et al. 2012;Lachat 2014). ...
Associative issue ownership (AIO) has proven its value in describing issue competition and explaining voting behavior. Yet, it is unclear whether and to what extent AIO also differentiates parties and influences vote choice in highly fragmented, multiparty systems. In such a context, parties must differentiate from many electoral competitors, which makes AIO worth pursuing. At the same time, obtaining unequivocal ownership may be a very difficult endeavor in the face of so many rivals. This paper aims to assess these questions empirically by employing the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study 2021 on a system with 17 elected parties (ENPP = 8). At the aggregate level, we find unequivocal issue ownership for 4 of the 14 issues under study. AIO of most other issues is contested, either by parties with very similar policy positions (within-block competition) or by parties with opposing positions (between-block competition). A final set of issues remain unclaimed. At the individual level, perceptions of issue ownership explain the composition of voters’ party consideration sets (pre-elections) and their actual vote choice (post-elections). These impacts are stronger when voters associate the party with an issue they find important. We conclude that AIO perceptions are an important factor to consider when studying party dynamics and voting behavior in a context of highly fragmented multipartyism.
... Why should that occur? A well-known hypothesis points to an asymmetry in economic voting (Mueller, 1970;Nannestad and Paldam, 1997;Bélanger and Meguid, 2008;Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck, 2014). As Evans and Andersen put it, economic downturns 'elicit shared and reasonably perceptive responses that are not powerfully affected by political conditioning ' (2006, 195). ...
... This is due to the controversial nature of CSA. Issue salience is the degree which the public perceives an issue to be important to society (Belanger & Meguid, 2008). Often, highly salient issues are hot-button issues; ones that are covered extensively in the media (Roberts et al., 2002). ...
Consumer reaction toward corporate social advocacy (CSA) stances can often be swift and visceral. These reactions may be due to messages evoking emotions that are self-transcendent-bigger than the individual and bigger than the company or its products or services. However, no research to date has examined the nature of self-transcendent emotions in CSA messages. Through a content analysis of CSA messages (n = 352), this exploratory study examined characteristics of CSA messages to understand the nature and prevalence of self-transcendent emotional elicitors within company CSA stances-as manifested in both written statements and video messages-which are typically the two mediums that companies use to communicate their CSA stances. Results indicate that most CSA messages do contain transcendent emotional elicitors with appreciation for beauty and excellence being the most prevalent. This study holds implications for research and practice at the intersection of public relations and media psychology.
... This implies that parties associate themselves with specific problems and develop a reputation for competence in handling them (Budge & Farlie, 1983). This strategy has an impact on both the associative dimension and the general reputation of political parties in terms of their ability to address different issues (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008). ...
This article examines the role of social media and journalistic media in presidential electoral processes. A systematic review of scientific articles published from 2012 to 2022 was conducted. The results indicate that the media has a significant influence on public perception and the political agenda during election campaigns. Furthermore, the importance of evaluating political leaders in the voters' decision-making process is emphasized. In summary, the article provides valuable insights into how the media can shape the narrative and public opinion during presidential elections.
... The CN worldview may be cross-cutting to some extent, but Republican ownership makes it ripe for mobilization strategies. Salient issues that are owned by parties or candidates can be mobilized (Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Petrocik et al. 2003), and media coverage can feed perceptions of partisan ownership (Hayes 2008). ...
Academic research on Christian nationalism has revealed a considerable amount about the scope of its relationships to public policy views in the US. However, work thus far has not addressed an essential question: why now? Research by the authors of this Element advances answers, showcasing how deeper engagement with 'the 3Ms' – measurement, mechanisms and mobilization – can help unpack how and why Christian nationalism has entered our politics as a partisan project. Indeed, it is difficult to understand the dynamics of Christian nationalism without reference to the parties, as it has been a worldview used to mobilize Republicans while simultaneously recruiting and demobilizing Democrats. The mechanisms of these efforts hinge on a deep desire for social dominance that is ordained by God – an order elites suggest is threatened by Democrats and 'the left.' These elite appeals can have sweeping consequences for opinion and action, including the public's support for democratic processes.
... Accordingly, the agency and strategies of individual political parties and 6 Introduction elites are crucial to explaining the varying levels of politicisation. Following the issue ownership/ saliency theory (Petrocik, 1996), political parties highlight issues they are said to 'own' and for which they have a reputation of competence (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Green-Pedersen & Krogstrup, 2008). Research consistently shows that radical right parties as well as centre-right parties hold ownership of immigration, act as issue entrepreneurs on the issue and thus are more likely to politicise it (Grande et al., 2018). ...
... 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, we find that 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, and gender gaps between parties. We introduce a new dataset of 15,589 authors of 9,944 reports from the American Enterprise Institute, Center for American Progress, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Heritage Foundation. 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 than much of the literature suggests.
... Como ha sido referido previamente, el voto de castigo en sistemas de dos partidos es más visible por el simple hecho de que si un elector decide sancionar al partido en el poder, puede optar por un partido alternativo lo suficientemente competitivo al cual otorgar su voto. Ante una competencia de más de dos partidos y en la que ingresan estratégicamente nuevos partidos(Meguid, 2008), los partidos tienen incentivos para diferenciarse. Dicha diferencia proviene de la propia ideología o de cualquier otra dimensión de la competencia.En este caso, se argumenta que la ideología es un referente diferenciador en la competencia electoral en América Latina. ...
Esta tesis analiza las consecuencias en la rendición de cuentas electoral cuando existen escándalos de corrupción cometidos por miembros del gobierno y, en particular, por integrantes del Poder Ejecutivo (presidente y círculo cercano) un año antes a las elecciones presidenciales en 18 países de América Latina. El argumento principal señala que las probabilidades de sanción aumentan en la medida que incrementa la diferencia ideológica entre el partido gobernante y el principal opositor. Asimismo, las expectativas teóricas predicen que existe un efecto diferenciado según el actor involucrado en dicho suceso. Así, se espera mayor impacto en el castigo si es el presidente es el que está envuelto en el escándalo a comparación de si lo es su círculo cercano. Los resultados confirman en gran medida lo anterior. La diferencia ideológica es la variable que permite hacer una conexión entre el voto de castigo y la presencia de escándalos cometidos por integrantes actuales del gobierno. Si esta variable no se toma en cuenta, no se encuentra ningún efecto. La evidencia empírica permite también validar parcialmente las hipótesis sobre la claridad de responsabilidades ya que es mayor el efecto en el voto de castigo si los involucrados en el escándalo son el presidente y su círculo cercano a que si actúan de manera individual.
... Indeed, it is easier for political actors to alter the importance they attribute to policy issues than to amend the position they embody over each of them. This is because politicians gain over time a reputation for competence in handling certain issues, and parties and candidates eventually come to "own" them (Petrocik 1996;Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Egan 2013;Stubager 2018). Among other things, this reputation stems from politicians' record in office and previous investments in expertise. ...
Are political representatives responsive to the public in determining the issues they publicly address? Our paper takes a novel approach to this question with innovative data and state-of-the-art methodology. While previous research on issue responsiveness has focused on the United States and its unique political institutions, we study a multi-party parliamentary setting: the Canadian House of Commons. We focus our analysis on a prominent policy issue: climate change. Using transcripts from the Question Period between April 2006 and June 2021, we measure the attention political parties attribute to the various policy issues. We use Google Trends data to measure policy issues' public salience. We implement an instrumental variable estimation strategy to causally estimate how much climate change's public salience drives elite attention. Our analysis reveals that climate change's public salience significantly affects the attention political parties pay to that policy issue, though with significant partisan heterogeneity.
... Selon cette optique, les journalistes chercheraient à publier des reportages capables d'attirer un large public tout en reflétant la voix indépendante de leur profession (Page 1996;Nadeau et Giasson 2005). Les politiciens chercheraient de leur côté à influencer le contenu de la couverture médiatique afin d'amener les journalistes à accorder plus d'attention aux enjeux les présentant sous un jour favorable (Petrocik 1996;Bélanger et Meguid 2008;Nadeau et al. 2010;D'Alimonte et al. 2019). ...
Résumé
Cette étude examine l’évolution de la couverture accordée aux enjeux dans la presse écrite durant les campagnes au Québec de 1994 à 2018. Deux constats ressortent de cette étude. On assisterait d'abord à une diversification de l'ordre du jour médiatique s'expliquant notamment par un recul de la question nationale dans l'espace médiatique au profit d'enjeux comme l'environnement et l'immigration. Le recadrage de la question nationale nettement plus axée aujourd'hui sur la dimension identitaire que sur la question du statut politique du Québec est frappant. Ces changements semblent indiquer la montée d'un axe politique libéral-autoritaire dans la province, alors même que l’émergence du multipartisme ouvre la porte à un réalignement politique durable. Ces observations tendent à confirmer la perspective voulant que l'ordre du jour lors d'une campagne résulte de l'interaction entre les médias, les partis et les électeurs et qu'il offre ainsi un reflet adéquat de l’évolution de la dynamique politique dans une société donnée.
... Brug & van Spanje, 2009), this is not necessarily the case for all parties, as is noticed when analysing right-libertarian discourses (see Bobbio, 1997 (Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Petrocik, 1996) and latent ideological value theory (Kriesi et al., 2012). The solidarity frame approach does not distinguish between materialist and postmaterialist needs or socioeconomic and socio-cultural issues. ...
Recently, theorization and conceptualizations of solidarity have experienced a surge, as solidarity has become increasingly problematised. The challenges that solidarity faces today make it a contested and politicised concept. Consequently, it is fair to assume that solidarity has become predominant in current political discourses. This dissertation focuses on political parties as active evaluators and framers of solidarity who come into conflict, as they propose a different understanding of solidarity.
Therefore, this dissertation introduces the concept of solidarity frames: rhetorical
devices that specify a particular problem definition, a causal interpretation, a moral
evaluation, and a treatment recommendation. We distinguish four solidarity frames -
group-based, compassionate, exchange-based, and empathic solidarity – and their
exclusionary counterparts.
The main contribution of this dissertation is to further the understanding of the role of solidarity frames in the dimensionalization of the party political sphere. Based on the dialectical theory of solidarity, we propose a solidarity frame theory that theorises six dialectical relationships between the four solidarity frames. In addition, a dialectical approach also assumes the potential of exclusion and backlashes.
We focus on the case of Belgium, more specifically the Flemish party system, to study solidarity frames in three aspects of party politics. First, we discuss the supply-side and assess the role of political parties in communicating and framing solidarity. We evaluate whether we can distinguish partisan discourses in solidarity frames more specifically by conducting a content analysis of party manifestos.
Second, we turn to the demand-side of the party political sphere and assess whether voters have similar solidarity preferences as their preferred parties by conducting a survey. More particularly, we evaluate whether the solidarity frame preferences of party electorates are congruent with those of their preferred parties and assess the impact of solidarity frame preferences on propensities to vote for specific parties.
Third, we conduct an intermediary analysis based on survey data that considers whether solidarity frames have a heuristic value for grassroots politicians functioning as the interface between the parties' supply and the voters' demands.
... Indeed, the personal importance of a policy issue affects people's likelihood of voting on this issue. The more importance people attach to their opinion on a political policy, the better their opinion on that issue predicts their vote choices (Anand & Krosnick, 2003;Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;Fournier et al., 2003;Krosnick, 1988;J. M. Miller, Krosnick, & Fabrigar, 2016;Visser et al., 2003). ...
What is public opinion, what factors cause it to form in particular ways, and why does it matter? In this chapter, we define public opinion as opinions on matters of public debate that have significant implications for society. Then, we provide an overview of key developments in three central topics in research on public opinion. First, we discuss research on opinionation, or when and why a person forms an opinion on a political topic. Second, we discuss directionality of opinion, or factors that shape whether a person forms a particular kind of opinion (e.g., favourable or unfavourable) on an issue. Finally, we discuss the consequences of public opinion, or how opinions shape action, with a focus how public opinion influences voting, civic activism, and government attention and action. We end by considering emerging research trends in the field of public opinion that can inspire future research on the topic.
... Moreover, the argument puts particular emphasis on the role of issue salience, highlighting that citizens have to care about an issue in order to feel poorly represented by political elites. In this regard, our argument follows the idea of, for example, Bélanger and Meguid (2008), that issue salience is an important moderator of how policy positions affect other political attitudes and political behaviour. ...
Recently, scholars of populism have increasingly started to theorise and capture susceptibility to populism at the individual level. Most of these studies, however, focus on the consequences of populist attitudes on political behaviour. Less attention has been paid to the question of which citizens have high levels of populist attitudes and why. While some scholars argue that populist attitudes more resemble an unchangeable personality trait, meaning that individuals may be more or less populist, others argue that it is a response to outside grievances or discontent. The latter suggests that levels of populist attitudes are dynamic and may change if grievances are addressed (or remain unaddressed). We contribute to this literature by asking how discontent fuelled by unfulfilled policy preferences affects the level of populist attitudes. Following the conception of populism as a thin-centred ideology, we argue that high levels of populist attitudes are not connected with certain issues per se. Rather, our argument is that people are more populist when they feel poorly represented on policy issues that they care strongly about. This argument provides an explanation for the observation that even voters of non-populist parties sometimes show high levels of populist attitudes. We test the impact of policy discontent on populist attitudes using data from the GLES 2021 Pre-Election Cross Section survey by combining information on citizens’ issue specific discontent with the perceived salience of respective issues. The results are in line with our expectations: Individuals with higher policy discontent are more populist.
... Research on the entry of challenger parties has explored when and how new issue dimensions are successfully introduced (Bélanger and Meguid 2008;Carmines and Stimson 1989;Hobolt 2012, 2020). De Vries and Hobolt (2020: 98) stress that while mainstream parties' strategic appeal lies within the boundaries of the left-right dimension, divisive 'issues are not easily integrated into a left-right party brand'. ...
This article examines how challenger parties enter the political arena and the effect of this entry by looking at the Italian 5 Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle – M5S). We explain the M5S's entry strategy in 2013 using the spatial approach to party competition and employing expert survey data collected for each national election between 2008 and 2018. These data allow us to analyse the changing spatial configuration of Italian politics due to the increasing salience of pro/anti-EU and pro/anti-immigration dimensions. We then apply the theoretical notion of the uncovered set (UCS) to trace how the M5S's entry reshaped the overall space of party competition, causing a realignment of existing parties. This work contributes to the ongoing debate on the electoral success of challenger parties and the emerging cleavages and polarization of party systems in Western European countries.
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.
The availability of online data has altered the role of social media. By offering targeted online advertising, that is, persuasive messages tailored to user groups, political parties profit from large data profiles to send fine-grained advertising appeals to susceptible voters. This between-subject experiment ( N = 421) investigates the influence of targeted political advertising disclosures (targeting vs. no-targeting disclosure), political fit (high vs. low), and issue fit (high vs. low) on recipients’ party evaluation and chilling effect intentions. The mediating role of targeting knowledge (TK) and perceived manipulative intent (PMI), two dimensions of persuasion knowledge, are investigated. The findings show that disclosing a targeting strategy and a high political fit activated individuals’ TK, that is, their recognition that their data had been used to show the ads, which then increased the evaluation of the political party and individuals’ intentions to engage in future chilling effect behaviors. High political fit decreased individuals’ reflections about the appropriateness of the targeted political ads (i.e., PMI), which then increased party evaluation. Issue fit did not affect individuals’ persuasion knowledge.
This paper explores how politicians respond to the public salience of policy issues when determining which topics to publicly address. Using new data and state-of-the-art methodology, our study provides a fresh perspective on this fundamental question. We focus on a multi-party parliamentary system, specifically the Canadian House of Commons, with a specific emphasis on the issue of climate change. To assess the attention given by political parties to various policy issues, we analyze transcripts from the Question Period spanning from April 2006 to June 2021. To gauge the public’s level of concern for these issues, we incorporate data obtained from Google Trends. Employing an instrumental variable estimation strategy, our study causally estimates the extent to which the public salience of climate change influences elite attention. Our findings reveal that the public salience of climate change significantly influences the attention given to this issue by parties, albeit with noticeable partisan variations. Moreover, our research highlights the effectiveness of the Question Period in compelling the government to address challenging or potentially embarrassing issues. Lastly, we uncover evidence suggesting that the Liberal Party of Canada successfully increased the public salience of climate change during its tenure in government.
Targeted political advertising (TPA) on social media builds on tailoring messages to (groups of) individuals’ characteristics based on user data. Questions have been raised about the impact of TPA on recipients and society. In this study, we focus on the fit of TPA, that is, the congruence between TPA and recipients’ preferences, and draw on congruity theories, social identity theory (SIT), and persuasion knowledge. In a two-wave panel study (N = 428) during a Viennese state election, we investigated the relationships between individuals’ perceived fit and misfit of TPA on perceptions about the manipulative intent as well as the benefits and harms for democracy. The findings showed that perceived fit of TPA at Time 1 decreased perceived manipulative intent and increased perceived benefits of TPA at Time 2. The perceived misfit of TPA at Time 1 did not influence individuals’ perceptions at Time 2, and perceptions about the harms of TPA to democracy stayed stable. Findings imply that political campaigners might benefit from targeting but raise questions about individuals’ defense mechanisms against the persuasive technique.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another dimension of performance on which governments can be judged during elections. This article focuses on how the pandemic and its management factored into vote choices in provincial elections in Canada. Did pandemic considerations overwhelm other factors, or was it a tangential consideration? We address this question with data from a series of two-wave election surveys that were conducted by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem) using online samples of citizens.
Parliamentary speeches are an important communication channel for political parties. A growing amount of literature suggests that parties use them to send policy signals in party competition. Although this perspective has become more popular in the literature, there is a lack of studies that focus on issue competition. I take a step towards closing this research gap by using a text‐as‐data approach to analyze parliamentary speeches in the Austrian Nationalrat. The data set consists of more than 56,700 speeches given by MPs between 2002 and 2019. I apply a semi‐supervised technique to classify the speeches at sentence level into 20 issue categories. The analysis shows that, despite the constraining parliamentary context (e.g., legislative agenda), parties put comparatively strong emphasis on their issue preferences. The magnitude of this effect, however, depends on a party's legislative agenda‐setting power. These findings confirm the presence and specific nature of issue competition in parliamentary speeches.
Politics around the world has become more divisive. We ask if the influence of far‐right parties extends to personal concerns and argue that a theory combining issue ownership with partisan discourse can explain personal policy salience. Using aggregate Eurobarometer data, we create compositional models to estimate the effect of partisan discourse on pocketbook policy concerns. We focus on whether these elite messages influence concerns differently depending on the presence of a far‐right party. We find that more partisan discussion about law‐and‐order issues influences relative personal concerns on security and immigration issues across ideological groups when a far‐right party is present. Our findings suggest that an “issue‐owning” party can alter how people interpret politics and view their own concerns. Far‐right parties influence the perceptions of people across ideologies. Research showed that these parties can influence parties and voters; we show that they can shape personal perceptions.
Issue salience is a fundamental component of party competition, yet we know little about when, where, or why parties’ issue emphases converge or diverge. I propose an original operationalization of issue salience divergence, the extent to which parties’ issue emphases differ from each other in an election, that generates values at the party-election and country-election levels. I leverage data from party manifestos to calculate scores for 2,308 party-election combinations of 381 unique parties in 426 elections across thirty European countries, the most comprehensive dataset to date. I find that issue salience divergence is generally low and has starkly decreased over time, but countries and parties differ substantially. As an initial step in understanding these differences, I propose and test initial expectations of how party and democracy age, electoral systems, and party type alter the incentives for divergent issue salience.
Politicians use political value rhetoric to win elections or persuade constituents towards policy positions, but the effectiveness of this rhetoric is unclear. I argue that partisan forces constrain the effectiveness of this rhetoric and that this constraint is conditional based on the value evoked and the match between the politician’s and message recipient’s partisanship. To examine this, I conduct a survey experiment with a diverse U.S. national population and show that politicians’ value rhetoric is disproportionately evaluated based on the value evoked as well as whether the politician is in-party or out-party: in-party politicians are punished—and out-party politicians rewarded—for trespassing on the other party’s values. I then use individual-level variables to examine what drives this result, finding that both party-congruent value endorsements and affective polarization levels moderate the asymmetric responses to political value trespassing. Lastly, I replicate this experiment and reproduce the same findings. The results speak to political values, the effectiveness of political rhetoric, party betrayal signaling, and the true object of out-party distaste, which seems to be more about the party than the party member.
This chapter draws on the history of approaches to social movement mobilisation and communicative tactics in disseminating movement arguments. It grounds this discussion in the era of digital media and explores the concomitant rise of online political participation and activism. Through an exploration of the linguistic instruments used in elections by institutional political actors, the chapter highlights an overlap between the electoral campaigning techniques used in formal politics and movement communication. The chapter illustrates that, in much the same way as traditional electoral campaigning, movement-voter interaction conveys its message in a way that aims to persuade voters and can also seek to highlight the weaknesses of their opponent or promote recognition of an issue.
An increasing number of consumers expect brands to engage in important societal issues. Brands like Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, and Gillette have launched ads promoting their stances on highly salient issues in public discourse. While corporate social responsibility (CSR) advertising research has explored issues such as skin cancer, heart disease, and abortion, this research stream has yet to investigate how an issue’s salience in society influences consumer response. Because salient (versus nonsalient) issues make information more accessible and generate debate, the advertising context (i.e., public issue salience) may influence consumer response to CSR ads. Applying the salience theory of party competition to CSR advertising, this research shows how an issue’s consensus level and individual issue importance differentially impact brand attitudes and purchase intentions when an issue is salient. Through a series of four experiments with real ads, the present investigation shows how and when public issue salience affects marketing outcomes. This research adopts an issue-centric view and contributes to CSR advertising scholarship by (a) opening a new theoretical corridor, (b) demonstrating empirically how the advertising context (public issue salience) influences marketing outcomes, (c) providing a more holistic, comparative advertising perspective on issue selection, and (d) generating new insight into individual issue importance.
Why do presidents make promises while in office and why do they fulfill some of them? We postulate 5 hypotheses to account for the fulfillment of promises made by sitting presidents and test them on an emerging presidential democracy in Latin America. With information on the 951 pledges made by presidents of Chile in annual state of nation addresses (1990–2017), we show that presidents fulfill fewer promises made in their last year, and when they have lower approval, but their seat share support in the legislature does not impact promise fulfillment. Presidents fulfill more promises when the economic conditions are adverse, and in areas where their political parties have issue ownership. Promises from the throne respond to a different logic than campaign promises. Presidents care about the promises they make and seek to fulfill some of them, but they also make unfulfillable promises to please their hardcore base.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
Do voters punish government parties for breaking an election pledge? How do preexisting opinions affect retrospective pledge voting (RPV)? This study hypothesizes that pledge breaking entails a fundamental loss of confidence resulting in a lower probability to vote for a government party, and that mistrusting citizens punish pledge breakage more severely. A representative survey experiment (N ¿ 10,000) with a one-dimensional treatment, that is carried out in Germany, provides evidence for these hypotheses. These findings have major implications for our understanding of political representation and the voter–party-relation. The results of this paper stress the importance of promissory representation and provide evidence that the electorate keeps tabs on government parties, but they also hint at the crucial role of individual predispositions.
In a political competition, political parties run their campaign communications to attract voters' attention to issues in which the parties have an advantage. Investigating how parties' issue selection strategy affects issue salience is crucial, considering the media outlets' behavior, as most voters receive political communication from parties through media reporting. In this study, I develop an issue selection model that incorporates the profit-maximization behavior of media outlets. First, I find that the issue coverage of media outlets diverges even when they do not have ideological preferences. Second, competition among media outlets and the strategic issue selection of parties lead to polarization in voters' issue salience weights. Finally, I show that this polarization increases the vote share of the party with lower-quality policy proposals. The results could be essential to understanding the relationship between issue salience, media, and their effect on electoral competition.
Are right-wing incumbents punished for failures in public security? Partisan accountability models predict greater sanctions for politicians who fail to deliver on issues they “own.” According to this logic, right-wing incumbents should suffer more from crime spikes. Contrary to this expectation, we show that right-wing governments are not always punished for sudden increases in crime just before an election. We take advantage of rich local crime data in Chile and Mexico to identify places that experienced a crime shock, and use a difference-in-differences design to illustrate the heterogeneous electoral effects of public security failures. We also provide survey evidence from 18 Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the main findings. We hold that right-wing incumbents’ greater electoral resilience to crime spikes could be explained by voters attributing security failures to exogenous factors or by voters still perceiving left-wing and centrist challengers as less competent at addressing crime.
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.