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How party‒issue linkages vary between election manifestos and media debates
Abstract
Existing research on party behaviour has largely focused on the drivers of issue salience in direct party communication. However, less is known about party‒issue linkages in election campaigns covered by the mass media, from which most voters get their information about party positions. Against this background, this article explores how two important drivers of issue salience in direct party communication – issue ownership and systemic salience – play out in the media. Based on considerations about the news value of specific party‒issue associations, one would expect both relationships to be particularly important in the media. Despite substantial similarities in party‒issue linkages across platforms, a comparison of manifestos and newspaper content reveals evidence for this claim. In particular, smaller parties are hardly covered in the news on issues they do not own, while large parties are especially covered on salient topics. These findings contribute to our understanding of issue competition in mediated environments.
... Since legacy news media still dominate the political information landscape in Denmark (Blach-Ørsten & Mayerhöffer, 2021), we understand issue salience as 'media salience', that is, the amount of attention news media gives to specific issues (Moniz & Wlezien, 2020). Regarding issue ownership and issue competition, we build on recent studies that argue that political parties compete in the news media regarding engaging in popular issues, causing socalled issue overlap, and even try to 'steal' issues from one another (Schwarzbözl et al., 2020;Merz, 2016;Green-Pedersen & Mortensen, 2015;Spoon et al., 2014). This is especially the case in multi-party systems such as Denmark, where many parties challenge each other's ownership of the popular issues (Aalberg & Jenssen, 2007). ...
... Second, the article does not focus on the relationship between the party agenda and media agenda as is often the case. Instead, the focus is on the media saliences of different issues and the party-issue linkage (Schwarzbözl et al., 2020;Merz, 2016) across two elections. This focus allows us to investigate changes in both issue salience and the news media's party-issue linkage which in theory indicate changes in issue ownership and issue competition for both parties and party leaders. ...
Research on issue ownership has placed political parties at the centre of studies. Recent research argues that this focus should be expanded. First, researchers have found that the salience of different political issues is affected by events exogenous to political parties, such as real-world events and societal trends. Second, researchers have pointed to the news media as an additional arena for issue ownership competition and maintenance, making the concept of party-issue linkages in election coverage an additional topic of study. This article contributes to election research by exploring party-issue linkage as an indicator of issue ownership for both political parties and political leaders in the two most recent national Danish elections. Both elections were affected by societal trends and real-world events. Based on large-scale content analysis and using descriptive statistics, we find a clear shift in media saliences from 2019 to 2022. We also find changes in party-issue linkage for both political parties and specific political leaders, especially regarding the most salient issues of the elections. KEYWORDS elections, issue salience, issue competition, news media, agenda setting 2 // M. BLACH-ØRSTEN & M. EBERHOLST
... Economy and social policy are traditional key issues in the political competition of left-wing and right-wing parties in Europe: In many countries, left-wing parties are the issue owners of social policy, while the economy is "owned" by right-wing parties (Schwarzbözl 2020;Wagner and Meyer 2014). The economy is salient in every election campaign, but due to its complexity, it is difficult to "sell" to voters, especially on SNPs where interest in economy-related posts is proven to be low (Bene et al. 2022). ...
Recent scholarship demonstrated that Facebook is a fertile space for populist political communication as its unmediated and viral nature make populist appeals highly efficient in mobilizing voters. However, less attention has been paid to the way these populist messages appear through political actors’ Facebook communication, and what post- and page-level factors they are associated with. We investigate these questions in the context of the 2019 European Parliament election based on a unique cross-national dataset covering twelve European countries. In this study, we categorized 8,074 Facebook posts published on the main Facebook pages of sixty-seven parties. Our findings show that different populist appeals are used in specific ways. For example, at the post level, anti-elitism is frequently used in relation to economy, labor and social policy, and immigration; people-centric appeals are associated with labor and social policy and used when parties call for action, while out-group messages are not related to other topics beyond immigration. “Ideational populist” communication is more frequently articulated in European level and related to the topics of economy and labor and social policy. At the party level, it seems that there are still sharp differences between populist and non-populist parties in their communication.
... A good bunch of analysts have argued that representative democracy depends on political parties providing visible statements about substantive issues, and this makes agenda setting in election campaigns by political parties highly relevant (Schwarzbözl, Fatke, and Hutter 2020). Local government is aptly defined as a sphere of government located within communities and well-placed to appropriately respond to local needs, interests, and expectations of communities (Koma 2010). ...
The emphasis on and centrality of service delivery in political party manifestos brings about an illusion of local government as a de-ideological and value-free sphere of governance. Whilst the focus on service delivery implies a strict pragmatism of sorts, it can be argued that this occurs against a backdrop of prevailing paradigms or frameworks of ideas which determine the parameters for political action even at this sphere of government. Moreover, the emphasis on service delivery in party manifestos gives the impression that political parties are interchangeable as the focus is on pragmatic and ‘neutral’ service provision. The short history of local government in South Africa, however, does have episodes of neoliberal approaches at the municipal level and that past has been ignored. Following the 2021 local government elections, A fair few analysts have advanced the notion that local government is about pragmatism and service delivery and not grand narratives and ideology.
... However, in contrast to their own agenda, they have limited control over media coverage. Therefore, their visibility on specific issues depends on the channel of communication (Tresch et al., 2018; see also Schwarzbözl et al., 2020). Since there are differences between direct and mediated communication, one could expect differences in their persuasive power. ...
During campaigns, parties must defend their reputation of competence on issues to persuade citizens to vote for them (issue ownership). Consequently, what are the most effective strategies to achieve this? I argue that direct (advertising) and indirect (media coverage) communication strategies have different effects on citizens’ perception of party competence. To analyze the impact of campaign dynamics on citizens, I use three data sources: an individual rolling cross-section panel, a media coverage analysis, and a parties’ advertisements analysis. I link those data on a daily basis to capture the dynamics of parties’ communication and citizens' opinion. The results show that advertisements help parties to win and maintain their issue ownership, while media coverage only helps parties to maintain their ownership. The study has scientific and practical implications with regard to party strategy, campaigns, and citizens’ perceptions of parties.
... Interestingly, they also show that public perceptions measured with national surveys correlate at a higher level with manifesto data than with media coverage. Schwarzbözl et al. (2020) demonstrate that issue salience of large parties translates to mass media quite accurately. For small parties, not so much as issue salience but issue ownership plays an important role in their media representation. ...
This study investigates the relationship between environmental attitudes and the ‘greenness’ of party choice, moderated by exposure to environmental problems such as the incidence of natural disasters and poor air quality. The ‘greenness’ of party choice is operationalised as the share of environmental policy in the parties' election manifestos. Voting for greener parties is especially important for environmental protection because greener votes are the keys to national, and eventually, global action mitigating the effects of environmental degradation. The analysis relies on the European Social Survey, the World Values Survey, the Manifesto Project Dataset, the EM-DAT dataset, as well as World Bank data, and covers 139 surveys in 38 countries between 1995 and 2016. Multilevel linear models reveal that voters with greener attitudes chose greener parties, as expected. At the same time, exposure to country-level environmental problems decreases the effect of these attitudes by significantly increasing the green vote cast by citizens not particularly concerned with the environment. It seems that non-environmental attitudes are substituted by environmental problems in increasing the ‘greenness’ of the vote. When people meet bad environmental conditions, they are more willing to take environmental action irrespective of their prior attitudes towards environment protection. This foreshadows an increasing overall emphasis on environmental issues in national party politics as more and more countries are facing the dire consequences of a degrading environment.
... Core Issues (ranging from 0 to 74, theoretical maximum: 100; mean: 27.3 sd: 13.5) accounts for the share of manifesto sentences belonging to the categories associated with the central issues of each party (on which they are seen as competent on: Green, 2011). Taking our cue from recent studies on the related concept of issue ownership (Ceron & Carrara, 2021;Schwarzbözl et al., 2020;Wagner & Meyer, 2014), per each party we derived the list of its core issues based on the attributes of its party family; for the so-called 'Special Issue' parties, we individually assigned to each party the core issues that seemed more crucial for it. Previous studies suggest that issue ownership is quite stable over time and across countries, being a general and long-term rather than a local and short-term phenomenon (Seeberg, 2017). ...
Switches produce a lack of credibility and damage a party's image, signaling weakness and an inability to select loyal MPs and preserve unity. Accordingly, we consider party out‐switching as a valence loss for the party. By combining information on party manifestos with a novel database on 2053 episodes of party switching, we investigate which electoral strategies parties adopt to reduce the negative consequences of such valence loss. Analyzing 1131 manifestos related to 135 parties in 14 Western European democracies, from 1945 to 2015, we show that parties try to restore their positive image by investing on valence, in terms of competence, clarity and core issues. An instrumental variable approach corroborates our results. The findings have implications for spatial modeling, valence politics, issue ownership and issue competition. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
... Since election manifestos are the main party document published only every few years, they attract a large attention in the mass media "from which most voters get their information about party positions" (Schwarzbözl et al. 2019, 1). Previous studies found that especially manifestos from mainstream parties are reported in the media (Schwarzbözl et al. 2019). Furthermore, mainstream parties' demands for popular sovereignty or for cutting privileges for parties and politicians might be even more emphasised by journalists than other stances. ...
This book examines the populist communication of mainstream parties in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain. For a long time, populist and radical right parties have been the main subject of investigation in academic research. Yet, how mainstream parties react to the rise of such actors is less known. Scholars assume a “populist Zeitgeist”, a populist contagion claiming that the political mainstream actively engages in populist and nativist discourses.
The author tests this widespread assumption analyzing whether center-left and center-right mainstream parties adopt populist messages, as well as content related to the leftist and right-wing host ideologies of populist actors. Therefore, this book is a must-read for scholars, students, and researchers of political science and electoral studies, as well as policy-makers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of populism and populist communication.
... For Italy, we recoded Pagella Politica's topics into the same 10-issues classification adopted in the United States (plus one additional issue for European Union topics). We ascribed ownership following existing studies (Schwarzbözl et al., 2019) and focusing on party families as suggested in the literature (Budge and Farlie, 1983). We assigned welfare to social-democratic and left parties (Free and Equal or Left Ecology Freedom, LEU or SEL, and the Democratic Party, PD), which have traditionally owned this issue. ...
This article develops a reputational theory of political falsehoods. Politicians are motivated by the desire to build a positive reputation, therefore, they will be more likely to deliver false statements (incurring the risk of being fact-checked) when the potential benefit outweighs the cost. This happens as new elections come closer, since the electoral benefit of falsehoods increases along with the probability of being checked too late (after the election day). Politicians are less likely to issue falsehoods in detailed statements and in scripted communication, since the reputational cost is higher because such falsehoods would be considered intentional. Conversely, the stronger trust that voters attribute to politicians on issues they own, allows politicians to lie on such topics. Statistical analysis of almost 8000 statements released by politicians and assessed by fact-checkers, in the United States and Italy (2007–2018), supports the hypotheses. The results hold irrespective of party affiliation.
... Political Science. The inter-linkage of public (newspaper) debates and party documents is currently widely investigated (Schwarzbözl et al., 2019;Haselmayer et al., 2019;Merz, 2018). Political parties rely on mass media to distribute their declarations of intent to the voter (Robertson, 1976;Bara, 2006), who in turn holds the party responsible for the promises made (American Political Science Association, 1950;Thomassen, 1994;Adams, 2001, for a critical discussion see Mair, 2009). ...
Issue salience – the attention a party devotes to an issue – in electoral manifestos remains understudied at the local level. This paper studies three potential determinants of issue salience: contextual responsiveness (parties emphasize topics important to voters), party‐issue associations (parties emphasize the same issues across time and settings), and parties' expertise (parties emphasize complex issues only if they have sufficient expertise). This paper uses a dictionary approach to measure the salience of social services in the over 6,600 available electoral manifestos for Dutch municipal elections between 2014 and 2022. To operationalize voters' priorities, party‐issue associations and parties' expertise, these data have been linked with data on demographic ‘indicators of need’, party affiliation, the salience of social services in national party manifestos, and individual politicians. Mixed effects models show that contextual responsiveness and party‐issue associations affect the salience of social services in electoral manifestos, while parties' expertise plays no role.
This study offers a novelty specifying climate change as the legislation results in the European Parliament (EP) as an indicator of the consistency of political groups in realising their Euromanifestos. The article aims to investigate precisely the prospects and future of climate change policies in the EU post the 2019 general election. This study adopted qualitative legal research methods by studying the Euromanifestos of political groups in the European Union that competed in the 2019 European elections. Environmental issues, particularly climate change, were a significant focus in the study of these manifestos. Based on data from Euromanifesto, this study selected five EU Regulations as indicators of realising such political promises. In addition, the record of legislation and the results of voting during the establishment of the regulation was also applied as a data source in this study. In general, the cohesion between political groups in the EP is excellent. Based on a manifesto study, there are three essential findings; namely, most political groups in the EP make environmental issues, especially climate change, a politicised issue in elections. The second finding is that there are specific intersections between political groups, so it has implications for making the issue of climate change a common interest, and the results of the vote showed that a majority of Member of European Parliament members supported the establishment of the regulation. Finally, the solidarity of the EP political group cohesion in establishing regulations related to climate change is the last finding in this research.
This article investigates the influence of electoral manifestos on the online communication of electoral candidates. Our study addresses electoral candidates’ conflict between party discipline and individual issue prioritisation. Building on the salience framework, we examine the thematic congruence between manifestos and online communication. Moreover, we test which issues are emphasised during the 2017 German federal election campaign. To this end, we created an original topic dictionary based on party manifestos. Applying the dictionary, we classify 143,969 tweets by 797 candidates. Our analyses demonstrate that manifestos shape the online communication of electoral candidates substantially. The findings show that electoral candidates of left–wing parties focus on core issues over time. Our results not only highlight the authority of party leadership, but also suggest that politicians do not tap the whole potential of online communication.
Social media are important for right-wing parties to communicate with and mobilize potential voters in election campaigns. Our study focuses on the Facebook campaigns of right-wing parties in six European countries and aims to understand which issues were transnationally shared and which ones emphasize national perspectives on the agenda of the populist actors. We ask what context conditions on the party- and country-level determine the individual issue agendas. Using structural topic modelling, we analyze the communication of the Austrian FPÖ, the German AfD, the French RN, the Italian Lega, the Polish PiS, and the Swedish SD during the 2019 EP election campaign. To explain their issue agendas, we run logistic regression models testing the influence of country-specific and party-specific factors. Our analyses establish that while right-wing parties across Europe are similar in pushing a few populist issues like blaming elites and immigration, they still engage in campaigning on national politics.
On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political contents citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors’ Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visibility. This study introduces the concept of self-centered social media communication style which focuses on “salient” and “owned” issues with populist and negative appeals and investigates how user engagement is related to its main elements. We also explore how
users’ receptivity to these content-related factors is shaped by country context. More specifically, we hypothesize that users are more likely to react, comment on and share posts focusing on salient topics or issues “owned” by parties rather than more permanent policy issues, and posts including populist appeals and negativity. Further, we test how
these effects are moderated by geographical regions and the level of party system polarization. We manually coded 9,703 Facebook posts of 68 parties from 12 European countries in the context of the 2019 European elections. Our findings show that users are more likely to engage with immigration-related, domestic, populist and negative posts, but react less to posts dealing with environmental or economic issues. While issue ownership does not play a significant role for user engagement, country context plays a minor role. However, some populist appeals are more effective in more polarized countries.
The 2019 Swiss national elections were characterized by the unusual prominence of two issues, environment and gender, whereas two staples of Swiss politics, immigration and Europe, were less dominant compared to previous elections. We study how, in this context, the media and party agenda were linked to issue ownership. Specifically, we consider whether political parties that own an issue could lead the media agenda and the agenda of other parties. Our analysis relies on all tweets and press releases of major Swiss political parties from January to October 2019 and 37,225 newspaper articles published during the same period. Results show, first, that the agenda-setting capacity of parties was restricted to the gender issue, and second, that the link between issue ownership and agenda setting is ambiguous. These findings suggest that during election campaigns, agenda setting may be largely exogenous to both parties and media.
La campaña de las elecciones autonómicas de la Comunitat Valenciana (España) de 2019 planteó un escenario inédito a las fuerzas de centro-derecha: los sondeos apuntaban a un necesario pacto poselectoral que incluía a Vox, formación de extrema derecha. Esta investigación analiza la participación del Partido Popular (PP) y Ciudadanos (Cs) en tres debates electorales mediante técnicas de análisis de contenido y de análisis funcional. Los resultados señalan que tanto PP como Cs coincidieron en plantear temas tradicionalmente presentes en la retórica de la derecha valenciana pero que, al mismo tiempo, implicaban una sustitución de la agenda autonómica por la estatal. Además, Cs atacó en más ocasiones al PP que a la inversa. El estudio permite subrayar que la importancia del marco estatal en el discurso de los partidos revela que la agenda autonómica quedó relegada, mientras que se observa una calculada estrategia de interpelación entre ambas formaciones que busca marcar distancias sin dinamitar futuras alianzas y alejar el fantasma de la extrema derecha como eslabón necesario.
This chapter illustrates the findings of the quantitative content analyses of mainstream parties’ communication. It provides longitudinal data regarding the degrees of populist (anti-elitist and people-centred), nativist (anti-outgroups and anti-immigration) and leftist (against economic elites/actors) messages. In what follows, I present the results for the analysis of the election manifestos (4.1) and of the public statements from mainstream parties’ websites (4.2). I do so by illustrating the development of populist, nativist and leftist messages over time using descriptive statistics and correlation models.
Social media is an important information outlet and a new political landscape for politicians. In fact, politicians use social media to promote their candidacies while running for office. In this paper, we discuss about an application prototype built to measure the closeness of a candidate electoral manifesto to hers/his online campaign. We use four different similarity measures on the resulting frequency arrays obtained by processing manifestos and timelines. We show our results tracking the 2019 Ecuadorian Sectional Elections based on data collected from candidates’ timelines on Twitter during the campaign and their official campaign manifestos.
Social media is an important information outlet and a new political landscape for politicians. In fact, politicians use social media to promote their candidacies while running for office. In this paper, we discuss about an application prototype built to measure the closeness of a candidate electoral manifesto to hers/his online campaign. In particular, we show our results tracking the 2019 Ecuadorian Sectional Elections based on data collected from candidates’ timelines on Twitter during the campaign and their official campaign manifestos. We configured our application to gather information from Major candidates in the city of Quito during the 2019 Ecuadorian Sectional Elections. This prototype collected Tweets into a relational database based on each candidate’s Twitter account. For this campaign, 18 candidates run for office. From these, we gathered 17 electoral manifestos and fed them to our application. Both, tweets and manifestos were preprocessed in order to produce a high dimensional word vector describing the collected timelines of each candidate and his/her manifesto. Later, the cosine similarity was used to compare a candidate political plan against hers or his digital campaign. Our results suggest that candidates drift from their electoral manifestos during social media campaigns. We discuss possible reasons for our results and pave the path for future research.
This comprehensive study of party competition in Europe since 2008 aids understanding of the recent, often dramatic, changes taking place in European politics. It addresses how the multiple crises that Europe faces have affected the intensity and structure of party competition, and whether we are seeing a wave of 'critical elections' which will reshape European politics for years to come. The geographical scope of the book covers fifteen European countries, including cases from North-Western Europe (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland), Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain), and Central-Eastern Europe (Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Romania). Using original data from a large-scale content analysis of mass media, and the debates among parties in election campaigns, this book provides clear graphical presentations of the results, appealing to a wide readership of students, scholars, journalists, practitioners, and the politically interested public.
Recently, the concept of issue ownership has attracted increasing attention by students of electoral behaviour as well as party competition. However, both the definition and measurement of issue ownership—often drawn from Petrocik’s seminal 1996-article—is unclear. This constitutes a serious drawback to the further development and understanding of issue ownership itself and its purported effects. The paper addresses these problems by, first, establishing a definition of issue ownership at the individual level. On this basis, the standard ‘which party is best at handling issue X’ measure of issue ownership is assessed. The analyses using experiments embedded in a nationally representative panel survey indicate that the measure lacks validity and is partially redundant. Consequently, its replacement with a better performing alternative is recommended.
Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general.
Issue ownership, or the idea that some parties are considered by the public to be better able or more committed to dealing with specific issues, is increasingly used in studies of electoral choice. Yet, various scholars have argued that if measures of issue ownership are confounded with party choice, this raises concerns regarding their usability to predict electoral choice. This research note examines to what extent various measures of issue ownership are confounded with voters’ party preferences and voters’ agreement with the party's position on the issue. Relying on an online survey-embedded question wording experiment fielded in two countries (Belgium and Denmark), question wording effects for two dimension of issue ownership are examined: competence issue ownership and associative issue ownership. It is found that, in both countries, the two associative issue ownership measures were less affected by party preference and positional agreement. The most used competence issue ownership measures are most confounded with party choice and positional agreement in the experiment. Results in the two countries are largely similar, the main exception being that one of the two associative measures performs worse in Denmark. The results imply that scholars should take care in using measures of especially competence issue ownership to predict the vote, but that also country differences affect the validity of issue ownership measures.
How do individual politicians use the news media to reach their political goals? This study addresses the question by proposing an actor-centered, functional approach. We distinguish 2 essential functions (and subfunctions) the mass media have for political elites. The media are a source of information; politicians depend on it for pure information and they can profit from the momentum generated by media information. The media also are an arena elites need access to in order to promote themselves and their issues. These 2 functions offer certain politicians a structural advantage over others and, hence, are relevant for the power struggle among political elites. A systematic functional account enables comparisons of the role of the media across politicians and political systems.
Why do political parties prioritize some policy issues over others? While the issue ownership theory suggests that parties emphasize policy issues on which they have an advantage to increase the salience of these issues among voters, the riding the wave theory instead argues that parties respond to voters by highlighting policy issues that are salient in the minds of citizens. This study sheds new light on the selective issue emphasis of political parties by analyzing issue attention throughout the entire electoral cycle. On the basis of a quantitative text analysis of more than 40,000 press releases published by German parties from 2000 until 2010, this article provides empirical support for the riding the wave theory. We show that political parties take their cues from voters by responding to the issue priorities of their electorate. Our results have important implications for political representation and the role that parties play in democracies.
Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation.
We present a new method to analyze party manifestos to benefit the placement of political parties
per se
and to advance the study of elections. Our method improves on existing manual coding approaches by (1) generating semantically complete units based on syntax, (2) standardizing units into a subject–predicate–object structure, and (3) employing a fine-grained and flexible hierarchical coding scheme. We evaluate our approach by comparing estimates for the 2002, 2006, and 2008 Austrian national elections with those yielded by previous studies that employ the entire range of available measurement strategies. We also demonstrate how we link our new manifesto data with other kind of data produced in theAustrian National Election Study, especially mass and elite (party candidate) surveys.
Studies on news values have provided many insights into what gets reported in the media. In this study we use the concept of news values to examine how journalists perceive the newsworthiness of party messages. Taking an innovative approach, fictional party press releases are used to test for the influence of five important news values in the context of political news in a factorial survey experiment. This allows us to study those news values in relation to one another in a controlled experimental setting, an advantage over traditional gatekeeping studies. Political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands were asked to indicate whether they would consider these press releases for reporting or not. Findings show that the power status of the party, unexpectedness, and the magnitude of the political action announced influence journalists’ perception of newsworthiness. Messages from parties that were part of government were more likely to be selected for coverage in the Netherlands, whereas the party did not matter in Switzerland, where power is distributed more evenly. This shows that political system characteristics influence the work of journalists. Opposed to results from content analyses of news output, some news values (personal status, conflict) did not prove to be relevant. In the conclusion section we elaborate on potential explanations.
Against democratic deficits of European Union (EU) governance, recent literature emphasizes the communicative function of national parliaments. Yet, arguments from the broader EU politicization literature have been only rarely applied to public parliamentary debates. This article integrates arguments about supranational authority and partisan competition as key drivers of debates on the EU and tests respective implications by an automated text analysis that retrieves EU references in all 1,393 plenary debates of the German Bundestag during 1991-2013. A panel analysis identifies authority transfers as the strongest predictor for EU salience in the plenary. EU references furthermore increase with supranational policy output, public EU visibility, and a differentiating public opinion. With regard to partisan emphasis, mainstream and particularly governing parties push European issues in the German Bundestag.
The literature on media appearances of political actors have repeatedly documented the so-called “incumbency bonus”, meaning that parties and politicians in government have more media coverage than those of the opposition. This bias is normally attributed to news criteria that reflect political power, such as relevance and the elite status of actors. Supplementing existing perspectives, this study puts forward a new explanation of the incumbency bonus. We argue that variations in the media dominance of incumbents are the result of the interplay between journalistic norms and political context. Outside election campaigns, political news is driven by the “watch dog” norm. Thus, the media focus on societal problems, and this produces a critical emphasis on incumbent actors. But when party competition intensifies, either during campaigns or when issues become salient, the norm of objective and impartial journalism results in a more balanced coverage where challengers increase their presence. The argument receives support through multivariate models of incumbent and challenger appearances in Danish radio news broadcasts over a 20-year period. Finally, in terms of democratic implications, the importance of the watch dog norm challenges the assumption that the incumbency bonus constitutes an electoral asset. Media dominance is closely related to the government’s responsibility for all kinds of problems, and thus, we find that incumbent support dwindles with increases in their media appearances.
What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers of the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.
Issue ownership is commonly conceptualized as multidimensional, consisting of a “competence” dimension and an “associative” dimension. Because existing operationalizations of issue ownership tap
only the former dimension, we focus on associative issue ownership: the spontaneous identification between specific issues and specific parties in the minds of voters. Survey evidence from Belgium shows that the associative dimension of issue ownership can be measured, that it differs from competence issue ownership, and that it is an independent determinant of voting behavior.
What determines how ‘European’ a party’s manifesto is? This article examines the salience of European issues in national parties’ Euromanifestos during the 1979–2004 period. I argue that domestic politics, including voter, party, and party system factors, influence the European content of a party’s Euromanifesto. Using data from the Euromanifestos Project for 14 member states, I find that the differential emphasis on European issues in the national party system, intra-party dissent on European integration, voter ambivalence on membership of the European Union, and party type all influence the salience of European issues in a party’s manifesto. These findings have important implications for understanding both how parties use manifestos to manipulate the political agenda and the dimensions of contestation in elections to the European Parliament.
Political parties have substantial influence on which issues the news media cover during election campaigns, while the media have limited influence on party agendas. However, we know little about why some parties are more successful than others in passing the media’s gates and being covered on sponsored issues. On the basis of content analyses of election news coverage (812 news stories) and press releases published by political parties (N = 334) during the 2007 national election campaign in Denmark, we analyse which parties were successful in appearing in the news on issues on which they published press releases. Using Sartori’s notion of relevant parties, we conclude that the more relevant parties have more success, that there is a positive spillover effect from other parties' press releases, but also a negative interaction effect between a party’s own and other parties' press releases. The results are discussed with respect to their generalizability and arising challenges for future research.
In times of increasing “mediatization” of politics, when voters and their elected representatives primarily communicate through the media, the question of who gets into the news and why becomes of the utmost importance. This article examines the determinants of Swiss legislators' presence and prominence in the print media by focusing on three competing approaches drawn from communication studies. The first approach regards the media as a “mirror” of political reality and argues that the media focus on the most active deputies in parliament. Second, news values theory predicts that “authoritative” politicians in leadership positions get the most media coverage. Third, theories of “news bias” hold that the media privilege legislators who are in line with their own editorial interests. Overall, the statistical analyses show an important leadership effect and provide strong support for the second explanation. While deputies in official functions get the most extensive news coverage, media access can also be won by parliamentary activity. The least support is shown for the news bias theory, although some newspapers try to localize parliamentary news coverage by focusing on deputies from their own media market.
This study focuses on a central question in the literature on policy agendas and punctuated equilibrium: why are some agendas more punctuated than others, and what causes these punctuations? In particular, is it friction – wherein barriers to change lead to the build-up of tension that finally overflows – or rather cascades that occur owing to positive feedback loops as actors imitate other actors? We hypothesize that both are at work, and that under certain conditions – e.g., the number of actors and the amount of communication between them – one mechanism is stronger than the other. We test our hypotheses with data on parliamentary activities (interpellations and oral questions) and media coverage in Belgium in the 1990s. We find evidence of both friction and cascading contributing independently to the typical punctuated pattern of policy agendas.
Why and how do candidates choose the issues on which their campaigns are based? Drawing on a large database of candidate advertisements from the 1998 House and Senate campaigns, extant theories of issue emphasis, which focus on factors such as party ownership and candidate record, are tested here and these theories are expanded by examining in more detail the role of constituency characteristics. Most notably, party ownership's impact is demonstrated to be weak: candidates are more willing to ‘trespass’ or talk about the other party's issues than previous literature has found. Also ‘trespassing’ is shown to be facilitated by framing the other party's issues in certain ways. The results have implications for theories of candidate strategy and for normative questions, such as how much ‘dialogue’ occurs in campaigns.
The issue yield model introduced a theory of the herestethic use of policy issues as strategic resources in multidimensional party competition. We extend the model by systematically addressing the specificities of issue yield dynamics in multiparty systems, with special regard to parties’ issue yield rankings (relative position) and issue yield heterogeneity (differentiation) on each issue. Second, we introduce a novel research design for original data collection that allows for a more systematic testing of the model, by featuring (a) a large number of policy issues, (b) the use of Twitter content for coding parties’ issue emphasis, and (c) an appropriate time sequence for measuring issue yield configurations and issue emphasis. We finally present findings from a pilot implementation of such design, performed on the occasion of the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy. Findings confirm the soundness of the design and provide support for the newly introduced hypotheses about multiparty competition.
The article studies whether and how negative campaigning is a successful strategy for attaining media attention. It combines extensive content analyses of party and news texts with public opinion surveys to study the success of individual press releases in making the news. The empirical analysis draws on 1496 party press releases and 6512 news reports in all national media outlets during the final 6 weeks of Austria’s 2013 general election campaign. We find that negative campaigning is a successful strategy to attract the attention of journalists and editors. It is particularly relevant for rank-and-file politicians, who lack the intrinsic news value of high public or party office, and for messages that focus on a rival’s best issues. These findings have broader implications for understanding party strategies and ‘negativity bias’ in the news.
For many citizens, news media are the most important source of information about relevant political topics and actors. As a consequence, it is crucial to investigate who gains media coverage and why. Leaning on two classic news sourcing criteria, suitability and availability, we claim that issue owners can be seen as good news sources. By combining a content analysis of television news with data collected through a journalist survey, we investigate whether issue ownership is a determinant of political parties’ news coverage. Results confirm that issue ownership is a predictor of parties’ news coverage, even when controlling for ministerial competences.
This paper develops a difference-in-semielasticities (DIS) interpretation for the coefficients of dichotomous variable interaction terms in nonlinear models with exponential conditional mean functions, including but not limited to Poisson, Negative Binomial, and log linear models. We show why these interaction term coefficients cannot be interpreted as a DIS or semielasticity in the same manner as continuous coefficients, which has been overlooked by some empirical researchers. Then we show how interaction terms can be easily transformed into a DIS and derive the asymptotic distribution of this estimator. We illustrate the discrepancy between the interaction term coefficient and the DIS using an empirical example evaluating the relationship between employment, private health insurance and physician office visits. Our results can be applied in treatment effect models when the outcome variable is logged and the dichotomous variables indicating treatment participation and the post-treatment time period. © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Bulletin of Economic Research and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
A widely noted and oft-decried characteristic of campaigns in the United States is the tendency of the competing sides to talk past each other-to avoid engaging with one another on the same issues. We bring a massive database on statements by the major-party presidential candidates and other campaign spokespersons in the 1960 through 2000 elections to bear on the question of issue convergence. Far from the exception, a high degree of similarity in the issue emphases of the two sides appears to have been the norm in these campaigns. This result suggests the need to rethink some influential empirical, formal, and normative perspectives on campaigns.
The mass media are central in providing citizens with information on political parties and issues. This study deals with the question of how the mass media link issues to parties in their news coverage. Such party–issue linkages in the media are crucial if parties want to gain or maintain ownership of political issues. The study tests hypotheses according to which journalists use parties’ issue emphases and issue positions as a heuristic to decide which party to give voice to when debating certain issues. It combines and analyzes datasets based on electoral programs and election news coverage of national elections in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK between 1991 and 2007. It finds that journalists link issues with parties that emphasized these issues in the past or increased their emphasis at the current election. In contrast, issue positioning does not effect party–issue linkages. These findings contradict past research on the reflection of parties’ issue emphasis in media coverage, and have important implications for parties’ issue strategies, party competition, and the role of mass media in democracy.
Issue ownership theory expects political parties to focus their campaigns on ‘owned’ issues for which they have a reputation of competence and a history of attention, and to avoid issues that play to the advantage of their opponents. However, recent empirical studies show that parties often campaign on the same issues. The literature has suggested several factors to account for this behavior, but has mostly neglected that issue emphasis strategies can vary across campaign communication channels and parties. Based on a quantitative content analysis of the manifestos and press releases of all seven parties competing in the 2009 regional elections in Flanders (Belgium), we make two contributions. First, we show that while there is some consistency in parties’ issue priorities, they do not necessarily set the same issue priorities in their different campaign communication channels. Second, it appears that parties follow different strategies depending on their standing in the polls, and, to a lesser degree, according to their position in government or in opposition.
I argue that citizens alter their views of candidates’ ideological and issue positions in response to two kinds of information cues: issue ownership and issue position cues. Issue ownership cues associate a candidate with the party that owns the issue discussed by a candidate. Issue position cues associate a candidate with the party that is linked to the position that the candidate discusses. These cues can either lead citizens to view the candidate as more or less extreme—both in terms of ideological and issue position assessments—than that candidate’s party. When both types of cues are present, citizens should ignore the issue ownership cues in favor of the easier-to-process issue position cues. Evidence from a survey experiment embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study provides strong support for this theory and suggests that issue ownership can convey positional information.
Issue ownership theory posits a positive relationship between electoral support and public attention to issues that a party “owns;” that is, issues that the party is perceived to be best at handling. We investigate this key prediction of the issue ownership theory in a dynamic analysis of 20 years of party support and media coverage across multiple parties and issues. The results provide support for the basic electoral implication of issue ownership theory, showing that increased media attention to owned issues increases support for the issue owners. Furthermore, the article argues theoretically and demonstrates empirically that the effect of the ownership mechanism materializes differently for opposition and government parties, respectively. Opposition parties benefit from media attention to owned issues without losing ground when news concentrates on issues owned by government parties. While for government parties, media priming of issue ownership at best serves to curb the vote loss that always accompanies office. Thus, we find that incumbents suffer electorally when news about opposition-owned issues increases without gaining support when the media agenda is ‘issue-friendly’. This conditionality holds important implications for how we understand and study party competition.
The ongoing process of integration in Europe has fundamentally altered the political environment in which the political parties of the EU member states find themselves. European integration has produced new political issues, which cannot always be easily accommodated into existing cleavage structures, as the preceding chapters reveal. It has also changed the political opportunity structure – parties may play these new issues up or they may play them down. In this chapter, we analyze why some national political parties have stressed European integration, while others have refrained from doing so. An analysis of the salience of European integration at the party level is important for several reasons. First, it speaks directly to the topic of contestation. A prerequisite for contestation is that political actors are willing to debate an issue – there is a willingness to give the issue a modicum of salience. To what extent do political parties show such willingness? Second, salience is also critical for understanding representation in the EU. Van der Eijk and Franklin (1996; this volume; see also Reif and Schmitt 1980) have observed that European elections are rarely about the scope and nature of integration, even though at the level of the electorate a contestation potential exists. This may be a contributing factor to the so-called democratic deficit of the EU. The lack of European content in European elections may be due to an unwillingness or inability of parties to raise integration above a critical salience threshold.
Americans consistently name Republicans as the party better at handling issues like national security and crime, while they trust Democrats on issues like education and the environment – a phenomenon called “issue ownership.” Partisan Priorities investigates the origins of issue ownership, showing that in fact the parties deliver neither superior performance nor popular policies on the issues they “own.” Rather, Patrick J. Egan finds that Republicans and Democrats simply prioritize their owned issues with lawmaking and government spending when they are in power. Since the parties tend to be particularly ideologically rigid on the issues they own, politicians actually tend to ignore citizens' preferences when crafting policy on these issues. Thus, issue ownership distorts the relationship between citizens' preferences and public policies.
This book explores the political implications of the human tendency to prioritize negative information over positive information. Drawing on literatures in political science, psychology, economics, communications, biology, and physiology, this book argues that “negativity biases” should be evident across a wide range of political behaviors. These biases are then demonstrated through a diverse and cross-disciplinary set of analyses, for instance: in citizens' ratings of presidents and prime ministers; in aggregate-level reactions to economic news, across 17 countries; in the relationship between covers and newsmagazine sales; and in individuals' physiological reactions to network news content. The pervasiveness of negativity biases extends, this book suggests, to the functioning of political institutions - institutions that have been designed to prioritize negative information in the same way as the human brain.
How strongly is European integration being politicised in election campaigns, and what explains why a party chooses to emphasise Europe or, by contrast, remains silent about it? This article provides a systematic assessment of the salience of European integration in domestic election campaigns, tracking its development from the 1990s to the 2000s across six Western European countries based on media content analysis data. The findings show that the salience of Europe in election campaigns is actually rather limited when put into perspective by benchmarking it against other political issues. Moreover, ideological determinants are crucial in explaining European integration issue-emphasis. In particular, the more culturally conservative a party, the stronger its emphasis on Europe; the impact of the economic left–right divide, by contrast, is weaker and more ambiguous. However, Europe remains in the shadow of its twin issue, immigration, which shares a similar issue-emphasis pattern yet is more attractive to these culturally conservative parties.
It is easier for voters to make informed electoral choices when parties talk about the same issues. Yet, parties may decide against such “issue engagement.” We hypothesize that issue engagement between parties is more likely (a) when the similarity of their policy positions means that both parties have clear
electoral incentives
to talk about the same topics and (b) when parties face few
organizational constraints
in terms of campaign resources. Our empirical analysis of 2453 press releases by Austrian parties shows that ideological proximity and party resources affect the level of issue engagement. These findings suggest that issue engagement is less likely precisely where it is needed most, which has important implications for understanding the democratic quality of election campaigns.
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.
Saliency approaches derive from the basic idea that political parties define their policies by emphasising certain topics more than others, particularly in public documents and debates. However, the approaches diverge on whether parties always emphasise the same ‘owned’ issues or can emphasise different ones in different elections with a view to winning votes. The article explores the way these differences developed and summarises them in a typology of ‘issue ownerships’, within which models linking ‘ownership’ to election outcomes can be located.
The empirical evidence concerning the ‘personalization of politics' thesis is, at best, mixed. The analysis of a new data-set on the media coverage of national elections in six Western European countries serves to reinforce this overall rather sceptical conclusion. The analysis shows that, in the national elections in the six countries covered (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom [UK]), there is no general trend to increasing personalization or increasing concentration of the media coverage on a limited set of particularly visible personalities. Among the six countries, the exception to this overall assessment is the Netherlands, where we find both a trend towards increasing personalization and increasing concentration of the public attention on a limited set of personalities. Rather than an increasing level of personalization, what we generally observe are large country-specific differences in the overall degree of personalization and of the concentration of attention on the top candidates.
Party system issue agendas are formed by the topics that individual parties decide to address, and these salience decisions are likely to be strategic. Two key strategies are commonly discussed in the literature: parties’ focus on (1) issues that they have ownership over and (2) issues that currently concern voters. Yet it is not known what explains the extent to which parties pursue each of these strategies. This paper argues that aspects of party organisation influence which salience strategy is pursued. Parties that have more resources will be able to ‘ride the wave’ of current concerns while parties with fewer resources are more likely to focus on their best issues. Furthermore, policy-seeking parties with strong activist influence will be less likely to ‘ride the wave’ and more likely to follow issue ownership strategies. An analysis of 105 election manifestos from 27 elections in 17 countries shows that aspects of party organisation are indeed strong and robust moderators of issue ownership strategies. Limited, albeit mixed, evidence is also found that party organisation affects the use of ‘riding the wave’ strategies. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party competition and voter representation.
A substantial literature claims that political parties compete over issues by selectively emphasizing favorable issues and avoiding issues emphasized by their opponents. In recent years, this understanding of issue competition has been challenged by empirical studies showing issue engagement to be the rule rather than the exception. To move the discussion beyond the descriptive question about degree of issue avoidance or issue engagement, this article offers a theoretical framework of issue competition that addresses central but hitherto neglected questions about which parties respond to which parties. The main implications of the theoretical framework are tested in a set of statistical time-series analyses of party interaction in Denmark covering more than 50 years, 24 major issues and 21 elections. These analyses offer support to the ideas that parties are more responsive to the issue agendas of parties from their own party family than to the issue agendas of non-family parties and that large mainstream parties are more responsive than niche parties to the common issue agenda of the other parties in the party system.
This study addresses the dynamics of the issue space in multiparty systems by examining to what extent, and under what conditions, parties respond to the issue ownership of other parties on the green issue. To understand why some issues become part and parcel of the political agenda in multiparty systems, it is crucial not only to examine the strategies of issue entrepreneurs, but also the responses of other parties. It is argued that the extent to which other parties respond to, rather than ignore, the issue mobilisation of green parties depends on two factors: how much of an electoral threat the green party poses to a specific party; and the extent to which the political and economic context makes the green issue a potential vote winner. To analyse the evolution of the green issue, a time-series cross-section analysis is conducted using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project for 19 West European countries from 1980–2010. The findings have important implications for understanding issue evolution in multiparty systems and how and why the dynamics of party competition on the green issue vary across time and space.
An overview of American and European research on the concept of news factors in news selection shows some theoretical and methodological problems, which can be reduced to four dimensions. First, it is discussed whether an apolitical model of news selection should be supplemented by a functional perspective. Second, the epistemological question of defining `an event' and its consequences for the concept of news factors are considered. Third, the validity of the theory is examined by a closer look at the operation of independent and dependent variables in various empirical studies. Fourth, the degree of universality of the concept of news factors is analysed.
This article contributes to the vast literature concerning extreme right parties in Western Europe by examining the effects of crime on the electoral success of these parties. Utilizing theories of issue ownership and political opportunity, this article argues that populist right parties appeal to voters who feel a sense of physical and social insecurity because of higher levels of crime. This hypothesis is tested using a data set covering 18 Western European countries between 1970 and 2005. The results indicate that populist right parties benefit from higher levels of crime as well as linking crime with higher levels of immigration. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this analysis.
Saliency theory is among the most influential accounts of party competition, not least in providing the theoretical framework for the Comparative Manifesto Project – one of the most widely used data collections in comparative politics. Despite its prominence, not all empirical implications of the saliency theory of party competition have yet been systematically tested. This article addresses five predictions of saliency theory, the central claim of which is that parties compete by selective issue emphasis rather than by direct confrontation. Since a fair test of the theory's assumptions needs to rely on data that measures party issue saliency and party positions independently, this article draws on new manifesto data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). Analysing all manifestos issued for the 2002, 2006 and 2008 general elections, it shows that saliency theory correctly identifies some features of party competition. For instance, parties disproportionally emphasise issues they ‘own’. Yet, the core assumption of saliency theory that parties compete via selective issue emphasis rather than direct confrontation over the same issues fails to materialise in the majority of cases.
I argue that the issue-handling reputations that underlie the theory of “issue ownership” affect the favorability of news coverage toward U.S. presidential candidates. A large-scale content analysis of newspaper coverage from the 1992, 1996, and 2000 elections shows that candidates are covered more positively when the news focuses on issues their party “owns” than on “opposition” issues. Democrats benefit particularly from news about social welfare topics. Republicans, meanwhile, receive the most favorable coverage in defense and tax stories. The differences are modest, but consistent, across the 3 election years. The findings suggest that candidates have an additional incentive to focus on owned issues and that the news media play a role in perpetuating issue ownership.
Claims regarding the power of the mass media in contemporary politics are much more frequent than research actually analysing the influence of mass media on politics. Building upon the notion of issue ownership, this article argues that the capacity of the mass media to influence the respective agendas of political parties is conditioned upon the interests of the political parties. Media attention to an issue generates attention from political parties when the issue is one that political parties have an interest in politicizing in the first place. The argument of the article is supported in a time-series study of mass media influence on the opposition parties’ agenda in Denmark over a twenty-year period.