Avoidance and engagement: Do societal problems fuel political parties’ issue attention?

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882110664
Author(s):  
Henrik Bech Seeberg
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Attention Allocation ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Central Source ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
Societal Problems

An important part of political parties’ competition for votes is to what extent parties avoid or engage the issues that rival parties talk about. Despite a large literature on this topic, it remains largely unknown when parties engage. Drawing on research on political attention allocation and party behaviour, this study argues that societal problems are a central source of issue engagement: The engagement is due to a pressure to not ignore electorally important problems. The analysis shows that issue engagement emerges because parties address the same issues in a negative development. Moreover, and particularly important for the issue engagement, parties attend more to a negative development if other parties already attend to the development, particularly at elections. The argument is tested across 16 issue areas through the collection and coding of 5523 press releases from seven parties in Denmark at a quarterly level from 2004 to 2017.

scholarly journals Looking for the party? The effects of partisan change on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Bevan ◽  
Zachary Greene
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Partisan Change ◽  
Use Of Data ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Stability

Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament, this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’ organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.

scholarly journals Quality of Understanding in Communication among and between Political Parties, Mass Media, and Citizens: An Empirical Study of the 2013 Austrian National Election

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Uta Russmann
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
National Election ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
Newspaper Articles

The study investigates the extent to which political parties, the mass media, and citizens follow qualitative principles demanded by the public sphere concept in political campaign communications. Using the index of a quality of understanding (IQU), it analyses the press releases and Facebook posts of political parties, newspaper articles, and responses by citizens in the form of comments in newspaper forums and on parties’ Facebook pages (N=7,525) during the 2013 Austrian national election. Considering that the quality of understanding of public discourse is measured on a 100-point scale, which serves as a benchmark representing perfect understanding, observed real-world values are often rather low. Austrian political parties scored the highest IQU of 28.35 points, and hence can be described as most closely following the principles of an ideal communication orientation. The quality of understanding is the lowest in everyday political discussion on Facebook, where political parties’ posts have an IQU of 17.97 points. The difference of 10.38 points to the highest achieved value of 28.35 reveals different deliberative communication practices between well-considered and strategically formulated communication in press releases as well as newspaper articles and everyday communication including citizens’ comments on Facebook and newspaper articles, which take different configurations.

The Dynamics of the Party System Agenda

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-81
Author(s):  
Christoffer Green-Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Multidimensional Scaling ◽  
Party System ◽  
Distinct Group ◽  
Analytical Strategy ◽  
Education And Health ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Eu

This chapter first addresses the question of whether the 23 issues included in the book can be reduced to a few dimensions in order to study attention to these dimensions. Such an approach would be very much in line with studies focusing on positional competition among political parties. To discuss this further, the chapter presents the results of a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis for each country based on the correlations of the 23 issues presented. MDS is a way of analysing whether groups of issues grow or decline together over time, which indicates that they are driven by similar attention dynamics. The MDS analysis does not find that issues argued to belong to the new, second dimension constitute a distinct group of issues in terms of issue attention dynamics. The chapter furthermore presents the reasons for studying immigration, the EU, the environment, education, and health care in the following chapters, including the ‘nested’ analytical strategy that will be pursued.

scholarly journals Who responds to protest? Protest politics and party responsiveness in Western Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swen Hutter ◽  
Rens Vliegenthart
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Setting Approach ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
Issue Competition ◽  
Do So

This article addresses the questions of whether and why political parties respond to media-covered street protests. To do so, it adopts an agenda-setting approach and traces issue attention in protest politics and parliament over several years in four West European countries (France, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The article innovates in two ways. First, it does not treat the parties in parliament as a unitary actor but focuses on the responses of single parties. Second, partisan characteristics are introduced that might condition the effect of protest on parliamentary activity. More precisely, it assesses the explanatory power of ideological factors (left-right orientation and radicalism) and other factors related to issue competition between parties (opposition status, issue ownership and contagion). The results show that parties do respond to street protests in the news, and they are more likely to respond if they are in opposition and if their competitors have reacted to the issue.

Measuring political agenda setting and representation in Turkey

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 717-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alper T Bulut
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legislative Politics ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Project Approach ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Issue Attention

This article introduces a novel data set on the agenda of the Turkish legislature and political parties. Using the Comparative Agendas Project approach, we trace political issue attention over an 11–year-period (2003–2013). By topic coding various political activities, this approach illustrates the dynamics of the Turkish political agenda and the issue attention of the political parties, and, therefore, sheds new empirical light on the dynamics of Turkish legislative politics and party competition. In this article, we explain the construction of the data set from data collection to coding, describe its features, and provide examples of possible applications.

scholarly journals Who Responds? Voters, Parties and Issue Attention

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 633-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Klüver ◽  
Jae-Jae Spoon
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
National Election ◽  
Niche Parties ◽  
Election Manifestos ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
Election Studies

Do parties listen to their voters? This article addresses this important question by moving beyond position congruence to explore whether parties respond to voters’ issue priorities. It argues that political parties respond to voters in their election manifestos, but that their responsiveness varies across different party types: namely, that large parties are more responsive to voters’ policy priorities, while government parties listen less to voters’ issue demands. The study also posits that niche parties are not generally more responsive to voter demands, but that they are more responsive to the concerns of their supporters in their owned issue areas. To test these theoretical expectations, the study combines data from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on voters’ policy priorities from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various national election studies across eighteen European democracies in sixty-three elections from 1972–2011. Our findings have important implications for understanding political representation and democratic linkage.

First avoidance, then engagement: Political parties’ issue competition in the electoral cycle

2020 ◽  
pp. 135406882097035
Author(s):  
Henrik Bech Seeberg
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
The Political ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Electoral Cycle ◽  
Multiple Issues ◽  
Saliency Theory ◽  
Issue Competition ◽  
Election Cycles

A major contradiction in party research is between the saliency theory and the logic of issue convergence, or what is often referred to as issue avoidance vs. engagement. Extant research shows that parties both emphasize only their own issues and engage each other’s issues. This study addresses this contradiction and argues that both perspectives have merits. The key to unlocking the puzzle is to unwind the electoral cycle. As far as possible into the electoral cycle, parties apply a long-term strategy and talk past each other. Yet, as the election draws closer, parties realize that they cannot change the agenda and therefore switch to a short-term strategy to engage rival parties’ issues. This argument is tested across multiple issues on a new dataset consisting of 19,350 press releases issued by the political parties in Denmark during several election cycles, 2004–2019.

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