Issue competition in five countries: snakes in a tunnel

What determines the issue content of party competition? The extant literature is torn between issue ownership theories predicting contrasted partisan profiles and more strategic views of electoral platforms emphasizing parties’ incentives to converge on the priorities with the greatest payoffs. This chapter argues that parties are like snakes in tunnels: this metaphor conceptualizes parties’ incentives to emphasize contrasted issues to stay true to their identity and past priorities (the ‘snake’ component) as well as constraints exerted on those efforts by political opponents and context (the ‘tunnel’). Parties need to accommodate emerging problems and their competitors’ strategies, resulting in considerable cross-partisan overlap. Utilizing analyses of Comparative Agendas Project data on issue attention in party manifestos, plus qualitative observations on single electoral campaigns and how parties ‘steal’ issues from each other, the chapter discusses the potential implications of our observations for the way elections influence policies, a topic at the core of the next chapter.

towards a new approach of the elections-to-policy nexus

This introduction briefly presents the central debates, challenges and puzzles addressed in the book. The focus is on the policy relevance of election campaigns, approached through the lens of two core requirements, i.e. differentiation in the electoral supply and mandate responsiveness. The chapter describes the climate of scepticism that prevails as to how contemporary democracies meet these principles. It points to current approaches limitations’ in conceptual and empirical terms. It then delineates the main arguments of the book’s alternative approach. Based on an agenda-setting perspective, our theoretical framework bridges studies of policy and issue competition, relying on unique empirical evidence covering five West European countries since the 1980s. Finally, the chapter provides an outline of the remaining chapters.

Socially mediated issue ownership

Given the growing importance of issue competition and the growing use of social media during elections, this study seeks to create a better understanding of how issue dynamics relating to political parties play out on social media. It tests whether issue ownership theory can explain how parties and issues are being discussed on Twitter and to what extent a mediated form of issue ownership aligns with citizens’ perceptions of issue ownership. The results indicate that perceptions of issue ownership as measured in representative surveys correlate with variations of what issues parties are linked with on Twitter. Some deviations also emerged, which possibly reflect short-term changes in parties’ issue competition. Understanding how issue ownership mediates through social media platforms is important in order to evaluate the role of social media in contemporary opinion forming processes and sheds light on the issue competition among political parties in online fora.

Learning at Home and Abroad: How Competition Conditions the Diffusion of Party Strategies

How do parties decide when to campaign on valence issues given high degrees of uncertainty? Although past studies have provided evidence of transnational emulation of parties' position-taking strategies, these findings do not directly apply to saliency strategies. Moreover, the exact diffusion mechanism remains largely elusive. Based on the issue saliency literature, this study develops novel theoretical propositions and argues that conscious learning enables parties to infer the relative utility of emphasizing consensual issues during an electoral campaign. The proposed theory gives rise to different expectations at the domestic and transnational levels because of the distinct logic of issue competition. By analyzing environmental issue emphasis in party manifestos, the authors find direct transnational dependencies and indirect spillover effects among the parties' saliency strategies. They identify conscious learning, rather than mere imitation or independent decision making, as the diffusion mechanism at work. Yet, in line with saliency-based theories, electoral competition mutes the diffusion of electoral strategies domestically.

Comparing automated content analysis methods to distinguish issue communication by political parties on Twitter

Party competition in Western Europe is increasingly focused on “issue competition”, which is the selective emphasis on issues by parties. The aim of this paper is to contribute methodologically to the increasing number of studies that deal with different aspects of parties’ issue competition and communication. We systematically compare the value and shortcomings of three exploratory text representation approaches to study the issue communication of parties on Twitter. More specifically, we analyze which issues separate the online communication of one party from that of the other parties and how consistent party communication is. Our analysis was performed on two years of Twitter data from six Belgian political parties, comprising of over 56,000 political tweets. The results indicate that our exploratory approach is useful to study how political parties profile themselves on Twitter and which strategies are at play. Second, our method allows to analyze communication of individual politicians which contributes to classical literature on party unity and party discipline. A comparison of our three methods shows a clear trade-off between interpretability and discriminative power, where a combination of all three simultaneously provides the best insights.

Party competition on climate policy: The roles of interest groups, ideology and challenger parties in the UK and Ireland

This study shows how interest group–party relations, parties’ cross-cutting policy preferences, and competition with challenger parties shape the structure of issue competition on climate policy. It uses the ‘most similar’ cases of the UK and Ireland to show how differences in party systems influence the structure of issue competition. The study takes up the challenge of integrating salience and position in the conceptualisation of climate policy preferences. Empirically, it provides new evidence on factors influencing climate policy preferences and the party politics of climate change, focusing on interest groups, party ideology, and challenger parties. Further, it identifies similarities between the general literature on interest group influence on party preferences and the literature on interest groups in climate politics, and seeks to make connections between them.

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

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.

A Theoretical Framework of the Partisan Politics of Law and Order

Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of law and order policies from a partisan politics perspective. It argues that understanding law and order policy making involves two main steps that can be conceptually distinguished: agenda-setting and decision-making. For the agenda-setting phase, the chapter builds on the assumption that issues related to law and order are valence-loaden and generate issue competition between political parties. Therefore, issue owners are particularly likely to get tough on law and order. For decision-making, the theoretical argument relates to theories of comparative public policy analysis, according to which the preferences do translate into public policies, but only if the institutional context allows. Finally, this theoretical chapter discusses how law and order turns may shape the future policy path through positive policy feedback. All expectations are summarized in seven hypotheses to guide the empirical analysis.