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

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.

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.

Media Systems and Attention Cycles: Volume and Topics of News Coverage on COVID-19 in the United States and China

We examined initial newspaper coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak (January–May 2020) in the United States and China, countries with contrasting media systems and pandemic experiences. We join the context-rich media systems literature and the longitudinal nature of the issue-attention literature to expand each by providing more system-level context for explaining how media cover an issue over time. U.S. coverage peaked later and stayed consistently high, while Chinese coverage was more variable. The most prominent topics in Chinese coverage were related to domestic outbreak response, while U.S. coverage focused on politics, highlighting how issue-attention cycles differ across countries.

The Voices of European Law: Legislators, Judges and Law Professors

European Union legislators, CJEU judges and EU law scholars have produced streams of texts which determine both what EU law is and how it is perceived. We explore what these distinct “voices” tell us about the EU’s legal and policy priorities using a mega corpus compiling more than 200,000 legislative acts, 55,000 court rulings and opinions, and 4,000 articles from a leading EU law journal. Applying an unsupervised machine learning technique known as probabilistic topic modelling, we find that economic integration remains the focus of EU law, but that scholars tend to emphasize rights issues more and ignore certain topics, such as farming regulations, almost entirely. The relationship among these partly interdependent, partly autonomous voices, we suggest, can be conceptualized in terms of co-evolution. Legislation influences issue attention on the CJEU, which, in turn, influences what law professors choose to write about.

Measuring interest group agendas in regulatory proposals: a method and the case of US education policy

We introduce a new way to measure interest group agendas and demonstrate an approach to extending the CAP topic coding scheme to policy domains at lower levels of analysis. We use public comments on regulatory proposals in US education policy to examine the topics contained in policy arguments. We map the education policy space using a data set of 493 comments and 5315 hand-coded comment paragraphs. A unique measurement model accounts for group and topic diversity and allows us to validate our approach. The findings have implications for measuring topic agendas in lower-level policy domains and understanding group coalitions and competition in education policy. We contribute to text-as-data approaches tracing policy change in the study of public policy. The findings suggest the relationship between issue attention observed by scholars and larger policy reform movements.

Trends in public attention to the environment from 1956 to 2005

A continuous measure of public environmental concern was created using the appearance of environmental content in mass-circulation magazines between January 1956 and December 2005 to investigate Downs' "Issue Attention Cycle", the public response to physical and non-physical episodic events, and the relationship between sectors of environmental concern. The results indicated that environmental concern follows discernible cycles peaking in 1970, 1990, and 2000. Each cycle exhibits an asymmetrical decrease in concern resulting in a ratcheting of environmental concern upwards over the study period. A multivariate regression analysis was used to test for physical and non-physical episodic events was not found to be a strong predictor of environmental concern. The dynamics of these cycles of environmental concern will have far-reaching implications for policy makers.

Trends in public attention to the environment from 1956 to 2005

A continuous measure of public environmental concern was created using the appearance of environmental content in mass-circulation magazines between January 1956 and December 2005 to investigate Downs' "Issue Attention Cycle", the public response to physical and non-physical episodic events, and the relationship between sectors of environmental concern. The results indicated that environmental concern follows discernible cycles peaking in 1970, 1990, and 2000. Each cycle exhibits an asymmetrical decrease in concern resulting in a ratcheting of environmental concern upwards over the study period. A multivariate regression analysis was used to test for physical and non-physical episodic events was not found to be a strong predictor of environmental concern. The dynamics of these cycles of environmental concern will have far-reaching implications for policy makers.