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.

The grammatical representation of expletive negation

Expletive negation refers to constructions where a negator in the complement of certain lexical items does not change the polarity of the complement proposition. Jin & Koenig (2021) show that expletive negation occurs rather widely in languages of the world and in very similar environments. They propose a language production model of why such apparently illogical uses of negation arise in language after language. But their study does not address the grammatical status and representation of expletive negation. In this paper, we argue that expletive negation is part of the lexical knowledge speakers have of their language and that the negator in expletive negation constructions contributes a negation to a non-at-issue content associated with expletive negation triggers. We provide a Lexical Resource Semantics analysis of how triggers combine in a non-standard manner with the standard semantic content of their complements: the negation (and in some cases an additional modal operator) of the content of their complement is part of the trigger’s non-at-issue content while the scope of the negation is an argument of the trigger’s MAIN content. Finally, we suggest that the expletive use of the French negator ne includes a lexical constraint that requires it to modify a verb that reverse selects for an expletive negation trigger.

When Does Income Inequality Cause Polarization?

Scholars have long been concerned with the implications of income inequality for democracy. Conventional wisdom suggests that high income inequality is associated with political parties taking polarized positions as the left advocates for increased redistribution while the right aims to entrench the position of economic elites. This article argues that the connection between party positions and income inequality depends on how party bases are sorted by income and the issue content of national elections. It uses data from European national elections from 1996 to 2016 to show that income inequality has a positive relationship with party polarization on economic issues when partisans are sorted with respect to income and when economic issues are relatively salient in elections. When these factors are weak, however, the author finds no relationship between income inequality and polarization.

NOT-AT-ISSUE CONTENT IN THE REFLEXIVE-REFERENTIAL THEORY

ABSTRACT The Reflexive-Referential Theory is a multi-content approach to utterance interpretation. Its main proponent, John Perry, assumes that utterances of sentences with singular terms express several contents, depending on how their utterers and interpreters harness information from the situations in which they are produced. However, the theory says little to nothing about implied content, like presuppositions. Here, I discuss the possibility of including presuppositions, defined in terms of the concept of not-at-issue content, in this view. I begin with a brief characterization of the Reflexive-Referential theory in what regards its theoretical motivations and main thesis, followed by a study case of presuppositional not-at-issue content associated to a specific class of singular terms, proper names. To conclude, I ponder over a few consequences of this overall project of theoretical expansion.

Improving the political judgement of citizens: why the task environment matters

Internal political efficacy (that is, beliefs about one’s ability to process and participate effectively in politics) is known to be shaped by factors such as levels of interest in politics, trust in institutions and awareness of political developments and debates. In this article, we show that the task environment also has an impact on internal political efficacy, and that little research has been done on this issue. We draw on data from focus groups in Australia, where citizens were asked to make political judgements in contrasting task environments: state elections and the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite. We examine four features of task environments: framing choice; issue content; the nature of available cues; and whether the task environment stimulates cognitive effort. We conclude that concerns about the internal political efficacy of voters should be addressed by exploring how the task environment created for political choice might be made more amenable in order to improve the political judgement of citizens.

Communicating in Good Faith? Dynamics of the Christian Right Agenda

It is an article of faith that organized interests represent members to elected officials making use of synchronized communication channels. Rarely, if at all, have researchers had access to multiple, internal, and external channels to test this notion. We mine a trove of nearly 2,500 emails the Family Research Council (FRC) sent to list subscribers from 2007 to 2018. Text tools allow us to depict message flexibility of the FRC. We then consider how internal and external messages may be linked by examining the issue content of emails in relation to press releases. Finally, we note the bills lobbied by FRC and the frequency these are mentioned in the internal email messages. Our findings are twofold. First, they support the conditional independence of communication channels in ways that appear to conform to the requisites of the different audiences: elected officials are likely mobilized by different signals than members are. Second, our evidence shows that the flexibility organized interests have in composing their communications can mean that different audiences are presented with considerably different political agendas. While FRC has significant sophisticated message flexibility, our data set indicates that such flexibility can raise serious concerns about good faith representation.

The Utility and Content of Traditional Ads

This chapter focuses on traditional political ads in US elections, in particular those most often airing on broadcast television stations, investigating three key questions: Have traditional political ads reached a tipping point, as new technologies and voter targeting opportunities shift the resource allocation of campaigns? Do traditional political ads work in changing minds and mobilizing voters, and how might those opportunities for persuasion and mobilization change as media engagement diversifies? Finally, what is the issue content of traditional political ads, and how does the content vary across platforms? All told, despite fast-developing change in opportunities for political actors to reach voters, television advertising remains a critically important strategy for campaigns and their political allies.

The Issue Incentive Model of Party System Attention

This chapter presents the ‘issue incentive model of party system attention’. This model uses the issue competition literature and policy agenda-setting theory as a platform for building a theoretical framework with individual issues as analytical points of departure, and at the same time, the model focuses on explaining the entire issue agenda and not just individual issues. The issue incentive model explains the issue content of party politics through the incentives that different issues offer to large, mainstream parties. The concept of the party system agenda is a key element in the framework as it is the dependent variable. The model is not focused on explaining party attention at a particular time such as during an election campaign, for instance; focus here is on attention in the medium term such as a decade. The concept of the party system agenda highlights the interaction among political parties and their shared perceptions of which issues are important. The incentives for large, mainstream parties with regard to a particular issue are argued to be decisive; partly because large, mainstream parties are much more flexible in terms of issue attention than niche parties are, and partly because the largest parties traditionally dominate government formation and thus politics. Furthermore, three types of incentives are argued to be particularly decisive for whether large, mainstream parties want to pay attention to an issue: issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down?

This chapter presents an overview of the literature that deals with the issue content of West European party politics. As argued by de Vries and Marks (2012), there are basically two theoretical approaches to the struggle for the content of party politics. First, a bottom-up approach that sees the issue content of party politics as a reflection of social conflicts. Second, a top-down or strategic approach in which the issue content of party politics reflects the strategic competition among political parties. The presentation of the bottom-up approach focuses on presenting the most recent, prominent examples of such an approach, namely the works by Kriesi et al. (2008, 2012) and Hooghe and Marks (2018). The presentation of the top-down approach is more fragmented as the literature within this approach mainly consists of journal articles in which different elements of this approach have been developed.