Attention to Education in the Post-Industrial Society

This chapter provides an analysis of party system attention to education based on the issue incentive model. The analysis shows that large, mainstream parties’ incentives are the key factor in explaining the dynamics of party system attention to education. However, compared to the three issues analysed before, problem characteristics rather than coalition considerations and issue ownership shape the incentives of large, mainstream parties. The fact that education is an obtrusive valence issue relevant to more or less the whole population implies that it is an issue that large, mainstream parties cannot ignore if public debates about policy problems emerge. The increased focus on education and human capital in the knowledge society has thus led to an increased focus on education. This focus has clearly been most pronounced in countries where it has materialized in a debate about the quality of primary schools. In Denmark, and later on also in Sweden, this debate came as a reaction to what was seen as disappointing PISA scores. In the UK, the PISA scores played a limited role in the debate about primary schools.

The Issue Content of West European Party Politics

This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book and discusses its implications. The theoretical argument of the book presented in the issue incentive model is that the vote and office incentives of large, mainstream parties are the key to explaining how policy issues rise and decline on the party system agenda. Furthermore, the argument is that the vote and office incentives of large, mainstream parties depend on three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations. Empirically, the book highlights the more complex party system agenda with the decline, but not disappearance, of macroeconomic issues as well as the rise in ‘new politics’ issues together with education and health care. Moreover, various ‘new politics’ issues have seen very different trajectories. Finally, the chapter lays out the implications of these findings for two larger debates within the study of West European party politics. One debate is about the role of niche parties and the consequences of their growth for the West European party system. The second debate is about the linkage between voters and political parties in contemporary Western societies. Discussing these implications also sheds light on the implication of more recent developments within West European party systems, namely the electoral decline of large, mainstream parties.

Expansion from the Right

This chapter provides an analysis of party system attention to immigration based on the issue incentive model. Two questions are central, namely the general increase in attention to immigration and the pronounced increase in Denmark. Based on the issue incentive model, the issue of immigration shows the importance of problem information. The increased share of foreigners has, combined with the growth of radical right-wing parties, generated more attention to the issue. In all countries, the issue has become an established issue on the party system agenda. The chapter furthermore shows the crucial role of large, mainstream parties’ coalition considerations in explaining how issues can make it to the top of the party system agenda. Only in Denmark has a strong focus on immigration been attractive from a coalition perspective. Denmark is thus the only country studied where immigration has become a central issue in the competition between the large, mainstream parties for office.

The Dynamics of the Party System Agenda

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.

The Development of the Party System Agenda in Western Europe

This chapter provides an overview of the general patterns that the following chapters on particular issues aim to explain. The development after 1980 should be seen in a more long-term perspective in which the decline of class politics has led not only to an expansion of the party system agenda as seen by the substantial growth in the length of party manifestos, but also to a more complex agenda on which more issues receive substantial attention. This development matches the idea of party politics becoming more issue-based. In terms of issue attention, traditional left–right related issues such as the economy, labour, and business, but also defence and foreign policy have seen declining attention, but they have not disappeared from the agenda. Other issues such as health care, education, crime and justice, and to a more limited extent, immigration have gained attention. Attention to the environment grew considerably in the beginning of the period, but then declined somewhat again. Attention to social policy has remained stable at a high level throughout the period, whereas European integration has remained an issue with limited attention.

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.

What Has Happened to Party Politics in Western Europe?

Party politics in Western Europe has changed profoundly over the last decades. Long gone are the times when class-based political parties with extensive membership dominated politics. Instead, party politics has become issue-based. Surprisingly few studies have focused on how the issue content of West European party politics has developed over the past decades. This book therefore offers a comprehensive analysis of the issue content of West European party politics. To do so, the book develops a new theoretical model labelled the ‘issue incentive model’ of party system attention. The aim of the model is to explain how much attention issues get throughout the party system, which is labelled ‘the party system agenda’. To explain the development of the party system agenda, one needs to focus on the incentives that individual policy issues offer to large, mainstream parties, i.e. the typical Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, or Conservative/Liberal parties that have dominated West European governments for decades. The core idea of the model is that the incentives that individual policy issues offer to these vote- and office-seeking parties depend on three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations. The issue incentive model builds on and develops a top-down perspective according to which the issue content of party politics is determined by the strategic considerations of political parties and their competition with each other.

Up and Down with the Environment

This chapter provides an analysis of party system attention to the environment based on the issue incentive model. The importance of issue characteristics and especially problem information is clear. During the 1980s, all countries struggled with environmental performance, and focusing events like the Chernobyl disaster drew attention to the issue. The conditions were perfect for parties that wanted to draw attention to the environment, and in the second half of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, party system attention to the environment peaked in almost all countries. The improvement of the state of the environment in all countries from the 1990s has generated less attractive conditions for parties wanting to draw attention to the environment, and party system attention has declined, but far from disappeared. Green parties, and to a lesser extent Social Liberal parties, are the ones that focus more on the environment than do other parties. The importance of studying the incentives of the large, mainstream left-wing parties is also clear. These parties do not automatically focus on the issue, but coalition considerations can make it attractive, and then they are able to push the environment towards the top of the party system agenda. There are typically two situations when coalition incentives make the issue attractive. One is when a Social Democratic party is seeking to win government power with a Green party. The other is when Social Democratic parties are trying to draw environmentally friendly Social Liberal/Centre parties away from the right-wing bloc.

An Ever-Sleeping Giant?

This chapter provides an analysis of party system attention to European integration. The expectation based on the issue incentive model was that large, mainstream parties were not interested in, and largely able to avoid the issue becoming an important issue on the party system agenda despite pressure from EU-sceptic issue entrepreneurs. This expectation was, by and large, confirmed. European integration continues to play a rather limited role on the party system agenda. Even events like the European debt crisis, which can be used by issue entrepreneurs to push the issue on the party system agenda, may generate ‘punctuations’, but not a stable position of the issue as important on the party system agenda. The deepening and broadening of the European Union has only led to a limited increase in the party system attention. Furthermore, referendums only function as alternative venues of attention if they have dramatic results like Brexit.