Who sets the agenda and who responds to it in the Danish parliament? A new model of issue competition and agenda‐setting

Inspired by the agenda‐setting literature, this article outlines a model of issue competition focusing on the interaction between government and opposition parties through the party‐system agenda. Unlike previous studies of issue competition, the model makes it possible to answer questions such as why some parties have greater success than others in forcing other parties to address unpleasant issues. One of the central implications of the model is that opposition parties are freer to focus continually on issues that are advantageous to themselves, whereas government parties more often are forced to respond to issues brought up on the party‐system agenda. Using data on issue competition in Denmark covering 25 years and 23 issue categories, the issue competition model is evaluated and finds strong support in a set of cross‐sectional time‐series analyses.     

Mapping the Nordic Party Space

The left-right positions of the political parties in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland are compared from the late 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s. To locate the parties, survey data on the voters' self-placements along the left-right continuum are used. In order to study changes in the left-right polarity and the degree of consensus along the left-right continuum in each of the countries, we use the mean party positions to calculate three different measures of party distances. The wing party distance is that between the party farthest to the left and the party farthest to the right. The rival party distance is that between the Social Democratic Party and the traditional Conservative Party. Finally, the mean party distance is the average distance between all pairs of parties. One of the main conclusions is that in Sweden and Iceland the left-right continuum seems to contract, whereas in Norway and Denmark the left-right polarity and the distances between the parties are increasing. In today's Nordic party space, the distance between left and right is longest in Denmark and shortest in Norway. Eventually, 39 Nordic parties are brought together on the same left-right scale. The analysis reveals that there are some clearly distinguishable clusters of parties or party families in the Nordic countries, such as, for example, the socialist parties, the social democratic parties and the conservative parties. Other party groups differ greatly in left-right position, like the progressive parties, the liberal parties and the centre parties.     

Political Parties and ‘the Immigration Issue’: Issue Ownership in Swedish Parliamentary Elections 1991–2010

Why is ‘the immigration issue’ rarely polemical for the Swedish mainstream when it divides parties across Europe? Several factors suggest fertile ground for conflict, yet parties hesitate to capitalise on anti-immigration cues. Based on interviews with Swedish MPs, the article discusses two interlinked issues. First, immigration crystallises conflicting ideological streams: market liberalism vs. value conservatism (for the centre-right) and international solidarity vs. welfare state/labour market protectionism (for the centre-left), and stressing the ‘wrong’ stream detracts attention from parties' core competencies. Second, since competition, when present, revolves around issue ownership, parties that are less trusted on immigration will divert attention to areas of higher competence. Whether immigration becomes politicised is not necessarily dependent on electoral grievances or a radical right presence but on parties' ability to handle and negotiate these conflicting streams and issue priorities. An appreciation of the party politics of immigration is thus central to understanding when, and why, immigration becomes an ‘issue’.     

Long-term Changes in Danish Party Politics: The Rise and Importance of Issue Competition

In Denmark and Norway, major research programmes known as the 'power and democracy studies' have evaluated the functioning of the political systems and democracy in general, highlighting numerous changes in both Danish and Norwegian politics over recent decades. However, despite the broad range of studies that characterize both programmes, it is striking how little attention has been paid to changes in party politics and party competition. This article, which focuses on Danish politics, argues that attention to the development of party competition would have been warranted for two reasons. First, party competition has undergone a transformation from class to issue competition. Political parties increasingly focus their efforts on influencing the content of the political agenda rather than positioning themselves with regard to a limited number of issues deriving from their class bases. Second, this transformation arguably explains some of the findings of the power and democracy studies, especially concerning political decision making.     

The Structure of Budget Demands in Denmark, Norway And Sweden

Data on people's attitudes to items on the public budgets are found in the International Social Science Programme (ISSP) Role of Government surveys and Danish national election surveys 1990–1998. These data are factor analysed to validate a three-way agenda that postulates three main goals or functions of the state: the authoritarian state, the welfare state, and the humanitarian state. The factor solution is very similar in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the four largest European Union (EU) countries, and on many points consistent with theories of value change and new politics.
Based on the factor analysis, the support for each of the three agendas is analysed for voters of different parties in the three Scandinavian party systems. We find that all three systems are structured in at least two dimensions, the welfare dimension and the humanitarian vs. authoritarian dimension. These data therefore point to the existence of a 'new politics' dimension that is similar in the three party systems insofar as it contains the same five budget items. However, the opinion climate differs somewhat between the three countries. The support for the humanitarian agenda is lowest in Norway, whereas the support for the authoritarian agenda is highest in Denmark.     

Social Class, Sector Employment, and Gender as Party Cleavages in the Scandinavian Countries: A Comparative Longitudinal Study, 1970–95

This article studies the changing impact of social class, sector employment, and gender with regard to party choice in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the 1970s to the 1990s, using election survey data. Political parties in the three countries are grouped into four party groups: left socialist, social democratic, centrist, and rightist parties.
Class voting has declined in all three countries. The focus on the four party groups shows that differences between the wage-earner classes have declined for the social democratic and rightist party groups. By contrast, 'class voting' has increased for the left socialist parties, which increasingly have concentrated their support among the new middle class.
Sector employment became an important party cleavage in all three countries in the 1990s. The impact of sector was generally largest in Denmark and Norway in the 1980s and 1990s. The sector cleavage also follows the left–right division of parties to a greater degree than previously. Sector differences in voting behaviour are most pronounced with regard to voting for the left socialist and the rightist parties.
Gender differences in voting behaviour have increased and changed character in all three countries. In the 1970s, men supported the socialist parties to a greater extent than women; in the 1990s men supported the rightist parties to a greater extent than women in all three countries, whereas women supported the left socialist parties and (in Sweden) the Green Party to a greater degree than men. The effects of gender are generally reduced when sector employment is introduced into the multivariate analysis, indicating that the different sector employment of men and of women explains part of the gender gap in voting behaviour.     

Welfare Dualism in Two Scandinavian Welfare States: Public Opinion and Party Politics

Recent research on the legitimacy of the welfare state has pointed to a potential negative impact of immigration. While much of this research has been concerned with a possible weakening of the general support for economic redistribution, this article analyses popular support for the introduction of a two-tier (dualist) welfare system, and focuses on the interplay between public opinion and party competition. It uses survey data from Denmark and Norway: two similar welfare states where elite politics on migration and welfare dualism has been markedly different over the last decade. It finds that the level and structure of popular support for welfare dualism are fairly similar in the two countries, but that attitudes toward dualism have a stronger impact on left–right voting in Denmark where the politics of welfare dualism has been actively advocated by the populist right party and pursued by a right-wing coalition government.     

Congruence between voters and parties: The role of party-level issue salience

The level of congruence between parties and their voters can vary greatly from one policy issue to another, which raises questions regarding the effectiveness of political representation. We seek to explain variation in party–voter congruence across issues and parties. We focus on the hypotheses that (1) average proximity between the positions of voters and the party they vote for will be highest on the issues that the party emphasises in the election campaign and that (2) this relationship will be stronger for niche parties. We test these hypotheses using data on the policy preferences of voters, party positions, party attention profiles and salience on concrete policy issues in four countries: The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Sweden. Overall, we find that voter–party proximity tends to be higher on issues that the party emphasises. As these are the issues where parties typically have the greatest policy impact, this implies that the quality of representation is highest where it matters most. There is some limited evidence that the positive relationship between issue salience and proximity is stronger for niche parties. In sum, the quality of policy representation varies strongly with party-level issue salience and to a lesser extent with the type of political party.     

Foreign Policy Objectives: Left Socialist Opposition in Denmark, Norway and Sweden

Due to their foreign policy opposition, the left socialist parties in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden remain among the few parties in Western democracies that lack governmental experience. When political parties confront political issues, they can either choose a competitive or a cooperative strategy. The Norwegian and Swedish left socialists chose competition when the EU issue appeared on the scene in the early 1990s. The Danish Socialist People's Party, on the other hand, opted for a cooperative strategy and accepted EU membership and the 1993 Edinburgh Agreement. Drawing on coalition theory, this article asks why.     

The 1988 Election Campaign in Denmark

In this article the 1988 national election campaigns of the Conservative Party, the Christian People's Party and the Social Democratic Party are analysed focusing upon: the impact of environmental factors – i.e. the constitutional setting, the party system and the media system; and the campaigns themselves – i.e. preparation and planning, control, strategy, financing and style. Findings indicate that the single most important factor for understanding national election campaigns in Denmark is that parties never know when a general election will be called. As a result, preparation and planning are virtually absent, TV is assessed as the most important channel of communication, the campaign is fairly centralized and controlled by the party leadership, the parties are dependent upon voluntary manpower and financial support, the use of 'outside' expertise is minimal, and the complex pattern of cooperation and conflict in Danish politics has a modifying impact on the amount of aggressiveness displayed in the campaign. All in all, similarities among the parties' campaigns are more pronounced than differences. It appears to make no difference whether the party is incumbent or in opposition, established or new, left-wing or right-wing, large or small.     

Party Politics and the Common Good in Swedish Local Government

Local government in Sweden is usually classified as the northwest European type of local government, together with the local government systems of the other Nordic countries and Britain. In the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, Swedish local government has been especially susceptible to the ideas of 'new public management' (NPM). At the same time there has been a long-ongoing trend of increasing party-politicisation of local councils. In this paper a selection of five local authorities are examined in order to see how party politics and party-politicisation are confronted by the new organisational doctrines. It is concluded that in this respect the doctrines guiding local government organisation can be characterised by three common traits: the legitimacy of particular interests is denied in favour of the common good of the locality; it is denied that conflict and competition between political parties perform any democratic function; finally, when it comes to the relation between politics and administration there is a common confession of the management-by-objectives doctrine. Somewhat surprisingly, these three principles guide organisation and politics not only in those authorities most enthusiastically adopting NPM but also in the authorities implementing organisational reforms based on more communitarian principles and even organisationally conservative municipalities not even considering any organisational change. One interpretation of this contradictory observation may be that NPM concepts and ideas have also found their way into local doctrines that are based on quite different principles. Another interpretation is that there is a consensus tradition in Swedish political culture that can also account for similar results in municipalities not explicitly introducing an apolitical organisation doctrine.     

Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen,programmatischen Standpunkten und der Bundespolitik auf die Regierungsbildung in den deutschen Ländern

Party politics at the German state level plays a decisive role for patterns of party competition and for legislative decision-making at the federal level. This article analyses the impact of party politics at the state and the federal level on the formation of coalition governments in the German Laender. The empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset that covers information on the state parties’ programmatic positions, their pre-electoral alliances, and the structure of party competition on the federal level in the time period between 1990 and 2007. The results reveal that the programmatic positions of state parties have a decisive impact on government formation. Other relevant factors are the parties’ relative strength, their coalition preferences and the partisan composition of government and opposition on the federal level.     

National protest agenda and the dimensionality of party politics: Evidence from four East-Central European democracies

Contemporary democracies show considerable differences in the issue composition of their protest politics, which tends to remain relatively stable over time. In countries like Germany or the Czech Republic, the vast majority of protests have been mobilised around sociocultural issues, such as human rights, peace, nuclear power or the environment, and only a tiny portion of protest has focused on economic issues. At the opposite extreme, protest in France or Poland usually has a strongly economic character and voices demands relating to material redistribution and social policy. What lies behind the cross-country differences in national protest agendas? In this article, the national protest agenda depends on what issues mainstream political parties are contesting: the content and strength of the master-issue dimension. In reference to the literature on the multidimensional political space and niche political parties, one should expect that there is a substitutive effect; where the stronger a specific master-issue dimension is in party politics, the less salient that issue dimension is in protest politics. This substitutive effect results from the tendency of electoral politics to reduce political conflict to a single-dimension equilibrium, which decreases the importance of other issues and relegates the contest over secondary, niche issues to the realm of policy-seeking strategies, with protest being a common type of this political strategy. In party systems where single-dimension equilibrium does not exist and the master-issue dimension is weaker, the same dynamics result in a more convergent relationship between party and protest politics and a greater similarity between the protest- and party-system agendas. To investigate this theory, the national protest agendas in four countries are examined. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show four combinations of two crucial factors that are not available in the old Western democracies: the content and the strength of the master-issue dimension. The study draws on an original dataset of protest events organised in the four countries between 1993 and 2010, and on qualitative and quantitative data on issue dimensions of party politics obtained from studies on party politics and expert surveys. The results show that in the Czech Republic, where the master-issue dimension has remained strongly economic, protest has been predominantly sociocultural. In Poland between 1993 and 2001 and Hungary between 1993 and 2006, the master-issue dimensions are strongly sociocultural, while protest is predominantly economic. There is no single-dimension equilibrium in party politics in Slovakia or in post-2001 Poland and mainstream parties compete on both economic and sociocultural issues. Consequently, the substitutive dynamics between party and protest politics is weaker and the issue agendas in party and protest arenas are here more alike.     

The politics of opposition and European integration in Scandinavia: Is Euro‐scepticism a government‐opposition dynamic?

Scandinavian party competition has incorporated divisions over European integration to a greater degree than most West European party systems, but with considerable variation in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. From a comparative politics perspective this raises questions about the relatively high salience of Euro‐scepticism in Scandinavian politics, the differences between the three cases and changes over time. The central argument in this article is that Europeanisation of party politics ‐ the translation of issues related to European integration into domestic party politics ‐ is driven by the dynamics of long‐ and short‐term government‐opposition competition, and the key driver of change is party strategy. Whether at the centre or extremes of the party system, Euro‐scepticism is a product of party competition — and is, both in its origins and development, ‘the politics of opposition ‘.     

The Effect of Associative Issue Ownership on Parties’ Presence in the News Media

Some studies suggest that challenger parties push new issues onto the agenda, especially when they ‘own’ these issues. Others claim that established parties largely determine how prominent issues appear on the agenda. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on an issue on which challenger parties have most ‘ownership’: immigration. Political claims on this issue made by political parties in newspapers in seven West European countries after three events that could potentially trigger attention to immigration were studied. Large and government parties appear most prominent in the news. However, findings show a significant, positive effect of associative issue ownership on claims-making in the news, while controlling for party size and government status. So, when challengers have issue ownership they appear as claim-makers on the issue. These results paint a balanced picture of the role that challenger and established parties have in setting the agenda.     

The Impact of Radical Right-Wing Parties on the Positions of Mainstream Parties Regarding Multiculturalism

What are the political effects of rising radical right-wing parties (RRPs) in Western Europe? Does the rise of the parties drive mainstream parties (MPs) to become more restrictive on issues mobilised by RRPs, such as multiculturalism? Analysing manifesto data from 1981 to 2008, it is found that the rise of RRPs makes right-wing MPs adopt more restrictive positions regarding multiculturalism. However, left-wing MPs do so only when the opinion of party supporters on foreigners becomes more negative or when the parties lost more votes in the previous election than their opponent right-wing MPs did. The result implies that niche parties with extremist positions can benefit from their own electoral success by dragging MPs toward their own positions. However, the impact of rising niche parties on MPs should be understood against a broader background of party competition, and the impact can be dissimilar between MPs with different ideological commitment and strategic opportunities.     

The Contagion Effects of the Feminist Initiative in Sweden: Agenda‐setting,Niche Parties and Mainstream Parties

As new parties have emerged in Europe on the left and the right, they have placed pressure on mainstream parties to adjust their issue positions and engage with new issues. This research note asks whether women's parties have the same effect. Analysing election manifestos of the mainstream parties in Sweden from 1991 to 2014, this article considers the extent to which the Swedish Feminist Initiative (F!) has influenced the attention parties pay to women's issues. The data indicate that a profound discursive change has occurred among these parties in Sweden around gender and women's roles in society, resulting in near consensus that gender inequality is a problem necessitating government action. There is gradual evolution for most of the period under study but a marked departure from past trends in 2014, coinciding with the emergence of F! as a contender for EU and parliamentary seats. Consistent with contagion theory, the concerns of women acquired urgency as F! grew more competitive. News coverage and public comment by political parties suggests that F! has had disproportionate influence, given its electoral support, on the issue agenda of the mainstream parties, pressuring them to ‘take up’ the issues of this niche party and engaging them in a competitive struggle to address women's issues in politics. The results indicate that we should look more closely at women's parties as a tactical choice of social movements to enhance women's representation and encourage public discourse about gender and power.     

Changing Issue Ownership through Policy Communication

Issue ownership has been an important concept in the analysis of party competition for several decades. Traditionally, issue ownership has been regarded as a stable phenomenon where parties are advantaged by different political issues. However, several recent studies have reported change in voters’ perceptions of parties’ issue ownership. To investigate the changeability of issue ownership and how it can be altered, this article investigates the impact of parties’ communication attempts through a web-based survey in Sweden. Two major political issues are in focus: employment and healthcare. The results show that parties can indeed improve their ownership by communicating on an issue. Indications were also found that the effects decrease as other parties simultaneously communicate on the same issue, and when those who receive the messages are ideologically distant from the party. However, in several cases results are weak. Many important conditionalities therefore remain to be explored in future studies.     

Government Formation in the Nordic Countries: The Electoral Connection

Government formation is guided by several principles, such as majority, plurality and electoral principles. According to the electoral principle, parties that increase their share of seats in the elections should form the government, parties that lose seats joining the opposition. We analyse the fulfilment of this principle in the five Nordic countries. In Denmark, Finland and Iceland the majority of governments contained parties that both won and lost in elections, whereas in Sweden nearly half of the governments included only parties that lost seats. Only in Iceland and Denmark does election success translate to an increased probability of a government place in an increasing way. In Norway and particularly in Sweden big losers have better chances of being in government than big winners. Party system attributes are not related to the fulfilment of the electoral principle. To shift our analysis to individual parties, prime ministers come more likely from parties that are big winners. Winning does not explain the probability of becoming a coalition partner. If a party wants to be in government it is more important to avoid losing seats than to be an actual winner. Coalition partners are more likely to be mid–sized parties, a finding probably explained by the desire of the formateur party to maximise its policy influence in the government.