Modeling the effects of changing issue salience in two-party competition

For a given distribution of voter ideal points, candidates may compete, not only by changing their policy platforms, but also by seeking to persuade voters to place more weight on one of the given dimensions. We do not examine persuasion mechanisms, per se, but, rather, investigate how change of the salience weights can lead to alternation of majorities for the candidates, even though candidate positions remain fixed. Thus, competition over the salience of issue dimensions can, under certain circumstances, be crucial for determining election outcomes. We illustrate potential non-monotonicities in priming effects in terms of the Fourier series decomposition of the distribution of voter preferences, showing that the existence of higher-level harmonics leads to greater uncertainty about election outcomes and about best heresthetic strategies. We then demonstrate the empirical relevance of our results with data on two issue dimensions of political competition in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.     

Electoral competition and the welfare state

The article investigates how parties compete over the welfare state by emphasising specific welfare state issues. The core argument is that two issue-specific factors determine how much parties emphasise individual welfare state issues: the character of policy problems related to the policy issues and the type of social risks involved. To test the argument, a new large-N dataset is employed, with election manifestos from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The dataset contains information on how much parties have talked about health care, education, and labour market protection in national elections since 1980. With the data at hand, it is possible to provide the first systematic investigation of how parties compete for votes over the welfare state. The approach here is able to explain the empirical fact that health care is consistently receiving increased attention everywhere, while particularly labour market protection has witnessed a decline in attention.     

Looking through a policy window with tinted glasses: Setting the agenda for U.S. AI policy

The policy agenda is currently being established for artificial intelligence (AI), a domain marked by complex and sweeping implications for economic transformation tempered by concerns about social and ethical risks. This article reviews the United States national AI policy strategy through extensive qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 63 strategic AI policy documents curated by the federal government between 2016 and 2020. Drawing on a prominent theory of agenda setting, the Multiple Streams Framework, and in light of competing paradigms of technology policy, this article reviews how the U.S. government understands the key policy problems, solutions, and issue frames associated with AI. Findings indicate minimal attention to focusing events or problem indicators emphasizing social and ethical concerns, as opposed to economic and geopolitical ones. Further, broad statements noting ethical dimensions of AI often fail to translate into specific policy solutions, which may be explained by a lack of technical feasibility or value acceptability of ethics-related policy solutions, along with institutional constraints for agencies in specific policy sectors. Finally, despite widespread calls for increased public participation, proposed solutions remain expert dominated. Overall, while the emerging U.S. AI policy agenda reflects a striking level of attention to ethics—a promising development for policy stakeholders invested in AI ethics and more socially oriented approaches to technology governance—this success is only partial and is ultimately layered into a traditional strategic approach to innovation policy.     

Issue salience, issue ownership, and issue-based vote choice

According to the issue ownership theory of voting, voters identify the most credible party proponent of a particular issue and cast their ballots for that issue owner. Despite the centrality of this voter-level mechanism to ownership theories of party behavior, it has seldom been examined in the literature. We explore this model and offer a refinement to its current understanding and operationalization. Returning to the roots of ownership theory, we argue that the effect of issue ownership on vote choice is conditioned by the perceived salience of the issue in question. Through individual-level analyses of vote choice in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, we demonstrate that issue ownership affects the voting decisions of only those individuals who think that the issue is salient.     

Moved,left no address: dam construction,displacement and issue salience

Dams have displaced millions of people in many countries of the world, but such social costs of dam construction constitute a relatively new international issue. The emergence of displacement as a salient issue is explained with reference to three factors: historical circumstances, political leaders' ability to mobilize support for their priority concerns and to public participation. Participation refers to both the public's action to influence critical policy decisions and to its sense of efficacy. Cases are considered in three major dam‐building countries: the United States, India and China. In the United States, social displacement never became a public or political issue. Instead, dams have been challenged on environmental grounds. In India, by contrast, dams have stirred enormous controversy due to their social costs. The article also considers experience in China, site of the world's largest dam project, and the recent report of an international commission, the World Commission on Dams. The report's release in November 2000 marks the emergence of social displacement as a global concern. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analyzing Greens in power: Setting the agenda

Abstract.  What are the key questions that political scientists investigating Green parties in government have to address? What are the possible contributions of a variety of theories and approaches to the explanation of the Green governmental experience, in a cross-national context? The international experience with Green party governmental participation is reviewed, followed by a discussion of past work and future challenges to explain Green parties' entry into government, their performance in government, the impact of government on them, and the conditions for their survival in or exit from government.     

Vote choices of left-authoritarians: Misperceived congruence and issue salience

Often lacking parties with a corresponding profile, citizens with economically left and culturally authoritarian, or nationalist, policy orientations face a trade-off between congruence on economic and on cultural issues. How such left-authoritarian voters resolve this trade-off depends on which issues are more salient to them, previous research argues. We extend this line of research by considering the role of (mis-)perceived party positions. Using a survey in the context of the 2017 German election, we show how perceived congruence and issue importance interactively shape the left-authoritarian vote. Our findings indicate that many left-authoritarians vote for a party simply because they misperceive it to hold a congruent left-authoritarian position. In this case, issue importance matters little. Yet when voters are aware that parties match their position on only one dimension, vote choices are shaped by whether they care most about the economy or immigration. We discuss several implications.     

Electoral accountability,clarity of responsibility and labor market policy

Does the exercise of accountability in elections have palpable policy effects? Building on recent advances in the economic voting literature, we show that electoral accountability leaves an imprint on labor market policy when left-wing governments are in office. When responsibility for the economy is clear and elections offer an opportunity to claim credit for economic expansion, labor protections and benefits become more generous. However, when clarity of responsibility is low and incumbents can expect to veer electoral responsibility, left-wing governments are more likely to retrench labor market policy. These results hold for policies benefiting both labor market insiders and outsiders. Consistent with evidence that the labor market is the purview of the left, electoral accountability does not condition labor market policy under right-wing governments. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of growing party system fragmentation and weaker accountability across advanced industrial democracies.     

The balancing act of establishing a policy agenda: Conceptualizing and measuring drivers of issue prioritization within interest groups

Interest groups are important intermediaries in Western democracies, with the potential to offer political linkage and form a bridge between the concerns of citizens and the agendas of political elites. While we know an increasing amount about the issue‐based activity of groups, we only have a limited understanding about how they selected these issues to work on. In this article, we examine the process of agenda setting within groups. In particular, we address challenges of conceptualization and measurement. Through a thorough review of the group literature, we identify five main factors that are hypothesized to drive issue prioritization. We operationalize items to tap these factors and then empirically assess this theoretical model relying on data from a survey of national interest groups in Australia. Our findings, from a confirmatory factor analysis, provide support for the multidimensional nature of agenda setting. We discuss how this provides a firm conceptual and methodological foundation for future work examining how groups establish their policy agenda.     

Circumventing formal structure through commitment: Presidential influence and agenda control

Although the formal institutional structure that defines the temporal order of play in a policy game between the Congress and President ought to provide Congress with agenda power, the President is traditionally treated as the dominant player in this relationship. We show that if the President can make clear-cut commitments, presidential commitment can counter the dominance hierarchy and the complexion of equilibrium outcomes. Thus, the details of political interactions (in particular, the possibilities for commitment) may be as important as the formal specification of institutional structure.We thank Peter Aranson, David Austen-Smith, Ed Campos, Gerry Faulhaber, Art Frank, Ken Koford, William Riker, Janet Pack, the anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Rochester for helpful comments, subject to the usual caveat. We also thank Joel Friedlander and Harold Dichter for research assistance.     

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.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

Electoral competition and the oversight game: A transaction cost approach and the Norwegian experience

Abstract. The central question addressed by this article is whether the absence of active competition changes the forces that shape the institutional landscape at the parliamentary level, and thereby the landscape itself. Based on a transaction cost approach, the study investigates whether the bolstering of parliamentary oversight procedures occurs in situations in which there is no credible alternative to the incumbent government, and whether opposition impotence contributes to the development of oversight institutions. The article argues that the strengthening of parliamentary oversight procedures is most likely to occur when there is a minority government but the opposition MPs are not in a position to form or envisage a credible alternative. An analysis of changes in oversight arrangements in Norway during 1993—1996 strongly supports this argument.     

Attention distribution as a measure of issue salience

Public Choice - In spatial theory a central concept is salience, or the relative importance of issues in a voter’s mind in evaluating candidates’ platforms. Traditional, self-reported...     

Keeping the other candidate guessing: Electoral competition when preferences are private information

We analyze a, model of two candidate competition in which candidate and voter preferences are private information. If candidates simultaneously commit to policy platforms the uncertainty about candidate preferences reinforces the incentive for platform divergence. After a candidate observes the other candidate’s stance but before she learns about voter preferences she may face regret about her choice. This ex post irrationality suggests that a 1 period model may not capture the relevant incentives. In a multi-period proposal game in which candidates first make non-binding public proposals and then they make binding public proposals (similar to Ledyard, 1989) we find that candidates are uninformative during the first stage, as they have a disincentive to reveal their preferences to the opposing candidate. This finding offers an explanation for candidate ambiguity or inconsistency early in an election which does not involve efforts to deceive voters. Candidates may be trying to keep their opponent guessing. With a strong pre-election commitment technology, candidates can only be deterred from this type of behavior if they anticipate that a sizeable number of voters (more than a majority) will vote contrary to their preferences over policy.     

Administrative reorganization as a signal: Bounded rationality,agency merger,and salience of policy issues

Although administrative reorganization has been a major political instrument in many democracies, there has been limited research on its effects. Aiming to address this gap, this study examines the reorganization of Korean government ministries, specifically, the impact of reorganization in the form of a merger of ministries performing interrelated but dissimilar functions. Examining the salience of policy issues expressed in official government press releases during the 12‐year period from 2001 to 2012, we found that administrative reorganization in the form of a merger has a significant impact on the relative salience of government policy agendas. Specifically, the interrupted time series estimates indicate that the salience of science and technology policy issues (in relation to education policy issues) decreased by approximately 12% to 17% following the dissolution of the Ministry of Science and Technology. We explain this finding based on the bounded rationality view of bureaucratic information processing.     

Economic conditions and populist radical right voting: The role of issue salience

In this article, we show with the European Election Study from nine Western European countries that issue salience of the economy and immigration contributes to our understanding of the puzzling relation between economic conditions and populist radical right support. In countries with relatively weak or worsening economic conditions, the economy is considered more salient, whereas immigration loses salience – also compared to other issues. Voters who perceive the economy as most important problem are less likely to opt for the populist radical right than people who perceive immigration or even other issues as most important. Populist radical right parties appear to not only win votes on the immigration issue, they also lose votes on the economic issue. Finally, in contrast to actual economic conditions, negative perceptions of the economy increases populist radical right voting, despite stronger salience of the economy and partly due to stronger salience of immigration compared to other issues.     

Signalling issue salience: Explaining niche party support in second-order elections

Why do many mainstream party voters switch to voting for niche parties in second-order elections? I develop a simple framework to explain niche party switching in second-order elections and propose that some voters defect strategically to niche parties as a way to signal the salience of an otherwise overlooked issue to their preferred mainstream party. Using panel data from the United Kingdom and Germany, I find that vote switching in second-order elections is more common among those who perceive a mismatch between the party they feel close to and the party perceived as best able to handle an issue of importance to them, as well as when they believe less is at stake and when they place much importance on an overlooked issue.