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.     

Blind spots in the party system: Spatial voting and issue salience if voters face scarce choices

Drawing on spatial models of political competition, this research investigates whether decision weights vary across groups of voters defined by their policy positioning in a two-dimensional space. Our analyses of electoral survey data from England, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland reveal that the economic and cultural dimensions of electoral competition are salient for the vote choice of most groups of voters. However, those voters who hold economically right and culturally libertarian preferences weigh their preferences on the economic dimension more and discount parties’ position on cultural issues when no party represents their configuration of preferences. Consequently, left parties are less able to attain votes of economically right but culturally libertarian voters for cultural policy reasons, when electoral choices are scarce, while right parties are successful in attaining votes based on both dimensions. As a result, significant representation gaps can occur.     

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.     

The United Kingdom 2017 election: polarisation in a split issue space

Abstract

After decades in which party competition was fought in the centre ground, the 2017 UK General Election witnessed a return to more conflictual politics. This article assesses public support for the electoral strategies of the main parties and examines the extent to which the issues the parties campaigned on resonated with their own supporters, as well as with the wider public. Drawing on the issue-yield framework, the article shows that the Conservative campaign – generally considered to be badly run – did not focus on issues that would fully exploit the opportunities for expanding support that were open to the party. Labour, by contrast, played a much better hand. While taking a clear left-wing stance on many policies that were popular with its constituency, the party also skilfully emphasised valence issues that Labour is often seen as more credible on, such as healthcare and education.     

Owning the issue agenda: Party strategies and vote choices in British elections

Explanations of party competition and vote choice are commonly based on the Downsian view of politics: parties maximise votes by adopting positions on policy dimensions. However, recent research suggests that British voters choose parties based on evaluations of competence rather than on ideological position. This paper proposes a theoretical account which combines elements of the spatial model with the ‘issue ownership’ approach. Whereas the issue ownership theory has focused mainly on party competition, this paper examines the validity of the model from the perspective of both parties and voters, by testing its application to recent British general elections. Our findings suggest that as parties have converged ideologically, competence considerations have become more important than ideological position in British elections.     

A dynamic analysis of partisan voting: The issue salience effect of unemployment in South Korea

This paper examines the electoral effects of the salience of unemployment issue. While increasing employment volatility has spawned exciting research, evidence of how unemployment affects vote choice is inconclusive. I refine partisan voting theory by focusing on issue salience of unemployment and the dynamics of voter choice. Voters are more likely to make a transition to support left parties when they identify unemployment as the most important and salient issue. The study also examines voter heterogeneity in the link between issue salience and the propensity for transition to the left. The effect of issue salience of unemployment is more pronounced among lower income groups than their counterparts. Analysis of a transition model using the 1997 and 2002 Korean presidential election surveys finds evidence supporting my arguments.     

Issue ownership and salience shocks: The electoral impact of Australian bushfires

As climate change increases the frequency of natural disasters, understanding how such disasters affect voting behavior has become crucial. While the literature has demonstrated that voters punish the party of the incumbent when they experience severe destruction, it remains unclear how other political parties are affected. In particular, we argue that voters shift their support to Green parties following natural disasters, given that these parties have ownership of environmental issues. We further argue that disasters decrease mainstream leftist parties’ vote share because liberal-minded voters are more likely to be the ones switching to Green parties. Empirical tests on bushfires and voting in Australia provide some support for our predictions, as all the expected effects of fires on voting manifest in state-level tests but not constituency-level tests. This suggests that our theory may operate only at certain levels of governance, paving the way for future research into why this might be.     

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.     

Small winners and big losers: strategic party behaviour in the 2017 Dutch general election

Abstract

This article analyses party strategies during the campaign for the Dutch general election of March 2017, making use of issue-yield theory. It investigates whether parties strategically emphasise high-yield issues, by juxtaposing the issue opportunities provided by voters with parties’ issue emphasis during the campaign. More specifically, it asks whether parties strategically emphasised issues that were expected to reward them electorally. Analysing voter preferences and party campaign data, it is found that parties and most of their constituencies show high ideological consistency, that parties emphasise mostly positional issues and thus choose a conflict-mobilising strategy, and that most parties emphasise high-yield issues rather than following the general political agenda. Four small parties that won significantly behaved strategically while the social democrats – who severely lost – hardly did. The findings imply that the issue-yield framework can help to explain the election result in the fragmented Dutch multi-party context.     

Measuring party positions and issue salience from media coverage: Discussing and cross-validating new indicators

Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue salience from media coverage: the core sentence approach and political claims analysis. Our cross-validation shows that with regard to party positions, indicators derived from the media converge with traditionally used measurements from party manifestos, mass surveys and expert judgments, but that salience indicators measure different underlying constructs. We conclude with a discussion of specific research questions for which media data offer potential advantages over more established methods.     

Performance of political parties in the 2016 parliamentary election in Slovakia: regional comparisons and district-level determinants

This paper explores the results of the 2016 parliamentary election in the Slovak Republic, with a special emphasis on the regional aspects of participating political parties’ election campaigns. It summarizes the election results for the country as a whole, as well as separately by region. An empirical analysis of party electoral performance at the district level suggests that the incumbent Smer party tended to do well in districts with higher rates of unemployment and a lower proportion of university-educated population. Similar patterns hold for the Slovak ethnic nationalist Slovak National Party and the far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia. By contrast, the two parties that presented themselves as being starkly opposed to the Smer government’s policies—Freedom and Solidarity and Ordinary People and Independent Personalities—exhibit greater support in districts with more university-educated voters and lower unemployment rates.     

Beyond protest and discontent: A cross‐national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support

Studies on populist parties – or ‘supply‐side populism’ more generally – are numerous. Nevertheless, the connection with demand‐side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. This article examines in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. It asks two core questions: (1) are populist party supporters characterised by stronger populist attitudes than other party supporters, and (2) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? The analysis uses fixed effect models and relies on a cross‐sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. The results are threefold. First, in line with single‐country studies, populist attitudes are prominent among supporters of left‐ and right‐wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support in addition to left‐wing socioeconomic issue positions for left‐wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti‐immigration issue positions for right‐wing populist parties. Third, populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy‐related preferences.     

Electoral Reform and Party Adaptation: The Introduction of the Single Transferable Vote in Scotland

The 2007 Scottish Local Government Elections saw the first large scale use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) in a mainland election in Britain. This presented a range of challenges for Scotland's political parties, more familiar with campaigning under first-past-the-post or the Scottish parliament's semi-proportional Additional Member System (AMS). Most crucially, STV meant the parties had to come to terms with multi-member wards and the transferral of votes between parties. Following a short discussion of the results of the STV elections, this article assesses evidence on how the parties adapted to the new electoral system, focussing particularly on candidate and campaign strategies. The article argues that Scotland's parties showed some, but limited, signs of adapting to new electoral conditions. Rather than strategic adjustment, an element of 'hoping for the best' was evident in all parties.     

Voters’ perceptions of government performance and attributions of responsibility: Electoral control in Poland

We test the claim that elections function as a mechanism of accountability in the case of Poland, a new democracy with a fluid party system. We ask whether individuals’ vote intentions are based on assessments of governing parties’ performance. Taking into consideration attributions of responsibility for such performance, accountability exists if assessments of poor performance decrease the probability of voting for a ruling party. We use two criteria of performance: perceived change in unemployment rate and level of corruption between two consecutive elections. Using data from the Polish POLPAN panel survey, our results confirm the existence of a heterogeneous sanctioning model.     

Positions and saliency of immigration in party manifestos: A novel dataset using crowd coding

Immigration is one of the most widely debated issues today. It has, therefore, also become an important issue in party competition, and radical right parties are trying to exploit the issue. This opens up many pressing questions for researchers. To answer these questions, data on the self‐ascribed and unified party positions on immigration and immigrant integration issues is needed. So far, researchers have relied on expert survey data, media analysis data and ‘proxy’ categories from the Manifesto Project Dataset. However, the former two only give the mediated party position, and the latter relies on proxies that do not specifically measure immigration. The new dataset presented in this article provides researchers with party positions and saliency estimates on two issue dimensions – immigration and immigrant integration – in 14 countries and 43 elections. Deriving the data from manifestos enables the provision of parties’ unified and unfiltered immigration positions for countries and time points not covered in expert surveys and media studies, making it possible to link immigration and immigrant integration positions and saliency scores to other issue areas covered in the Manifesto Project Dataset. Well‐established criteria are used to distinguish between statements on (1) immigration control and (2) immigrant integration. This allows for a more fine‐grained analysis along these two dimensions. Furthermore, the dataset has been generated using the new method of crowd coding, which allows a relatively fast manual coding of political texts. Some of the advantages of crowd coding are that it is easily replicated and expanded, and, as such, presents the research community with the opportunity to amend and expand upon this coding scheme.     

Ethnic outbidding and nested competition: Explaining the extremism of ethnonational minority parties in Europe

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small‐N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross‐cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert‐survey‐based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two‐level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models.     

The 2015 Regional Election in Italy: Fragmentation and Crisis of Subnational Representative Democracy

In May 2015, voters in seven Italian regions went to the polls to elect new regional councils and governments. The final election result was apparently similar to that of 2010: centre-left coalitions won in five out of seven regions, as in the previous election, leaving the remaining two to the centre-right. Yet behind this picture of stability, dramatic changes have occurred in the internal composition of regional coalitions, cross-party equilibriums and levels of participation. Generally, regional party-based democracy seems to be experiencing increasing fragmentation and a crisis of representation and legitimacy.     

Dimensions of political conflict and party positions in multi-level democracies: evidence from the Local Manifesto Project

Partisan conflicts have been frequently analysed in comparative political science research. Yet little is known about the dimensions of political conflict at the local level in multi-level democracies. This article contributes to the literature on the estimation and analysis of party positions by first presenting a new dataset of more than 800 local party manifestos in Germany that allows for a systematic analysis of the dimensions of political conflict at the German local level. Secondly, it is demonstrated that (semi-)automatic content analysis of these texts offers a promising approach for gaining new insights into local party positions. Thirdly, the empirical analysis of German local party manifestos shows that partisan conflicts are not only structured along the left–right dimension but also along a dimension which distinguishes between parties addressing ‘local’ and ‘national’ issues to a varying degree in their manifestos, due to the different behaviour of established and populist parties.     

Making sense of party strategy innovation: challenge to ideology and conflict-mobilisation as dimensions of party competition

Abstract

This article develops a pooled comparative analysis aimed at addressing two of the three overarching research questions of the special issue. It first discuss an ‘end of ideology’ research question: that is, whether party constituencies and party strategy show clear challenges to classic twentieth century ideological alignments. Second, it investigates the type of issue strategy that parties employ in this new ideological environment, expecting mainstream parties to stress a problem-solving approach, while challenger parties should favour a conflict-mobilisation strategy. Finally, the article combines these two fundamental dimensions (ideological consistency; reliance on problem-solving vs. conflict-mobilisation strategies) in order to identify party strategy innovations in current West European elections.     

From issues to goals: a novel conceptualisation,measurement and research design for comprehensive analysis of electoral competition

Abstract

The analysis of issue politics has long suffered from a fragmentation between valence and positional conceptualisations, preventing the effective development of a general model of issue-based party competition. Building on an overview of the evolution of party competition in the Western world in recent decades, this article offers a theoretical development that builds on ‘issue yield’ theory to provide a conceptualisation of political goals that generalises across positional and valence issues. This in turn allows a common measurement strategy, offering the possibility to comparatively assess various characteristics (including the electoral potential) of both positional and valence issues. Finally, it describes the specific research design derived from this framework and its implementation in comparative perspective in six West European countries during 2017–2018.