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.     

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.     

How party‒issue linkages vary between election manifestos and media debates

Abstract

Existing research on party behaviour has largely focused on the drivers of issue salience in direct party communication. However, less is known about party?issue linkages in election campaigns covered by the mass media, from which most voters get their information about party positions. Against this background, this article explores how two important drivers of issue salience in direct party communication – issue ownership and systemic salience – play out in the media. Based on considerations about the news value of specific party?issue associations, one would expect both relationships to be particularly important in the media. Despite substantial similarities in party?issue linkages across platforms, a comparison of manifestos and newspaper content reveals evidence for this claim. In particular, smaller parties are hardly covered in the news on issues they do not own, while large parties are especially covered on salient topics. These findings contribute to our understanding of issue competition in mediated environments.     

Marching to the Left? Programmatic Competition and the 2017 Party Manifestos

This article analyses the content of the 2017 general election manifestos, and introduces the latest estimates from the Manifesto Project to explore recent ideological movements in the British party system. It reports the changing policy emphases in Conservative and Labour manifestos and the ideological positions of the major political parties in 2017. It finds that Theresa May's party produced its most left‐wing manifesto since 1964, and that Jeremy Corbyn's party produced its most left‐wing manifesto since 1992 and the election before the advent of New Labour. The article also finds that the ideological space between the Conservatives and Labour opened up in 2017, and that Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionists published the most right‐wing manifesto.     

The French elections of 2017: shaking the disease?

The results of the 2017 presidential and legislative elections represent an important shift in French politics. For the first time in the history of the 5th French Republic, the candidates of the two traditional governing parties were disqualified during the first round of the presidential elections. The duel between a centrist and a radical-right candidate in the second round of the elections constitutes an unprecedented configuration. Moreover, there was a record parliamentary renewal after the 2017 legislative elections, as well as a feminisation of the National Assembly with 38.8 per cent of women among the deputies. At the same time, abstention for the legislative elections reached a new record high. Overall, the results of the French elections in 2017 could point to major shifts in the party system, as well as to a renewal of the French political elite, and to an enduring malaise between French citizens and their political representatives.     

German gays go green? Voting behaviour of lesbians,gays, and bisexuals in the 2021 German federal election

Previous analyses have shown the existence of a sexuality gap in voting behaviour between those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB), and those who identify as heterosexual (Hertzog 1996). On the basis of these findings, it is generally assumed that LGBs vote primarily for liberal and left-wing parties because they are most likely to represent the group's interests in the political space. Using the 2021 German federal election as a case study, this article provides substantial findings, showing that, when controlled for the ideological proximity between voters and parties, sexuality affects in several ways how LGBs identify with and vote for parties in Germany. Positive effects can be demonstrated for the Greens, the Left, and – in contrast to previous assumptions – the far-right AfD. This is the first study to examine systematically the voting behaviour of LGBs and heterosexuals in Germany.     

Evaluations of candidates’ non-policy characteristics from issue positions: Evidence of valence spillover

Why do most winning candidates adhere to partisan orthodox positions? While some prior work has examined how issue positions signal candidate ideology, this paper instead focuses on how candidate issue positions affect evaluations of valence. In light of important inferential limitations in using the correlation between observed candidate positions and electoral performance to assess voter responses, we present a large-scale candidate vignette experiment that reveals issue positions affect perceptions of non-ideological characteristics. Candidates with only one of three positions that stray from the “typical” position for their party – being too extreme, bipartisan, or ideologically unusual – are perceived as less effective legislators. This suggests party-consistency may be reinforced by the electorate through changes in perceived valence, and that the observed correlation between candidate performance and issue positions might arise for reasons apart from ideology.     

Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation

This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.     

To the Advantage of the Big Parties but They Seem to Lose Interest—TV Advertising During the 2002 German National Election Campaign

Abstract

Since the introduction of commercial broadcasting in Germany during the 1980s, parties are allowed to purchase airtime in addition to the free airtime they receive on public channels. This has led to an increasing disadvantage for the smaller parties. In addition to the fact that a graded system of allocation of airtime is applied for ads on public TV and small parties receive fewer slots than their big competitors, they cannot afford to buy extra airtime. Comparisons of style and content of the party ads further show that the bigger parties produce highly professional ads while the broadcasts of smaller parties are often unprofessional and almost home-style. While the spots allow unknown parties to receive the attention of the audience, their unprofessional offerings might work to their disadvantage. While the ads of the 2002 electoral campaign have confirmed these developments, analyses of the ads of the big parties at the same time hint at a growing disenchantment with the ads as a campaign channel. Even the big parties tend to invest less money in their TV campaign than in former campaigns, which at least partly seems to be due to unfavorable conditions for electoral advertising on TV. This paper presents findings from analyses of the party ads in 2002 which are compared with findings from a long-term analysis which covers the elections since 1957, the first year in which party ads were shown on German TV.     

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.     

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.