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What is the relationship between the priorities expressed in party platforms before an election and the subsequent legislative agenda? The agenda setting literature often deemphasizes the role of political parties in agenda setting, instead focusing on the importance of problems bubbling up to the surface and demanding attention from policymakers. However, parties will often express different issue priorities during elections, and compete based on those priorities. If those promises are credible, voters should be able to choose between different sets of priorities during elections. The paper utilizes new data from the U.S. Policy Agendas Project and Wolbrecht on policy attention in U.S. party platforms to study the relationship between U.S. parties and legislative activities in Congress. A time-series cross-sectional analysis finds strong evidence to support the proposition that legislative agendas are influenced by the platform of the President’s party in the short term, although the relationship differs for different types of agendas and by issue, and fades over time.

This article examines the relationship between demand for expert information from members of the US Congress and increased issue salience in the public. As problems become salient, policymakers should seek out expert information to define problems and identify effective policy solutions to address those problems. Previous work on elite mass public representation and government problem solving has relied on public actions by elected officials to evaluate this relationship. We rely instead on new data on the policy content of privately requested reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) from 1997 to 2017. We find strong evidence that members consult experts when issues become salient, even when controlling for legislative agendas.

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Parties in government prioritize issues that voters trust them to handle more than other parties. However, scholars disagree about whether this relationship exists because parties strategically prioritize issues that voters trust them to handle or whether voters first observe core party priorities while in government and then trust them to handle those issues. This article disentangles these two explanations, arguing that issue ownership is caused by the core priorities of elites. I evaluate this argument by leveraging the privately financed structure of US party-aligned think tanks, which provide important policy information to US political parties. I introduce new data on the policy content of 15,897 white papers published by the leading party-aligned think tanks in the United States. I find that think tanks aligned with both parties tend to distribute more policy attention to their owned issues, although the process works differently for Republicans and Democrats, and that these patterns are durable. I conclude that these results are strong evidence to support elite prioritization explanations for issue ownership, although they do not rule out other explanations.