Research on issue ownership is accelerating and so is its use in studies of voting and party behaviour. Yet we do not know how stable issue ownership is. Does it describe a solid, persistent association between a party and an issue in the eyes of the electorate, or does it describe a more fluid and fragile issue reputation of a party among the electorate? Theoretical and empirical work suggests both stability and variability in issue ownership. To get closer to an answer, this article presents and analyses unprecedented comprehensive data on issue ownership. The analysis identifies stability rather than change in issue ownership over time and similarity more than difference across countries, and therefore suggests that issue ownership is a general and long-term rather than a local and short-term phenomenon. The implications for how voters perceive parties are important.

In a quantitative study using unique quarterly data across two decades, this article addresses the opposition's opportunities to influence policy; a topic that has been neglected in existing party-policy research. The idea that is developed is applied to a remarkable policy development on crime during the Danish leftwing government in the 1990s. Contrary to its policy position when it took office in 1993, the leftwing government repeatedly adopted severe restrictions to penal policy. The policy position of the rightwing opposition and its vehement and persistent criticism of the government provide an explanation, the article argues. Taking media coverage, public opinion, violence statistics, and the government's performance into account, the analysis shows that opposition criticism spurred the penal policy restrictions. Hence, by incorporating a policy agenda perspective, this article encourages a broadening of the perspective on parties’ policy influence. In particularly the opposition's opportunities to politicise issues and hereby influence policy.

The public administration literature has been dominated by questions about how politicians can control the bureaucracy's application and implementation of laws at the back end of the policy process. Much less scholarly attention is devoted to the influence of the bureaucracy on the content and composition of the policy agenda at the front end of the process. Agenda setting is a fundamental aspect of politics, and this article examines the influence of the bureaucracy on the policy agenda and the conditions for this influence. The core proposition is that the policy agenda is larger and more diverse in political systems in which administrative professionals take up a larger share of the bureaucracy. This effect is expected to be mitigated by the involvement of elected representatives in the policymaking process. The empirical analysis supports these expectations. The findings are based on a time-series cross-section dataset from 98 Danish municipalities over seven years containing a detailed coding of local council agendas and rich register data.

An impressive literature examines how voters evaluate government performance based on its record. Yet this literature rarely studies the role of party communication for how voters use social problems to evaluate a government. In response, this article studies the importance of party communication. Using British monthly data from 2004 to 2013 across four issues, the analysis shows that social problems such as growing unemployment increasingly undermine voters’ approval of government competence on this issue when opposition criticism intensifies. In fact, social problems do not systematically influence voters’ evaluations of government competence unless opposition criticism is taken into account. This suggests an important role of opposition communication in representative democracy where the opposition helps voters hold the government to account.

A premise of the mass-elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties' policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters to accurately perceive changes in parties' positions. We advance this literature with a two-wave panel survey design which measured voters' perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011-2013. We report two key findings that extend previous work: First, in our case voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a 'coalition heuristic' as a rule-of-thumb. Our findings imply that voters under some conditions are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.

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We study voter heterogeneity focusing on the influence of four decision criteria-The study uses a specially-designed survey instrument to study heterogeneity-Criterion heterogeneity translates into heterogeneous effects on the vote-Voter sophistication influences which decision criteria voters consider important