Avoidance and Engagement: Issue Competition in Multiparty Systems

Abstract

A substantial literature claims that political parties compete over issues by selectively emphasizing favorable issues and avoiding issues emphasized by their opponents. In recent years, this understanding of issue competition has been challenged by empirical studies showing issue engagement to be the rule rather than the exception. To move the discussion beyond the descriptive question about degree of issue avoidance or issue engagement, this article offers a theoretical framework of issue competition that addresses central but hitherto neglected questions about which parties respond to which parties. The main implications of the theoretical framework are tested in a set of statistical time‐series analyses of party interaction in Denmark covering more than 50 years, 24 major issues and 21 elections. These analyses offer support to the ideas that parties are more responsive to the issue agendas of parties from their own party family than to the issue agendas of non‐family parties and that large mainstream parties are more responsive than niche parties to the common issue agenda of the other parties in the party system.

Errors have been made, others will be blamed: issue engagement and blame shifting in Prime Minister speeches during the economic crisis in Europe

“…We found that prime ministers speak more extensively about economic issues when the domestic economy is in decline and when the unemployment rate rises. Our findings are in line with issue engagement theory (Sides 2006;Jerit 2008;Sigelman and Buell 2004;Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2015;Meyer and Wagner 2016): instead of focusing on the issues they "own", governments address topics that are publicly salient -in other words, they "ride the wave" of public attention (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994), thereby signaling that they are in touch with their voters' needs and concerns.…”

How Politics Shapes the Growth of Rules

“…Lengthy debates about an interpellation or a bill arise in parliament, because many parties find it important to address an issue. Furthermore, it is a measure that has proven its validity in previous studies of political agenda setting (see, e.g., Green‐Pedersen and Mortensen , ).…”

Friends With Text as Data Benefits: Assessing and Extending the Use of Automated Text Analysis in Political Science and Political Psychology

“…However, when parties engage with each other on issues (e.g., Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2015) then scaling only works if these parties use language on similar topics that is different enough. In practice parties sometimes engage with and sometimes avoid issues (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2015). If the scaling procedure finds dissimilarities between parties it is because they talk about different issues or because they take different positions on the same issues.…”