Who Responds? Voters, Parties and Issue Attention

Abstract

Do parties listen to their voters? This article addresses this important question by moving beyond position congruence to explore whether parties respond to voters’ issue priorities. It argues that political parties respond to voters in their election manifestos, but that their responsiveness varies across different party types: namely, that large parties are more responsive to voters’ policy priorities, while government parties listen less to voters’ issue demands. The study also posits that niche parties are not generally more responsive to voter demands, but that they are more responsive to the concerns of their supporters in their owned issue areas. To test these theoretical expectations, the study combines data from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on voters’ policy priorities from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various national election studies across eighteen European democracies in sixty-three elections from 1972–2011. Our findings have important implications for understanding political representation and democratic linkage.

Setting the Agenda or Responding to Voters? Political Parties, Voters and Issue Attention

“…While previous research almost exclusively focused on parties' issue attention in election campaigns focusing either on the American two-party system or concentrating on issue emphasis in election manifestos of political parties in Europe (e.g. Damore 2005;Klüver and Spoon 2014;Sides 2007;Sigelman and Buell 2004;Spiliotes and Vavreck 2002;Spoon and Klüver 2014;Wagner and Meyer 2014), we have provided a novel analysis of parties' issue attention throughout the entire electoral cycle. Based on a quantitative text analysis of more than 40,000 press releases published by German political parties from 2000 until 2010, we were able to explore the day-to-day dynamics of issue competition between political parties.…”

“…But at the same time, previous research examining election manifestos has found considerable evidence for an issue ownership effect (e.g. Green-Pedersen and Krogstrup 2008;Klüver and Spoon 2014). Thus, in order to understand the seemingly contradictory evidence one must bear in mind that two different data sources are analysed.…”

“…Budge and Farlie 1983;Petrocik 1996;Petrocik et al 2003;Spiliotes and Vavreck 2002), others demonstrate that parties respond to the policy priorities of their voters (e.g. Klüver and Spoon 2014;Spoon and Klüver 2014;Wagner and Meyer 2014). In addition, the vast majority of studies investigating selective issue emphasis of political parties focuses on political communication in the United States (e.g.…”

“…As a result, one could expect that the riding the wave theory might better explain parties' selective issue emphasis in multi-party systems as parties could settle on policy issues that are salient to the electorate while the issue ownership theory might be more suitable to explain the fierce competition between parties in a two-party system where each party is solely interested in maximising its own electoral benefits. What is more, previous research almost exclusively focused on issue competition in election campaigns (Damore 2005;Hayes 2008;Klüver and Spoon 2014;Sides 2007;Sigelman and Buell 2004;Spiliotes and Vavreck 2002;Spoon and Klüver 2014;Wagner and Meyer 2014). Election campaigns are very different from the day-to-day politics during the legislative term as they only cover a short period of heated political competition.…”

Coalition Governments and Party Competition: Political Communication Strategies of Coalition Parties

“…Third, in order to control for the responsiveness of coalition parties to public opinion, we controlled for voter issue attention as previous studies have shown that political parties respond to the issue priorities of voters (Klüver and Spoon, forthcoming;Spoon and Klüver, 2014). As a result, we expect that coalition parties differentiate less on issues that are highly salient among citizens.…”