Do Parties’ Issue Emphases Lead Citizens’ Priorities?

• In Event: How Do Political Parties Adapt Their Communication and Representation?

Abstract

Issue ownership theory posits that parties strive to set the ‘terms of the debate’ in elections by selectively emphasizing issue areas that enhance their popular appeal. Yet, do citizens’ respond to parties’ issue emphasis, as the theory implies, or do they mainly respond to objective factors such as economic and environmental conditions, crime rates, immigration flows, and so on? We report a first time-series, cross-sectional analyses of the relationship between the public’s issue attention, parties’ issue emphases, and objective national conditions across seven issue areas in 13 western publics between 1971 and 2021, finding that objective conditions strongly predict citizens’ subsequent issue attention, but that party system issue attention does not. There are stronger links, however, between parties’ issue emphases and their supporters’ subsequent attention.

Authors

• James Adams, University of California, Davis

• Henrik Bech Seeberg, University of Aarhus