Issue Engagement and Avoidance in the Electoral Cycle

• In Event: Cross-national Perspectives on Party Press Releases

Abstract

Studies on political competition usually focus on election campaigns as the most important events in modern democracies. Yet, little is known about how parties and politicians compete during the inter-election period. In this paper, we study how issue engagement (i.e. the degree to which party actors address the same issues) varies across parties, politicians, and the electoral cycle. We expect that the level of issue engagement decreases as elections approach, because parties aim to appear united and to increase the attention to their best issues in election campaigns. In contrast, during the electoral cycle the parties’ issue agendas are more diverse, less focused on top party officials, and the general level of issue engagement is higher across parties. The empirical analysis is based on about 20,000 press releases by Austrian legislators between 2013 and 2017. We track the communication of 183 individual MPs in this multiparty context to study how the level of issue engagement between MPs changes over the electoral cycle. Our findings have broader implications on the substantive representation of citizens between elections and the quality of political representation in general.

Authors

• Thomas M Meyer

• Markus Wagner, University of Vienna