How Does the Conflict Structure Shape Issue Attention? Party Politics in Ireland

• In Event: Political Conflict and Competition in Ireland

Abstract

Does the conflict structure of a political system shape political parties’ issue attention? Existing studies have assumed that this is the case. For instance, the emergence of the GAL-TAN conflict has led to increased party attention to issues such as immigration and European integration. However, the exact role of differences in the conflict structure for parties’ issue attention is difficult to investigate as the conflict structure is similar across most West European countries. The left-right conflict has been dominant and has now been supplemented by the GAL-TAN conflict. Ireland, however, is the exception as the left-right conflict has never been dominant. This exceptionalism allows us to test the extent to which conflict structures and issue attention may be independent of one another, and to argue that it is other factors that drive political attention. Empirically, it presents new data on Irish party manifestos (1981-2020) coded using the Comparative Agendas Project framework. It examines a number of perspectives: first, the idea that attention focuses on the historical cleavages; second, that it focuses on emergent lines of conflict; third, that issue attention focuses on ‘owned’ issues of the parties in the system; and fourth, that parties attend to issues according to short-term strategic incentives, such as electoral competition and coalition formation.

Authors

• Christoffer Green-Pedersen, University of Aarhus

• Conor Little, University of Limerick