How Much Do Parties’ Issue Emphases Lead Citizens’ Priorities?

• In Event: New Approaches in the Study of Citizen-Party Linkage

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, citizens’ issue priorities also respond to objective factors such as economic and environmental conditions, crime rates, immigration flows, and so on. We report 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 2017, finding that objective conditions strongly predict the mass public’s 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

• Henrik Bech Seeberg, University of Aarhus

• James Adams, University of California, Davis