The Relationship of Issue Salience and Positional Theories of Party Competition

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of Party Positions

Abstract

Spatial theories of party competition focus on the position of political parties, while issue theories home in on the salience of issues, sometimes in interaction with the perceived competence of a party or candidate to “handle” the issue (“issue ownership”). Empirical expert measures of party strategies, therefore, score both party’s position and salience to distinguish the contribution of rival theories to accounting for party strategies. But the literature on party competition has given insufficient attention to investigating the relationship between parties’ attribution of issue salience and spatial position.

Position and issue salience may not be orthogonal to—or statistically independent from—each other in a party’s strategizing. The main task of the paper is to develop propositions and techniques to show that spatial and salience measures of party issue stances are, in fact, interdependent. A large share of the variance in parties’ salience attributed to issues can be predicted from information about their positions on the same and other issues, their size, their age and party system features (fragmentation). What is also important to endogenize salience is whether an issue is in the economic-distributive domain or the domain of political governance and cultural identification. Parties’ salience attributed to issue positions in the latter dimensions is often a function of (1) the systemic configuration of parties’ economic issue stances, as well as (2) their own clarity and (3) position of stances on economic-distributive issues.

Our analysis up this point is entirely correlational with an important pragmatic upshot for measurement effort in content analysis and expert data collection of party strategies: it may be redundant to ask experts to score both party issue positions and salience. Knowing position, we can often infer salience. Conversely, knowing salience in party manifestos and other sources often implies position.

In the final part, the paper will also begin to explore the causal aspect of the problem with a diff-in-diff analysis of CHES (Chapel Hill Expert Survey) data: Do changes in party position predict subsequent salience and changes in salience of parties’ issue emphasis? Or do changes in salience predict positional changes?

Authors

• Kerem Yildirim, Kadir Has University

• Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University