Attacks and Issue Competition: Do Parties Attack Based on Issue Salience or Issue Ownership?

ABSTRACT

Various studies have been devoted to explaining the conditions under which parties engage in attack behavior. However, the existing literature has overlooked the issues on which parties attack. This study addresses this gap by arguing that the issues on which parties attack others are conditioned on their salience and the parties’ ownership. We argue that parties decide to increase attacks on issues that receive high levels of scrutiny in society and in the media (salience hypothesis). At the same time, the attention devoted to attacks is also expected to be higher on issues that parties own (issue ownership hypothesis). Therefore, attention to attacking others on a salient issue is expected to be the highest for parties that own a salient issue (congruence hypothesis). Using data on parties’ attacks during question time sessions from Belgium and the United Kingdom, together with a diverse set of measures on salience and ownership, we confirm our expectations in both cases. Parties attack others on salient issues and on issues that they own, and when a party has ownership over a salient issue, it will devote the greatest attention to attacking on that issue. These results provide an understanding of parties’ attack behavior and contribute to the broader issue competition literature.

KEYWORDS:

• attack behavior
• issue competition
• issue salience
• issue ownership
• parliaments

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and editors for their valuable feedback, which significantly improved the paper. We are also thankful to Stefaan Walgrave, who provided feedback on a previous version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2264224.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RDPFA1

Notes

1. Examining attack behavior in answers to questions is of utmost importance, as recent studies conducted in both Belgium and the United Kingdom reveal that parties frequently deviate from the specific issues they are being questioned on (Poljak, 2023a). This highlights the significance of analyzing attack behavior originating from the cabinet in answers to questions, as it often involves a different set of issues.

2. Generating all possible party-issue observations and keeping non-attacks on issues naturally leads to skewed outcomes in our data (90.9% of party-issue observations in Belgium have no attacks; 72.5% in the United Kingdom). To avoid possible biases this may cause in our analyses, we make sure to control for differences in issues and party-issue observations (see the Method section), and we further test our expectations using several other methods appropriate for skewed continuous measures (e.g. Boulton & Williford, 2018) in the Appendix F.8.

3. However, we do test our expectations using the count dependent variable indicating the overall number of attacks a party employed on an issue (Appendix F.7).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of Antwerp Research Fund [43834].

Notes on contributors

Željko Poljak

Željko Poljak is a postdoctoral researcher and a member of the M²P (Media, Movements & Politics) research group at the Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp. His research focuses on political competition, party politics, agenda-setting and political communication.

Henrik Bech Seeberg

Henrik Bech Seeberg is an associate professor in political science at Aarhus University. His research mostly concerns party competition and political agenda-setting. He currently leads a project funded by the Danish Research Council on youth representation and political parties’ youth wings.