How to Attract Voter Attention? The Emergence of the Political Agenda and the Issue Management Model

Abstract

The large theoretical and empirical body of research on different rational choice concepts has provided a wide array of material for both critics and adherents of this approach. However, the ability rational choice theories offer to incorporate assumptions developed in different research areas in unitary logical concepts has been seldom highlighted. In order to demonstrate this ability, I have developed a model of the emergence of the political agenda, called the Issue Management Model, which tries to extend the Economic Theory of Democracy to the requirements of the modern media democracy and to connect its main assumptions with some concepts of shaping the political agenda from political psychology and media communication. The article pursues three objectives: first, it demonstrates the ability of the rational choice theories to link their key assumptions to empirical results of studies in different academic disciplines. Second, it discusses the extent to which the Economic Theory of Democracy can be aligned with the requirements of modern democracy. Last, it attempts to bring together several concepts of the emergence of the political agenda. The intention of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the formation of political agenda or, strictly speaking, of the construction of party strategies aimed at surviving in office.

KEYWORDS:

• economic theory of democracy
• heresthetic
• issue ownership theory
• political agenda
• rational choice
• voter maximizing

Notes

For an overview of the most critical points that seem to be still current, see Shapiro and Green (1994). For arguing that rational choice does not necessarily equal formalization, see Cox (2002: 4), Snidal (2002: 73 and 77), and Dylla (2007).

The terms parties and political leaders or politicians are treated in this paper synonymously since a party is understood as a conglomerate of individual politicians with the same objective: voter maximization.

However, the political tactic of stressing topics, in which a party has demonstrated credibility while avoiding those in which it is weak, not only is a key element of the heresthetic, the Issue Ownership Theory, and a subject of the study on priming effects but also emerges also in the Salience Theory, referred to below.

For empirical validity of the Issue Ownership Theory, see Aldrich (1980: 174 ff.), Petrocik (1996), Narud and Valen (2001), Griffith (2005), and Egan (2006). A formalization of this theory is offered by Simon (2002). For a criticism, see Kaplan, Park, and Ridout (2006) and Aldrich and Griffin (2003).

For empirical studies confirming this hypothesis, see Druckman (2001: 1041), Simon and Xenos (2000), Sniderman and Theriault (2004), Slothuus (2005: 2), and Berinsky and Krosnik (2006).

For an argument that parties do not always focus on framing but also engage in a policy debate, see below and Jerit (2008).

Empirical evidence for a high degree of issue convergence, when issues in question are salient, is provided by, for instance, Sides (2006) and Green and Hobolt (2008).

Empirical evidence of the hypothesis that when exposed to contrary frames, the attentiveness of the public focuses on those frames that confirm its political beliefs, see Rousseau, Lux, and Miodownik (2000), Sniderman and Theriault (2004: 27), and Goble and Werner (2006: 4).

For an overview of the limits of the political manipulation through framing, see Druckman and Nelson (2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daria W. Dylla

Daria W. Dylla studied international relations at the University of Silesia, Poland, and completed a PhD at the University of Cologne, Germany. She has worked for the Chair for International Politics and Foreign Policy at the University in Cologne. Her current teaching and research interests lie in the theories of foreign and security policy, the rational choice approach, Transatlantic relationships, and the region of Central Europe. Dylla is currently working on the development of a theory of foreign policy called “theory of double survival.”