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Abstract
Empirical assessments of issue competition lack both conceptual precision in the use of the concept of “policy issue”, and sufficient studies integrating both salience and positional perspectives. This article specifies an operational definition of a “policy issue” suited for the analysis of issue competition in the electoral arena and beyond, and proposes a typology of electoral issues that takes into account the two sides of issue competition – the decision to address an issue, and the adoption of a diverging or similar position on it. This typology allows distinguishing proprietal, consensual, blurred and conflictual issues. The framework is illustrated with an analysis of EU-related issues in the electoral manifestos of British, French and German parties. This source did not enable us to identify any blurred issue, but our exploratory study delivers several conclusions regarding the other issue types. Proprietal issues appear to be marginal, indicating that parties tend to devote attention to the same issues and that issue ownership is highly contested. We further observe a primacy of consensus in EU-related discourses, especially among governing parties.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Mark Franklin, Frank Baumgartner, Sylvain Brouard, Emiliano Grossman, Piero Ignasi, Herbert Kitschelt, Robert Ladrech, Duncan McDonnell, Anke Tresch, John Wilkerson and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties for their comments on previous drafts of this article. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors and inconsistencies.
Notes
1 As will appear to the reader, our conception of issue competition is broad and is not limited to parties' strategies regarding issues' salience, but includes parties' positions on those issue. In our understanding, issue competition relates to all electoral uses of policy issues by political parties.
2 See in particular the salience (Budge & Farlie, Citation1983; Budge et al., Citation1987; Klingemann et al., Citation1994) and issue-ownership (Green-Pedersen & Blomqvist, Citation2004; Petrocik, Citation1996; Petrocik et al., Citation2003) theories.
3 CMP data do include aspects of positional competition as well, since some coding units refer to a pro or contra position on a given issue (e.g. multiculturalism)
4 Parties have incentives to address issues on which they enjoy issue ownership in the eyes of the electorate (Walgrave et al., 2012), or a greater cohesion compared to other parties, or a position that is closest to the one of the median voter (Budge, Citation2001; Green-Pedersen, Citation2007), which may result in some issues being politicized by one party only.
5 The CAP codebook is divided in 250 subtopics grouped in 24 topics.
6 European integration is sometimes also described as a “dimension” (De Vries & Hobolt, Citation2012; Hix, Citation1998; Marks & Steenbergen, Citation2004) or a “cleavage” (Kriesi et al., 2008), which shows its perceived conflictual character.
7 A list of these 69 issues can be found in the Appendix
8 Parliamentary parties are parties that have had access to parliament at least once between 1981 and 2010. This case selection explains why we left some parties out of our selection, such as the extreme-left parties in France (LO, NPA), the extreme right parties in Germany (NDP), or the Greens and UKIP in the UK.
9 By focusing on the period 1986–2009 and on national elections, our study purposely leaves aside two developments in British politics, namely the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party, which has not yet accessed Westminster yet, and the participation of Liberal Democrats in a Tory-led coalition since May 2010. The Liberal Democratic Party is thus studied here as a challenger party while acknowledging its specificities when compared to the challenger parties in other countries (notably in terms of ancienty and of their position on new politics).
10 This step of the analysis and the list of issues were described and analysed in a previous publication (cf. Guinaudeau & Persico, Citation2013).
11 We can here draw a link between issue ownership from the voters' perspective and issue ownership from the parties' perspective, which appear to be closely connected. Voters are likely to associate a party with an issue if this party was once the only one to emphasize it. The associative issue ownership that exists, in the eye of voters, between Green parties and the environmental issue (Walgrave et al., Citation2009), directly relates to the fact that the Greens used to be the only one to campaign about environmental protection.
12 The median share of proprietal issues is even slightly higher in governing parties' manifestos.
13 The probability that challenger parties' average share of conflictual issues is higher than governing parties' one, tested by a two-sample t-test with unequal variance, is significant at the 0.05 level.