The separate empirical chapters each make specific contributions to the academic literature. These will be discussed in the respective chapters, and will be summa-rized in the concluding chapter. This dissertation offers, in addition, three over-arching contributions to the scholarly literature on party competition and issue attention in established democracies.
First, this dissertation goes beyond the notion of selective emphasis – that is, the notion that parties have incentives to selectively emphasize the issues on which they enjoy competitive advantages while they have an interest in downplaying the importance of issues that might benefit their competitors. This idea underpins much of the extant literature on issue competition. Recent work has argued that the issue competition literature suffers from a “one-sided theoretical focus”, a result of which is that studies “have been slow to move beyond the idea that parties have issues they prefer” (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen, 2014, p.1-2). This dissertation offer a contribution to the literature by highlighting three additional components of issue salience strategies that have received relatively little attention in the empirical literature on party behaviour: parties’ inclination to respond to
the issue appeals of other parties, the scope of parties’ issue agendas and parties’
incentives to highlight new issues.
In addition, this dissertation systemically explains variation in the extent to which parties pursue these issue attention strategies. External party system pressures, conceptualized as parties’ relative positions in the competitive party system, are considered an important explanatory factor in this regard. This dis-sertation shows how the threefold distinction between mainstream government, mainstream opposition and challenger parties matters when it comes to differ-ences in issue attention strategies across parties. The challenger-mainstream has been introduced in other recent studies (see for example de Vries and Hobolt, 2012), but has been mainly used to explain parties’ incentives to campaign on Eu-ropean integration matters. Challenger parties, the argument goes, seek to upset the political status quo by highlighting European integration issues in an attempt to increase the underlying dimensionality of the political issue space (de Vries and Hobolt, 2012; Hobolt and de Vries, 2015; van de Wardt, de Vries and Hobolt, 2014;
van de Wardt, 2015). This dissertation broadens the scope of inquiry and argues that mainstream government, mainstream opposition and challenger parties pur-sue different ispur-sue salience strategies, induced by the different incentives they face resulting from their relative position in the competitive party system. As such, the second overarching contribution emerges from advancing the applicability of this behavioural classification of political parties in multi-party settings.
A third overarching contribution comes with the assessment of the impact of parties’ internal organizational structures on their issue strategies. Increas-ingly, studies of party behaviour seek to ‘open the black box’ of political parties, acknowledging that intra party politics precedes, and affects, parties’ policy pro-posals, election manifestos and strategic political choices. In the introduction to a recent special issue about the causes and consequences of internal party politics, Polk and K ¨olln (2016, p.1) write: “parties may be collective entities but internal factions, groups and divisions structure those entities.” A key aspect of contem-porary intra party research concerns “the electoral and other ramifications of in-ternal party tensions or divisions” (Polk and K ¨olln, 2016, p.1). Recent research has indeed taken up such questions, and has examined the impact of intra party politics on party policy positioning. Schumacher, de Vries and Vis (2013), for ex-ample, posit that parties in which activist dominate respond to changes in the positions of party voters while leadership-dominated party organizations induce responsiveness to the mean voter position. Lehrer (2012), adopting a similar line of argumentation, maintains that inclusive parties – parties in which rank-and-file members select leaders – respond to the issue positions of party members whereas exclusive parties – parties in which a small group of officials select lead-ers – respond to median voter shifts. These studies provide valuable insights in the effects of intra party dynamics on parties’ policy positioning on generalized left-right dimensions. This dissertation adds to the literature by highlighting that internal organizational structures are relevant as well for parties’ issue attention strategies.
The larger debates to which this dissertation speaks, though, relate to ques-tions of why certain issues become the focus of political conflict in party sys-tems whereas others are of minor importance or remain largely ignored. These questions are relevant beyond the academic sphere, and this dissertation aims to provide a contribution by enhancing our understanding of political parties’ issue attention strategies in western European countries.
The Conflict over Conflicts
Parties, Issue Attention and Political Competition
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There are billions of potential conflicts in any modern society, butonly a few become significant. The reduction of the number of conflicts in an essential part of politics. Politics deals with the domination and subordination of conflicts. A democratic society is able to survive be-cause it manages conflict by establishing priorities among a multitude of potential conflicts.”
Elmer E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People. A Realist’s View of Democracy in America,1960 (p.66)
2.1 Introduction
P
olitics is essentialy concernedwith the management of conflicts. The above quote by Schattschneider (1960) highlights the importance of this notion: democratic societies survive because they prioritize certain con-flicts over others. But how does this occur, establishing priorities among the many conflicts in democracies? What determines the selection of salient issues? And what role do political parties play in this process?This chapter consists of three parts. The first part (section 2.2) briefly dis-cusses and summarizes the literature on issue competition. The second part (sec-tion 2.3) introduces this study’s theoretical framework. It discusses the three com-ponents of parties’ issue salience strategies that are the focus of this dissertation:
(1) the extent to which parties respond to the issue attention of their competitors, (2) the scope of parties’ issue agendas and (3) the extent to which parties innovate their platforms. In addition, it discusses the two factors that are considered as crucially influencing parties’ issue salience strategies: (1) external party system pressures and (2) internal party organizational structures. The third part (section 2.4) puts forward some remarks on measurement and case-selection before this chapter closes with a brief summary.