Abstract.  Studies of party politics and party competition in West European democracies all point to diversification. Non‐economic issues such as the environment, refugees and immigrants or law and order have become increasingly central to party politics. However, there has been surprisingly little interest in explaining variation across time and countries concerning which issues actually become central to party competition. From the sparse literature, two general answers can be discerned. One is societal, focusing on mass media coverage, public opinion and the development of the policy problems related to the issue. The other focuses on the structure of party competition itself – more precisely on the incentives for different parties in drawing attention to different issues. This study stresses the importance of the latter based on a study of the immigration issue in Denmark and Sweden. Party political attention to this issue in the 1990s has been considerably stronger in Denmark than in Sweden. This can be explained by the different strategic situation of the main stream right‐wing parties in the two countries. Focusing on the immigrant issue easily leads to a conflict with the centre‐right, especially social liberal parties. In Sweden, such a conflict would undermine mainstream right‐wing attempts at winning government power. In Denmark, the Social Liberals governed with the Social Democrats in the 1990s, which made it attractive for the main stream right‐wing parties to focus on the issue in order to win government power based on the support of radical right‐wing parties.

The aim of this work is to identify a clear policy proposal for how the EU may persuade the US to rejoin the Kyoto agreement. Accordingly the US' three major concerns in The Hague about the Kyoto Protocol have been investigated with the following result. Firstly, the EU should scrap the supplementarity principle of 50% domestic reduction or at least reduce it considerably. This would lower costs particularly by enhancing more free trade with emission permits. Secondly, the EU should support the US proposal to incorporate carbon sinks into the Protocol. Thirdly, the developing countries should be persuaded to make binding commitments preventing any carbon leakage which is harmful to the American economy. Together these measures should minimize US compliance costs, and ensure for the US a positive net gain from participation and thereby provide an incentive to rejoin. The overall result is that the EU necessarily has to make concessions to persuade the World's largest CO 2 emitter to join international climate negotiations again. This would ensure environmental improvement and cooperation in contrast to the present situation of US refusal to participate.