Coalition Governments and Party Competition: Political Communication Strategies of Coalition Parties

Abstract

Coalition parties have to reconcile two competing logics: They need to demonstrate unity to govern together, but also have to emphasize their own profile to succeed in elections. We argue that the electoral cycle explains whether unity or differentiation prevails. While differentiation dominates at the beginning and the end of the legislative term in close proximity to elections, compromise dominates the middle of the term when coalition governments focus on enacting a common policy agenda. To test our theoretical claims, we draw on an innovative quantitative text analysis of more than 21,000 press releases published by coalition parties from 2000 until 2010.

Setting the Agenda or Responding to Voters? Political Parties, Voters and Issue Attention

“…In order to analyse the attention that political parties in Germany pay to different policy issues, we study the press releases published by their party groups in the German Bundestag (see also Sagarzazu and Klüver 2015). Press releases are an ideal data source to study the selective issue emphasis of political parties as we can trace the attention that parties pay to different policy issues on a daily basis, which constitutes a major advantage over election manifestos which are only published in election years.…”

“…Second and more importantly, we rely on a novel dataset that was generated based on a quantitative text analysis of more than 40,000 press releases published by German political parties between 2000 and 2010 which allows for analysing issue competition throughout the entire electoral cycle. Press releases constitute an ideal instrument of political communication as political parties can independently choose what to communicate to their voters on a daily basis (see also Grimmer 2010;Hopmann et al 2012;Sagarzazu and Klüver 2015). Unlike speeches or questions in the legislature which are constrained by the parliamentary agenda, political parties can freely decide which political issues they want to emphasise.…”

Errors have been made, others will be blamed: issue engagement and blame shifting in Prime Minister speeches during the economic crisis in Europe

“…There is a rich literature that combines these factors using case studies, but it remains hard to generalize from those. This study demonstrates how government communication can be studied systematically (also see Sagarzazu and Klüver, 2017). On the longer term this allows for a more systematic evaluation of the interplay between economic problems, government communication, voter responses and policy changes.…”

“…As noted, poor economic performance makes the economy more salient and therefore governments may choose to "ride-the wave" of public opinion in their communication with the public. Recent research on European parties provides evidence for parties' attention to publicly salient issues in their press releases (Klüver and Sagarzazu 2016, see as well Sagarzazu and Klüver 2017) and party manifestos (Wagner and Meyer 2014). Also, the literature on American political campaigns has, by and large, confirmed that public salience is a more important predictor of the candidates' issue focus than issue ownership, and that issue trespassing and issue convergence are the norm (Sigelman and Buell 2004;Sides 2006;Druckman et al 2010 Alternatively, PMs may want to brag about good economic conditions.…”

The Impact of Economic Crises on Political Representation in Public Communication: Evidence from the Eurozone

“…4 See, e.g., Bakker et al 2015;Budge et al 2001. 5 See, e.g., Grimmer 2013;Grimmer, Westwood, and Messing 2015;Herzog and Benoit 2015;Pardos-Prado and Sagarzazu 2016;Proksch and Slapin 2015;Sagarzazu and Klüver 2017;Schwarz, Traber, and Benoit 2017. 6 Hoff, Raftery, and Handcock 2002;Hoff 2005. 7 That is, in a one-dimensional space, they are both placed to the left or the right of the zero point.…”