How parties compete for votes: A test of saliency theory

Abstract

Abstract. Saliency theory is among the most influential accounts of party competition, not least in providing the theoretical framework for the Comparative Manifesto Project -one of the most widely used data collections in comparative politics. Despite its prominence, not all empirical implications of the saliency theory of party competition have yet been systematically tested. This article addresses five predictions of saliency theory, the central claim of which is that parties compete by selective issue emphasis rather than by direct confrontation. Since a fair test of the theory's assumptions needs to rely on data that measures party issue saliency and party positions independently, this article draws on new manifesto data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). Analysing all manifestos issued for the 2002, 2006 and 2008 general elections, it shows that saliency theory correctly identifies some features of party competition. For instance, parties disproportionally emphasise issues they 'own'. Yet, the core assumption of saliency theory that parties compete via selective issue emphasis rather than direct confrontation over the same issues fails to materialise in the majority of cases.

Issue Entrepreneurship and Multiparty Competition

“…While recently much scholarly attention has been devoted to the questions of why parties compete on different dimensions and why parties and policy makers are more or less responsive to voters on these dimensions (see for example Adams et al 2006;Ezrow 2007;Meguid 2008;Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Dolezal et al 2014), the precise mechanisms underlying changes in the dimensional structure of competition have received much less attention, especially within multiparty systems. To date, most studies examining how issues emerge stem from the US context.…”

Credit or debit? The effect of issue ownership on retrospective economic voting

“…Findings on party campaign strategies seem to lend support to this argument. In fact, while the saliency theory expects parties to emphasize the issue they own during the election campaign (e.g., Budge and Farlie 1983;Dolezal et al 2014; but see also Wagner and Meyer 2014), existing studies find parties' strategies to be influenced not only by their ideology but also by their record. For instance, Winkler and Praprotnik (2015) show that in times of a high unemployment rate, left-wing incumbents, despite owning the unemployment issue, are less likely to refer to their record on this issue.…”

Learning in the Wild: Coding Reddit for Learning and Practice

“…The first cycle of coding was undertaken on a dataset of 1% of 2015 subreddit posts (excluding parent submissions) from each of 'Ask_Politics' (n=189), 'AskAcademia' (n=197) and 'askscience' (n=163). Each sample was coded by three coders, and was then assessed through Krippendorf's alpha, a conservative benchmark index commonly used to measure the validity and intercoder reliability in content analyses [6] and is well suited for projects that involve two or more coders and multiple coding categories [9].…”