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Saliency approaches derive from the basic idea that political parties define their policies by emphasising certain topics more than others, particularly in public documents and debates. However, the approaches diverge on whether parties always emphasise the same ‘owned’ issues or can emphasise different ones in different elections with a view to winning votes. The article explores the way these differences developed and summarises them in a typology of ‘issue ownerships’, within which models linking ‘ownership’ to election outcomes can be located. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the rise of political parties has rendered classical distinctions between direct and representative democracy largely obsolete. This is particularly true for representative democracy where, rather than selecting candidates as individuals, electors are now asked to choose between party policy packages. Party-mediated rather than unmediated policy voting is also the order of the day so far as direct democracy is concerned. The real contrast between the two thus boils down to periodic voting on medium- term party programmes versus frequent votes on individual policy. We argue here that there is a place for both in any modern democracy that truly aims at creating a necessary connection between public policy and popular preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]