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Understanding the drivers of party issue emphasis and the specific role of public opinion is important to shed light on the mechanisms of contemporary party competition and to assess the quality of representation in liberal democracies. Previous research has produced conflicting results between issue ownership and issue dialogue perspectives and has ignored the role of time in party communication strategy. We present a theory focused on the economy in which proximity to election day increases the incumbent's cost of not responding to opponent attacks and subsequently decreases the incumbent's attention to public opinion. We validate the main empirical implications of the model via content analysis of party discourse in Spanish parliamentary speeches (1996–2011) and time series analyses. Our results have pessimistic implications for an ideal conception of bottom-up representation. As electoral accountability pressures increase over the electoral cycle, endogenous party competition overshadows public opinion as a driver of representatives' agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reasons pushing parties to politicize noneconomic dimensions of competition, and the consequences of this for the representation of public opinion, are badly understood in the party competition literature. This is a pressing research gap, especially given the recent and significant reactivation of territorial or center-periphery conflicts in Western Europe. In this article, we first argue that bad macroeconomic performance increases the incentives of incumbent parties to deviate the attention toward territorial conflicts in order to avoid electoral punishment. Second, we also argue that the opposite is true for public opinion: it is precisely during periods of bad economic performance and high economic concern, when the electorate moves away from territorial interests. The dynamic emerging from our findings is thus far from an ideal bottom-up representation: elites divert the attention toward territorial conflicts to mask periods of poor economic performance, which is precisely when public opinion is less interested in center-periphery issues. We validate our claims using text analysis of party attention in Spain and time series models covering four electoral cycles (1996–2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective In this project, we develop an informational theory that identifies which prime minister debates are the most meaningful in terms of shifting Spanish public opinion . We argue that debates immediately following the installation of new leaders (because they shine light on leadership traits) and debates occurring in times of crisis (because voters can judge both the leader's ability to remedy the problems and their policy proposals) will have the largest short- and long-term effects. Methods We use seemingly unrelated regression to explore the impacts of 15 Spanish State of the Nation debates from 1998 to 2016 on vote intention for Partido Popular (PP) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE). Result Debates following the installation of new party leaders often produce sizable improvements in vote intention, but the most meaningful debates occur during economic crises. Conclusion Parliamentary debates are valuable opportunities for party leaders to shift public opinion in their favor, a fact that is not lost to them considering the time and energy devoted to crafting strategies, and the media's fascination with providing extensive coverage of the debates. This study has important implications for the study of dynamic processes (such as vote intention), and the link between parties' strategic communications and voting behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]