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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]

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]

Classic and revisionist perspectives on economic voting have thoroughly analyzed the role of macroeconomic indicators and individual partisanship as determinants of subjective evaluations of the national economy. Surprisingly, however, top-down analysis of parties’ capacity to cue and persuade voters about national economic conditions is absent in the debate. This study uses a novel dataset containing monthly economic salience in party parliamentary speeches, macroeconomic indicators and individual survey data covering the four last electoral cycles in Spain (1996–2011). The results show that the salience of economic issues in the challenger’s discourse substantially increases negative evaluations of performance when this challenger is the owner of the economic issue. While a challenger’s conditioning of public economic evaluations is independent of the state of the economy (and can affect citizens with different ideological orientations), incumbent parties are more constrained by the true state of the economy in their ability to persuade the electorate on this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]