Search

What is the relationship between social policy reforms and issue salience in public opinion? Extensive research analyses policy feedbacks on policy preferences and the influence of policy preferences on policy change. Scant research, however, considers the link between reforms and issue salience – i.e., the perception of importance citizens attach to a topic. We address this gap in the literature through the comparative study of the salience of the 'pension issue'. Drawing on a novel dataset covering 2010–2020 and 28 European countries, we argue that the passage of pension reforms shapes pension salience. Multilevel fixed effects models indicate that pension reforms that include either contracting or expansionary provisions are positively related to pension salience. In contrast, expansionary and contracting reforms, by themselves, are not robustly associated with pension salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on political representation suggests that legislative activity is influenced by governing parties' policy emphases in their election campaigns. We argue that populist governments are an exception as they may find it difficult to draft and implement laws on an issue even if it is salient to them. The anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manichean-discourse nature of populist party platforms significantly alters their ability to legislate on their campaign issues. We test this claim using data on the saliency of governments' immigration policies in their election campaigns and subsequent legislation on immigration. The empirical analysis is based on 14 democratic states from 1998 to 2013. The results support the theory that populist governments will exhibit a relatively weak relationship between their issue emphases in election campaigns and the number of policies they enact on immigration. This research has important implications for our understanding of populism, political representation, and immigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political participation and party attachment in Western democracies have become more and more volatile. In turn, political campaigns seem increasingly dependent on short-term discursive windows of opportunity opened by dynamic debates on issues such as migration, climate, employment and economic policies. Based on panel data from nine European countries, we investigate how patterns and changes in the materialist and postmaterialist concerns of respondents affect electoral turnout and party switching. By relating these variables, we aim to uncover whether and to what extent underlying concerns – and thus short-term politicization – account for short-term patterns of electoral volatility. We pay special attention to young respondents, who are often framed as being particularly dynamic and less bound to traditional political loyalties. Our findings offer insights into short-term change in discursive opportunities for political mobilization and broader democratic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of declining party identification, political parties need to persuade and mobilize their voters from election to election. Setting topics in such a way that voters are convinced to cast their vote has become an essential prerequisite for success in modern election campaigns. Social media are suitable for this, as parties can set their own topics or highlight the topics most important to the voters and communicate them to a large audience in organic posts or target specific voter groups with ads. While tendencies of issue ownership in posts on Facebook are repeatedly shown empirically, there is a lack of studies investigating which strategies parties follow in their investment decisions on Facebook ads. Based on theoretical expectations derived from the literature about digital political marketing and issue prioritization in election campaigns, this article investigates whether parties communicated consistently on Facebook with regard to the issues they set in organic posts, sponsored posts, and ads during the 2021 German federal election campaign. The results of a manual quantitative content analysis (n = 1,029 posts, n = 1,197 sponsored posts, n = 2,643 ads) show that parties focused on issue ownership in their posts. Still, their investments in sponsored posts and ads followed different strategies. Here, most parties highlighted social policy, contradicting issue ownership for some parties. The article provides novel insights into digital campaigning and discusses the extent to which parties can engage audiences beyond their organic reach within party-affiliated audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its detrimental effects, corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling has been underexamined in the literature. This research explores why and how companies engage in CSR decoupling from the perspective of behavioral theory of social performance. We contend that legitimacy threats drive firms with corporate social performance (CSP) below stakeholder expectations toward substantive CSR initiatives, which reduces CSR decoupling. In contrast, efficiency deficit drives firms with CSP above stakeholder expectations toward symbolic CSR initiatives, increasing CSR decoupling. Building upon literature on issue salience, these relationships are moderated by industry culpability and earnings pressure. A longitudinal analysis was conducted on Heckman two‐stage estimation using a sample of 5166 Chinese publicly listed firms from 2010 to 2019, which supports our hypotheses. Additionally, the findings remain robust after rigorous tests. This study contributes to the CSR literature by shedding light on the impact of CSP feedback on CSR decoupling and enriches the behavioral theory of social performance by incorporating the perspective on CSP feedback through issue salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on data-driven campaigning has mostly focused on the strategies of central campaign teams. However, there is a lack of evidence explaining how parties and supporters use data-driven campaigning techniques to organise their social media campaigning. Do user engagement metrics influence the choice of campaign themes by encouraging political parties to concentrate their communication on issues that are most liked, commented on, and shared? Our study focuses on the use of Facebook by French political parties and their supporters during the 2022 presidential election campaign. We conducted a supervised content analysis based on machine learning to examine their Facebook posts (n = 17,060). Our results show that the issues prioritized by parties on Facebook may be different from those that are most prominent in their broader communications. In most cases, however, these themes are not chosen based on user engagement, even for parties that claim to have developed their base through digital channels. Instead, the choice of themes seems influenced by more traditional campaign strategies, such as the desire to capture the electorate of their closest rival. In our conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the adoption of data-driven campaigning in digital election communication across Europe.

Extensive research applies counterfactual simulation methodology to study parties’ optimal policy positions in multiparty elections. In recent years, this methodology has been extended to the study of variation in issue salience. We employ this method to estimate the electoral effects of changes in the salience of specific positional issue dimensions on parties’ success. Applied to British Election Study survey data from 2017 and 2019, we find that plausible issue salience changes could have shifted the parties’ projected vote shares by several percentage points. Our approach implies that the governing Conservative Party had electoral incentives to downplay positional issues, to magnify the relative effects of its non-policy advantage due to perceived competence and performance, among other factors. Labour would also have benefitted from reduced salience of Left-Right ideology. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats had strong electoral incentives to emphasize their moderate Left-Right position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue salience is a fundamental component of party competition, yet we know little about when, where, or why parties' issue emphases converge or diverge. I propose an original operationalization of issue salience divergence, the extent to which parties' issue emphases differ from each other in an election, that generates values at the party-election and country-election levels. I leverage data from party manifestos to calculate scores for 2,308 party-election combinations of 381 unique parties in 426 elections across thirty European countries, the most comprehensive dataset to date. I find that issue salience divergence is generally low and has starkly decreased over time, but countries and parties differ substantially. As an initial step in understanding these differences, I propose and test initial expectations of how party and democracy age, electoral systems, and party type alter the incentives for divergent issue salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question to what extent voters punish governments for cutting the welfare state is an unsettled issue in social policy research. Our contribution addresses this shortcoming by systematically analyzing how media reporting about legislative changes to the welfare state affects the public agenda and citizens' vote intentions while controlling for the influence of actual cutbacks and expansions. In our analysis we examine the case of Germany from 1994 to 2014; a period where major cutbacks but also significant expansions to the German welfare state occurred. We find that mass media reporting about pension cutbacks is associated with a drop in government approval, whereas the reaction to expansive legislative changes is muted. We also find that the relationship of media reporting and government approval strongly depends on who is in government with the social democrats being punished harder than the Christian democrats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how challenger parties enter the political arena and the effect of this entry by looking at the Italian 5 Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle – M5S). We explain the M5S's entry strategy in 2013 using the spatial approach to party competition and employing expert survey data collected for each national election between 2008 and 2018. These data allow us to analyse the changing spatial configuration of Italian politics due to the increasing salience of pro/anti-EU and pro/anti-immigration dimensions. We then apply the theoretical notion of the uncovered set (UCS) to trace how the M5S's entry reshaped the overall space of party competition, causing a realignment of existing parties. This work contributes to the ongoing debate on the electoral success of challenger parties and the emerging cleavages and polarization of party systems in Western European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various studies have been devoted to explaining the conditions under which parties engage in attack behavior. However, the existing literature has overlooked the issues on which parties attack. This study addresses this gap by arguing that the issues on which parties attack others are conditioned on their salience and the parties' ownership. We argue that parties decide to increase attacks on issues that receive high levels of scrutiny in society and in the media (salience hypothesis). At the same time, the attention devoted to attacks is also expected to be higher on issues that parties own (issue ownership hypothesis). Therefore, attention to attacking others on a salient issue is expected to be the highest for parties that own a salient issue (congruence hypothesis). Using data on parties' attacks during question time sessions from Belgium and the United Kingdom, together with a diverse set of measures on salience and ownership, we confirm our expectations in both cases. Parties attack others on salient issues and on issues that they own, and when a party has ownership over a salient issue, it will devote the greatest attention to attacking on that issue. These results provide an understanding of parties' attack behavior and contribute to the broader issue competition literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent mobilization by living wage movements and unions to raise minimum wages have put the issue of low-wage work at the center of political debates in several countries. To study the position of political parties on this issue, we use electoral manifestos from 18 western democracies from 1990 to 2019. The results show that left-wing parties mention much more often the issue of low-wage work than right-wing parties, especially in countries with a weak degree of corporatism. The different categories of respectively left- and right-wing parties are quite similar in their mentions of low-wage work issues. However, ecologist parties mention low-wage work issues less often than other left parties and radical left parties tend to make broad criticisms of low-wage work more often than center-left parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of declining party identification, political parties need to persuade and mobilize their voters from election to election. Setting topics in such a way that voters are convinced to cast their vote has become an essential prerequisite for success in modern election campaigns. Social media are suitable for this, as parties can set their own topics or highlight the topics most important to the voters and communicate them to a large audience in organic posts or target specific voter groups with ads. While tendencies of issue ownership in posts on Facebook are repeatedly shown empirically, there is a lack of studies investigating which strategies parties follow in their investment decisions on Facebook ads. Based on theoretical expectations derived from the literature about digital political marketing and issue prioritization in election campaigns, this article investigates whether parties communicated consistently on Facebook with regard to the issues they set in organic posts, sponsored posts, and ads during the 2021 German federal election campaign. The results of a manual quantitative content analysis (n = 1,029 posts, n = 1,197 sponsored posts, n = 2,643 ads) show that parties focused on issue ownership in their posts. Still, their investments in sponsored posts and ads followed different strategies. Here, most parties highlighted social policy, contradicting issue ownership for some parties. The article provides novel insights into digital campaigning and discusses the extent to which parties can engage audiences beyond their organic reach within party-affiliated audiences.

Political trust is a critical facet of the democratic legitimacy of political institutions. A vast body of research convincingly demonstrates that political trust is responsive to actual political performance, where citizens trust their government if it performs well and vice versa. However, if political trust is based on citizens' evaluations of government performance, this raises the question what type of performance citizens take into consideration. This research note demonstrates that citizens' bases of political trust vary as they emphasize different policy issues, and that perceived issue salience can explain this variation. Using a combination of longitudinal cross-sectional data from EU member states and novel multi-level Dutch data, it models both collective and personal issue salience as key conditions for performance-based political trust. In doing so, this research note generates new insights into the formation of political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which party controls which cabinet posts is an important determinant of how multi-party governments work. Existing research shows that parties' attention to policy domains in election manifestos is a key predictor of portfolio allocation. However, election manifestos are broad documents and typically published months before an election. This research note argues that policy emphasis in the last few weeks before the election matters for portfolio allocation, because parties can focus their message, react to exogenous events and use campaign communication as a commitment device. A test of this argument makes use of a novel dataset on party representatives' campaign statements. The findings show that the policy focus of campaign statements, especially those stating positions rather than referring to valence, predicts who will control a ministerial portfolio associated with the respective policy domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensive research on the 'politics matter' hypothesis, the findings achieved so far remain ambiguous. Inspired by that hypothesis, this research focuses on electoral promises, a chief but as yet untested indicator. It examines whether government party colour explains the adoption of an ideologically committed policy agenda in electoral manifestos. To answer this goal the research looks at the left–right placement of manifesto pledges of the Portuguese governing parties between 1995 and 2019. The results indicate that partisanship significantly explains the executive's party agenda-setting and that this relationship prevails over time. Findings also suggest that the partisan effect is mediated by issue salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper addresses the question of how governments respond to the politicisation of preferential trade agreements (PTA). How have governments responded to business interest mobilisation while negotiating PTAs? Moreover, if there has been an increase in the salience of a trade agreement, has this changed the government response? First, we assess politicisation in terms of the mobilisation patterns of private sector interests during PTA negotiations. Our central argument is that governments liberalise more when a broad range of business interests involving a large number of sectors mobilise in response to trade negotiations, as this would provide legitimacy to their policy positions. Second, we study governments' reactions to the level of salience of the trade agreement at hand. We argue that governments liberalise less when the agreement in question is highly salient and provokes increased public debate. We take an actor-centred and comparative approach to our research questions and use a novel dataset of 157 PTAs covering the period from 2005 to 2018. Both of our hypotheses are supported by our analysis. Our results also reveal an important difference between PTA 'depth' and 'rigidity', which are often perceived as closely correlated in assessing trade openness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates towards which policy issues Italian political parties oriented their commitments in the run-up to the 2022 parliamentary election. Do parties make more promises in salient domains? Or, do they prioritise those issues in which they enjoy ownership? To answer these questions, we created a novel data-set that contains 3,992 election pledges made by Italian political parties in the 2022 electoral campaign. By looking at the programmatic policies included in the campaign manifestos of the main political parties and coalitions during the last general election, we find that Italian parties seem to compete around the same issues. In particular, in 2022 a large share of election promises was devoted to economic and social matters. Although the Ukrainian war, the resulting energy crisis, and the implementation of EU-funded investments were the backdrop to the 2022 electoral campaign, Italian political parties do not seem to prioritise these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie ( KZfSS) is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACTThe impact of party polarization on voter satisfaction is disputed. While a direct negative effect is expected, polarization has also been found to clarify party policies, with indirect positive impact. This Note proposes a more direct source of positive effects for polarization through an interaction with congruence. We use citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SwD) as the evaluation of interest; we take ideological polarization among parties and citizen-government left-right congruence as independent variables; and we use data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. We find that higher polarization, while indeed detrimental to satisfaction with democracy, gives rise to countervailing effects of congruence. We borrow the geometric concept of leverage to characterize the way this interaction enhances congruence’s positive effect on SwD.

We examine whether bargaining behavior alters the initially expected effects of exogenous factors, such as power balance, issues, and domestic regimes, influencing crisis outcomes. Our argument is that, instead of weakening threat credibility as assumed in the traditional advocacy for firmness, mixing coercion with accommodation optimally allows states to reach an outcome within the bargaining range shaped by exogenous factors. After establishing causal mechanisms, we test our hypotheses over the 1918−2015 period. The findings validate our expectations that intransigence exacerbates crisis stability even under favorable exogenous conditions whereas mixed bargaining mitigates the effects of unfavorable ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What has caused the marked, cross-national, and unprecedented trends in European electoral results in the 21st century? Scholarly explanations include social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We argue that these electoral changes more proximally result from public issue salience, which results from societal trends and mainly affects rather than is caused by party agenda setting. We use aggregate-level panel data across 28 European countries to show that the public issue salience of three issues—unemployment, immigration, and the environment—is associated with later variation in the results of the conservative, social democrat, liberal, radical right, radical left, and green party families in theoretically expected directions, while the party system issue agenda has weaker associations. Public issue salience, in turn, is rooted in societal trends (unemployment rates, immigration rates and temperature anomalies), and, in some cases, party agenda setting. We validate our mechanism at the individual-level across 28 European countries and using UK panel data. Our findings have implications for our understanding of the agency of parties, the permanency of recent electoral changes, and how voters reconcile their social and political worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: While morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media. Findings: Candidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies. Practical implications: This study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations. Originality/value: This work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media news sharing has become a central subject of scholarly research in communication studies. To test current theories, it is of an utmost importance to estimate the meaningful parameters of news sharing behavior from observational data. In this article, we retrieve measures of ideological congruence, issue salience, and media reputation to explain news sharing in social media. We describe how the proposed statistical model connects to different strands of the news sharing literature. We then exemplify the usefulness of the model with an analysis of the relationship between ideological congruence and issue salience. Results show that if ideology and salience correlate with each other, the preferences of ideologues (i.e., users who give higher weight to ideological congruence) will be overrepresented in observational data. This will result in the heightened perceptions of polarization. We test the performance of the model using data from Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes immigration a salient issue among Latinos? We focus on immigration – one of the most pressing issues facing the United States (US) – and evaluate the factors that motivate immigration salience among Latinos over several election cycles. Although immigration policy has been linked with the Latino electorate over the period of our study due to high foreign-born rates and mixed-status families within this community, immigration policy has actually not been the dominant issue for the majority of Latino voters over this time period. Using survey responses from the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections, we test multiple theories of issue salience by exploring social, political and individual determinants of policy salience among Latino voters. We find that in addition to nativity, consumption of ethnic media and group identity are associated with reporting immigration as a salient issue. These findings provide a valuable addition to literature of public opinion on immigration and the origins of policy issue salience among ethno-racial minorities in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a wealth of scholarship on threat-based climate change messages, most research has examined the effects of a single exposure to them. This is a critical oversight because there are competing claims in public discourse about the benefits or drawbacks of continued exposure to threatening coverage of global warming. In two experiments, we examined whether psychological responses (e.g., emotions, issue salience) intensify or wane with repeated exposure to threatening messages about climate change multiple days in a row. Study 1 examined three consecutive daily exposures to threat-containing news stories about climate change, revealing that fear intensity did not dissipate upon repeated exposures to different threatening articles. Hope was not consistently affected by message exposure, and issue salience was uniformly high. Study 2 involved seven days of messaging exposure, manipulated high- vs. low-threat messaging, and included a wider range of outcomes. Small but significant effects emerged, such that fear and intentions exhibited curvilinear relationships with repeated exposure (increasing initially but plateauing around six exposures) whereas personal issue salience and personal efficacy increased linearly. These over-time trends were not different for high- vs. low-threat messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do politicians and policymakers not prioritize pro-immigration reforms, even when public opinion on the issue is positive? This research note examines one previously overlooked explanation related to the systematically greater importance of immigration as a political issue among those who oppose it relative to those who support it. To provide a comprehensive empirical assessment of how personal immigration issue importance is related to policy preferences, I use the best available cross-national and longitudinal surveys from multiple immigrant-receiving contexts. I find that compared to pro-immigration voters, anti-immigration voters feel stronger about the issue and are more likely to consider it as both personally and nationally important. This finding holds across virtually all observed countries, years, and alternative survey measures of immigration preferences and their importance. Overall, these results suggest that public attitudes toward immigration exhibit a substantial issue importance asymmetry that systematically advantages anti-immigration causes when the issue is more contextually salient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural backlash research explains voting for populist radical right (PRR) parties mostly by socioeconomic factors and anti-immigration attitudes, neglecting the role of gender values. This study addresses this gap by arguing that gender issue salience triggers backlash against liberalising gender values, resulting in PRR votes by people with conservative gender values. This is tested in the gender-equal context of Sweden by analysing national elections data from 2014 to 2018, comparing voting behaviour before and after a period marked by strong gender issue salience. The study demonstrates that (a) the gap between conservatives' and liberals' gender values widens, and (b) conservative gender values predict PRR voting in Sweden in 2018 but not in 2014. These findings suggest that salience of liberalising gender values may trigger backlash, which in turn fuels PRR voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In democratic politics, the participation of interest groups in policymaking is commonly understood as a secluded affair. Why would interest groups and policymakers make public an otherwise private affair? I argue that legislators invite interest groups to participate in the legislative process to raise the salience of issues they "own". Legislators with gatekeeping authority, I show, bring interest groups into committees when their party benefits from raising public attention. Interest groups, on their part, are given preferential access to finetune laws that directly affect them. Extensions of the model show that participation increases before an election and declines after, with issue salience providing electoral benefits rather than policy ones. I test my argument using an original dataset of 4902 instances of interest group participation in committee meetings in the Ecuadorian Congress between 1988 and 2018, as well as over 30 interviews to interest group representatives, legislators, and congressional staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Netherlands and Belgium are European Union (EU) states with a shared border and cultural similarities. Article 13 of the EU Treaty of Lisbon recognises animals as sentient beings. EU laws protect animal welfare and conservation, and member states can implement more stringent legislation. Political salience refers to the extent to which citizens are concerned about political issues. Issue salience can be measured by assessing references to animal protection in party political manifestos. This research analyses the political salience of animal protection in the Netherlands and Belgium. It analyses over 2600 statements on animal protection in Dutch (2012–2021) and Belgian (2010–2019) party manifestos across three consecutive national elections. Quantitative analysis reveals that in both the Netherlands and Belgium, animal protection became more salient during successive elections, with the total number of positive statements increasing and the total number of negative statements decreasing. Farmed animal welfare and wildlife/biodiversity were the most salient issues, although the focus in countries and regions differed. Dutch parties and those in the Walloon region of Belgium focused on farmed animal health and unnecessary suffering; Flemish parties stressed intensive agriculture and animal welfare. In Belgium, wildlife/biodiversity statements stressed the protection of local species; Dutch statements were strongly linked to agriculture. In both the Netherlands and Belgium, left-wing parties had more progressive policy statements, whilst right-wing parties prioritised economic prosperity over animal protection. This research provides the first academic analysis of animal protection policies in political manifestos in the Netherlands and Belgium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a conceptual understanding of when and how organizations respond to normative pressures. More precisely, we examine two main factors underlying the willingness and ability of organizations to respond to an issue: issue salience and the cost-benefit analysis of resource mobilization. We suggest that decision makers' interpretation of issue salience in conjunction with their perception of the costs and benefits of taking action to address the issue generates five potential responses: symbolic compliance and symbolic conformity, substantive compliance and substantive conformity, and inaction. We extend the baseline model by examining a number of boundary conditions. By focusing on the willingness and ability of organizations to respond to normative pressures, and by adopting the issue as the unit of analysis, our model helps explain intraorganizational as well as interorganizational response heterogeneity to institutional complexity. We contribute to the institutional research tradition and offer useful implications for managerial practice, from strategic management to policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how niche parties may utilize a strategy of policy shifting to garner additional voters. It leverages a unique opportunity in which a Costa Rican political party released two different versions of its party manifesto at different moments during a single election cycle. This rare opportunity uncovers how the party shifted from having a hard conservative stance on social issues, such as abortion, to moderating its stance and centering its focus on less contentious issues in a runoff election campaign. Understanding how a single political party may alter its strategy is important because it allows us to better gauge the effectiveness of shifting policy positions, especially for niche parties, for which a particular issue area is dominant. Moreover, this analysis opens additional avenues of research on political parties in the Latin American context, since research utilizing manifesto data in this context has been limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change presents a pervasive global threat to billions of people as well as ecosystems. Global mitigation policy failures mean we must now urgently adapt to projected climate impacts. While local government is expected to play a vital role in climate change adaptation, major breakdowns are occurring in local governments' ability to implement adaptation responses. Studies point to the importance of two key factors underpinning successful municipal climate change adaptation – supportive leadership and an authorising environment for adaptation. But few studies provide in-depth analysis of these factors and how they play out in practice. This paper reports the results of research addressing this knowledge gap, drawing on analysis of leadership in four Australian local governments (municipal councils). Twenty-five local government elected officials, executive leaders, and staff required to operationalise leaders' decisions were interviewed. Interviews examined leaders' role and influence in climate change adaptation and their receptiveness to mainstreaming. Results show that whether leaders consider climate risk on their policy agenda is highly variable and subject to factors such as: public mood and community expectations; issue salience; the presence of dedicated policy entrepreneurs to champion a response; and focusing events that heighten the urgency of adaptation. We identify three concrete opportunities to mainstream municipal climate adaptation responses: enhance issue salience within leaders; leverage networks of influence; and strengthen formal systems of municipal climate governance. • Municipal leaders recognise diverse risks arising from a changing climate. • Adaptation is often considered discretionary on the municipal policy agenda. • How adaptation is described and justified affects issue prioritisation by leaders. • Leaders' networks of influence can be leveraged to support climate mainstreaming. • Mainstreaming must engage with leaders' mindsets and receptiveness to adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative governance is a crucial approach to addressing cross-jurisdictional environmental problems. With the ample water resources across China, lack of coordination for water governance however has become a severe barrier to regional development. Taking the largest freshwater lake in east China -- Lake Tai as an example and drawing upon intergovernmental collective action theory, issue salience theory, and resource dependence theory, this research explores how the combination of contextual factors and intra-alliance factors contribute to the formation of stable collaborative water governance. Specifically, we applied a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the 32 collaborative water governance cases in Lake Tai basin from the year of 2010 to 2019, and found that the presence of governmental intervention is a necessary condition for shaping collaborative water governance in China, and two configurational pathways represent the issue-oriented model and path-dependence model, which provides possible insights for promoting inter-governmental collaborative governance in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there have been numerous studies on mental wellbeing impairment or other negative consequences of Workplace Violence (WPV) against healthcare professionals, however, the effects of WPV are not limited to those who experience WPV in person, but those who exposed to WPV information indirectly. In the aftermath of "death of Dr. Yang Wen," a cross-sectional study was conducted to explore the psychological status of healthcare professionals. A total of 965 healthcare professionals from 32 provinces in China participated in our research. The prevalence rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms, depression, anxiety among healthcare professional in the current study were 25.60, 46.01, and 27.88%, respectively. Moreover, our research suggested that the awareness of WPV-incident had a significant association with PTSD symptoms. In addition, risk perception was shown to mediate the effect of WPV awareness on PTSD symptoms. Furthermore, the present research also found a U-shaped relationship between issue salience and PTSD symptoms, and the relationship between issue salience and anxiety, indicating that higher awareness of WPV issue was negatively related to mental health status (including PTSD and anxiety) but only to the points at which there were no additional effects of more issue salience. This study highlighted that more protective measures for healthcare professionals need to be implemented in response to potential WPV events. More importantly, risk perception was found to mediate the effect of WPV issue salience on PTSD symptoms, it is critical to reduce the mental health burden through intervening in risk perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Scholars have long been concerned with the implications of income inequality for democracy. Conventional wisdom suggests that high income inequality is associated with political parties taking polarized positions as the left advocates for increased redistribution while the right aims to entrench the position of economic elites. This article argues that the connection between party positions and income inequality depends on how party bases are sorted by income and the issue content of national elections. It uses data from European national elections from 1996 to 2016 to show that income inequality has a positive relationship with party polarization on economic issues when partisans are sorted with respect to income and when economic issues are relatively salient in elections. When these factors are weak, however, the author finds no relationship between income inequality and polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a factor affecting why the interests of the older electorate often prevail in politics in developed countries with aging populations, namely the difference in issue salience related to governmental programs for the elderly. Analysis of data collected with a national electoral survey in Japan conducted at every national election between 1972 and 2016 (28 surveys) revealed that elderly voters have been far more attentive—and more consistently attentive—to the welfare issue than the younger electorate when making voting choices. Moreover, the gap has grown in recent years as the population ages and the welfare program matures, probably due to policy feedback. This gap would enhance the influence of the elderly over the issue beyond their numbers and higher turnout, as discussed in previous studies. This result explains why welfare reform for the elderly has been very difficult, at least in Japan, despite (or, indeed, because of) considerable intergenerational inequality under the current system. At the same time, this result also shows that issue salience is not static but responds to media coverage, especially among young voters who would, otherwise, show less interest in the issue. In other words, lively public debate of the issue, covered by news media, can decrease the salience gap between the youth and the elderly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Normative theories of democracy agree that public demand should be the main guide in policymaking. But positive theories and related empirical research disagree about the extent to which this holds true in reality. We address this debate with an empirical focus on climate change policy. Specifically, we are interested in whether observable variation in public demand for climate change mitigation can help explain variation in adopted national climate policies. Using our own data to approximate public demand, we estimate the responsiveness of policymakers to changes in public demand in six OECD countries from 1995 to 2010. We find that policymakers are responsive and react in predicted ways to variation in our opinion component of measured public demand, rather than to the mere salience of the climate issue. The effect of issue salience is strongest in combination with our opinion measure as this creates a scope for action. The results underscore the importance and usefulness of our concept and empirical measures for public demand, as well as of our disaggregated analysis of climate policy outputs in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks how policy responses to migration in Italy have been shaped both by issue salience and by changing configurations on the centre right of Italian party politics both prior to and following the 2015 'migration crisis'. We show that, first, the increased politicisation of 'irregular' arrivals into Italy after 2015 changed migration from a relatively 'quiet' policy issue to one of 'loud' politics meaning that it was highly salient to the public. This salience significantly advantaged the Lega, who by this point had already transformed into an archetypal, European populist radical right party, but could now campaign successfully nationally and dominate the nominal 'centre-right' coalition. Second, the imposition when in government between June 2018 and September 2019 by the Lega of policies for migrants and asylum-seekers that focussed solely on prevention and removal and ended what remained of prior policy drift. We show that both trends conform to theoretical expectations regarding the relative power of interest groups and public opinion over public policy that are contingent on public issue salience, which we show to be the most plausible determinant of variation in migration policy, rather than public attitudes or party positions, during the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do political parties electorally benefit from presenting ambiguous policy positions? We suggest that the electoral effect of position ambiguity on an issue depends on the salience of the issue to voters. We use data on political parties' party position, position ambiguity, and issue emphasis as well as survey data on voters' issue salience. We find that ambiguous party positions on an issue weaken the electoral support of people who put salience on the issue. However, position ambiguity does not alter the electoral support of people who do not consider the issue salient. Our results imply that the electoral effect of position blurring in Western Europe should be understood in the context of party competition in multi-dimensional issue space. They also imply that political parties may face a dilemma between policy flexibility and electoral loss by presenting ambiguous party positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has shown that issues vary significantly in their salience across citizens, explaining key outcomes in political behavior. Yet it remains unclear how individual-level differences in issue salience affect the measurement of latent constructs in public opinion, namely political ideology. In this paper, we test whether scaling approaches that fail to incorporate individual-level differences in issue salience could understate the predictive power of ideology in public opinion research. To systematically examine this assertion, we employ a series of latent variable models which incorporate both issue importance and issue position. We compare the results of these different and diverse scaling approaches to two survey data sets, investigating the implications of accounting for issue salience in constructing latent measures of ideology. Ultimately, we find that accounting for issue importance adds little information to a more basic approach that uses only issue positions, suggesting ideological signals for measurement models reside most prominently in the issue positions of individuals rather than the importance of those issues to the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 US Presidential Election was a highly-anticipated moment for our global society. During the election period, the most intriguing issue was who would be the winner--Trump or Biden Among the possible main themes of the 2020 election, from the COVID-19 pandemic to racism, this study focused on feminism ('women') as a main component of Biden's victory. To explore the character of Biden's supporters, this paper focused on internet spaces as a source of public opinion. To guide the data analysis, this study employed four indices from empirical studies on Big Data analytics: issue salience, attention diversity, emotional mentioning, and semantic cohesion. The main finding of this study was that the representative keyword 'women' appeared more prevalently within content related to Biden than Trump, and the keyword pairs indicated that female voters were the main reason for Trump's failure but the root cause of Biden's victory. The results of this study indicated the role of the internet as a forum for public opinion and a fountain of political knowledge, which requires more rigorous investigation by researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the differences in pledge fulfilment strategies in majority and substantive minority governments. Issue ownership and dynamic agenda-setting literature are applied, expecting that government parties will focus on fulfilling the party's most salient pledges, and also the pledges that are publicly salient for the whole electorate. Adding these expectations to the context of substantive minority governments, parties must accommodate these attempts because they face the opposition actor(s) with veto power and their own policy motivation. Compared to majority governments, the odds of adopting party-salient pledges should decrease for minority coalition parties. The effect of public-salient issues should also differ from the majority governments. This analysis is conducted on government party pledges in one minority and two majority governments in the Czech Republic (formed after 2006, 2010, and 2013 elections). The analysis shows a generally weak effect for party and public issue salience on pledge fulfilment. The decreasing effect of party issue salience for minority government parties is supported; the effect of public issue salience does, however, not differ in its decreasing direction from the majority governments. The additional model including combinations of the high and low party and public salience shows that for minority governments, public salience decreases the odds of fulfilment regardless of party issue salience. The article concludes with a contextual explanation of the minority government's special character in the Czech case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]