Issue Engagement Across Members of Parliament: The Role of Issue Specialization and Party Leadership

Studies on political communication in multiparty democracies usually focus on political parties as unitary actors and how they engage with each other in election campaigns. We deviate from this approach and study how issue engagement (i.e., the degree to which party actors address the same issues) varies across members of parliament. We argue that MPs’ role in parliament affects how they engage with other legislators. In particular, we expect an intraparty division of labor, where each party’s policy specialists address the same issues. Moreover, party front benchers have a distinct way of communicating: they are more likely to engage with other party leaders rather than with policy specialists of rival parties. Using spatial lag models based on approximately 15,000 press releases by Austrian MPs, we find empirical support for these expectations. Our findings show the limitations of the “unitary actor” approach for studying issue engagement in European party systems.