Simon Persico

What is Issue Competition? Conflict, Consensus and Issue Ownership in Party Competition

Abstract Empirical assessments of issue competition lack both conceptual precision in the use of the concept of “policy issue”, and sufficient studies integrating both salience and positional perspectives. This article specifies an operational definition of a “policy issue” suited for the analysis of issue competition in the electoral arena and beyond, and proposes a typology of electoral issues that takes into account the two sides of issue competition – the decision to address an issue, and the adoption of a diverging or similar position on it. This typology allows distinguishing proprietal, consensual, blurred and conflictual issues. The framework is illustrated with an analysis of EU-related issues in the electoral manifestos of British, French and German parties. This source did not enable us to identify any blurred issue, but our exploratory study delivers several conclusions regarding the other issue types. Proprietal issues appear to be marginal, indicating that parties tend to devote attention to the same issues and that issue ownership is highly contested. We further observe a primacy of consensus in EU-related discourses, especially among governing parties.

Do Party Manifestos Matter in Policy-Making? Capacities, Incentives and Outcomes of Electoral Programmes in France:

A key factor in modern democracies’ legitimisation is the extent to which policies submitted for public approval before an election translate into material outcomes once a political party has won power. Current research finds no clear empirical evidence for partisanship in policy-making nor has any unified theory been offered or tested systematically. This article addresses that gap by offering a conditional approach to policy-making undertaken by parties in government. It suggests that partisan influence on policy depends on both office-holders’ capacity for implementing policies evoked during their electoral campaigns and on governing parties’ incentives to implement electoral promises. Data from French Agendas Project datasets is used to compare the contents of governing parties’ pre-election manifestos with legislation passed in France between 1981 and 2012. Panel negative binomial regressions on electoral and legislative agendas support the expected outcome, namely that issues featuring in governing parties’ electoral manifesto have had an impact on their subsequent legislative agendas, with the effect depending on both partisan capacities and incentives. Party programmes do matter in policy-making, albeit only under certain conditions.