Party mandates and the politics of attention:Party platforms, public priorities and the policy agenda in Britain

This paper develops an attention-based model of party mandates and policy agendas, where parties and governments are faced with an abundance of issues, and must divide their scarce attention across them. In government, parties must balance their desire to deliver on their electoral mandate (i.e. the “promissory agenda”) with a need to continuously adapt their policy priorities in response to changes in public concerns and to deal with unexpected events and the emergence of new problems (i.e. the “anticipatory agenda”). Parties elected to office also have incentives to respond to issues prioritized by the platforms of their rivals. To test this theory, time series cross-sectional models are used to investigate how the policy content of the legislative program of British government responds to governing and opposition party platforms, the executive agenda, issue priorities of the public and mass medi

Up and Down, Old and New: Values and Value Systems of MPs and Voters in France

MPs are often criticised as being homogeneous. This is well known in terms of social background or gender, but the criticism also holds for values and norms. MPs are said to share normative agreements on the essential points and demonstrate differences on second-order issues. This criticism is even more widespread regarding the new politics based on the cultural divide, notably vis-à-vis politicians from the extreme right as far as immigration, European integration or globalisation are concerned. In this contribution, these criticisms are addressed by investigating the degree of normative agreements and disagreements of French MPs. Furthermore, the differences both in old and new politics between MPs on the one hand and the electorate as a whole and their supporters on the other hand are evaluated. It is concluded that MPs are definitely not all the same and the degrees of difference among MPs or with the electorate are far from being those expected