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

Follow the foreign leader? Why following foreign incumbents is an effective electoral strategy

Previous research suggests that political parties respond to left–right policy positions of successful foreign political parties (“foreign leaders”). We evaluate whether this is an effective electoral strategy: specifically, do political parties gain votes in elections when they respond to successful foreign parties? We argue that parties that follow foreign leaders will arrive at policy positions closer to their own (domestic) median voter, which increases their electoral support. The analysis is based on a two-stage model specification of parties’ vote shares and suggests that following foreign leaders is a beneficial election strategy in national election because it allows them to better identify the position of their own median voter. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation, parties’ election strategies, and for policy diffusion

Ideological congruency and decision-making speed: the effect of partisanship across European Union institutions

How does ideological congruency affect the speed of legislative decision-making in the European Union? Despite the crucial importance of actor preferences, the effect of partisan alignments and ideological composition of the European institutions has largely been neglected. However, we argue that the ideological congruence between legislative bodies has an important effect on the duration of policy-making. We test our theoretical expectations based on a large new dataset on decision-making speed in the European Union using event history analysis. The findings confirm our theoretical claim indicating that the ideological distance between the European institutions slows down policy-making which has important implications for the problem-solving capacity of political systems more generally

Transitory and Resilient Salient Issues in Party Manifestos, Finland, 1880s to 2010s : Content Analysis by Means of Topic Modeling

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