Jane Green and Will Jennings Universities of Manchester and Southampton Valence Politics: How Competence Matters to Voters, Parties and Governments How issue ownership and salience shape government agendas University of Vienna, 22 nd October 2012

 General ‘mood’ in party competence evaluations (Green and Jennings, 2012; BJPolS)  Performance associated issue-by-issue fluctuations in competence; responsive to exogenous indicators  Relatively stable reputations on different issues  Issue ownership: Mean competence rating  Issue ownership: Mean advantage over other parties  Issue ownership: W ithin-party rank of competence

67% common variation51% common variation

British Conservatives’ ranking on ‘Conservative’ issues (Green, 2011, BJPolS)

British Conservatives’ ranking on ‘Labour’ issues (Green, 2011, BJPolS)

 Parties have different issue priorities; policy-seeking in office  Parties use government to enhance a reputation for commitment to issues and delivery.

“the ability to resolve a problem of concern to voters. It is a reputation for policy and program interests, produced by a history of attention, initiative and innovation toward these problems, which leads voters to believe that one of the parties (and its candidates) is more sincere and committed to doing something about them.” Petrocik (1996: 826)

 Parties have different issue priorities; policy-seeking in office  Parties use government to enhance a reputation for commitment to issues and delivery.  Governments have incentives to focus attention on their electorally beneficial issues  Median mandate theory: manifestos predict policy outcomes  But: governments are especially responsive to problem-solving imperatives : literature on new problems and salient issues  And: issue ownership considerations should be especially influential for less popular parties in government

H 1 : Governing parties attend to an issue more when they have a reputation for issue ownership on that issue. H 2 : The effects of Issue ownership evaluations on governing policy agendas will be mediated by the salience of the policy issue. H 3 : The effects of Issue ownership evaluations on governing policy agendas will be attenuated by the electoral popularity of the governing party.

 Dependent variables  US and UK policy agendas 1945 to 2010, using adapted coding from the Policy Agendas Project  Nine comparable issue categories in the US and UK: economy, health, labour, education, environment, crime, social issues, foreign affairs, and ‘other’  Cases  US and UK government agendas  Executive agendas (State of the Union addresses in US and Queen’s Speech in the UK)  Legislative outputs (Statutes of US Congress, Acts of UK Parliament) Data and Cases

 Main effects and mediating variables  Party competence in handling issues (>5,000 poll questions about the party ‘best able to handle’ issue X or the party trusted ‘to do a better job of handling’ issue Y  Issue salience (the ‘most important problem’)  Party popularity: vote intention share  To test for lagged effects of party competence, and to deal with potential endogeneity, the measures are constructed with all available survey data from the previous election.  Robustness checks: controlling for party, using seat share for popularity, various checks on handling of missing data Main and mediating variables

 Mean competence in the previous electoral cycle (level)  Between-party rank of competence in the previous electoral cycle (majority, or lead)  Within-party rank of competence in the previous electoral cycle (relative within-party advantage)

 Two-step analytic procedure  Pooling the data and estimating effects for three separate operationalisations of ownership  Issue specific effects using the rank measure of ownership  Time series cross-sectional AR(1) models fitted using Prais-Winston estimation method to control for serial autocorrelation.  Panel corrected standard errors for pooled analysis AGENDA it = α * 0 + α * 1 COMPETENCE it-c + β * 1 MIP it + β * 2 MIP it *COMPETENCE it-c + β * 3 POPULARITY it + β * 4 POPULARITY it *COMPETENCE it-c

18

19

Issue Ownership EconomyHealthLabourEducationEnvironCrimeSocialForeignOtherUS Executive Agenda (14.293) (8.684) (6.644) (16.172) (5.601) (30.045) (36.211) (20.760) (26.390) Legislative Outputs (2.141) (3.405) 4.022* (1.919) (4.066) (1.919) (10.405) * (8.672) (4.120) (13.336) UK Executive Agenda (2.227) (0.416) (1.237) (1.722) (2.570) (1.916) 2.960* (1.409) 6.119** (1.656) (3.574) Legislative Outputs (3.618) (0.463) (1.282) 2.677* (1.069) (5.944) 4.122* (1.806) 2.251* (0.887) (0.771) ** (4.462) † p ≤ 0.10, * p ≤.05, ** p ≤.01

MIP * Issue Ownership EconomyHealthLabourEducationEnvironCrimeSocialForeignOtherUS Executive Agenda * (0.051) ** (0.207) (0.735) (0.346) (0.466) (0.131) (0.247) (0.063) (0.156) Legislative Outputs (0.008) (0.082) * (0.131) (0.089) (0.262) (0.049) (0.072) * (0.013) (0.065) UK Executive Agenda (0.013) (0.010) (0.022) (0.133) (0.185) (0.072) (0.071) (0.029) (0.082) Legislative Outputs 0.068** (0.021) (0.012) (0.023) (0.087) (0.388) (0.065) (0.054) (0.015) (0.097) † p ≤ 0.10, * p ≤.05, ** p ≤.01

Popularity*OwnershipEconomyHealthLabourEducationEnvironCrimeSocialForeignOtherUS Executive Agenda (0.275) (0.162) (0.115) (0.313) (0.120) (0.585) (0.685) (0.407) (0.482) Legislative Outputs (0.041) (0.067) * (0.035) (0.079) (0.040) (0.201) * (0.165) (0.081) (0.243) UK Executive Agenda (0.052) (0.011) (0.025) (0.050) (0.063) (0.044) (0.038) * (0.041) (0.089) Legislative Outputs (0.086) (0.012) (0.026) * (0.031) (0.145) ** (0.042) * (0.025) (0.020) * (0.113) † p ≤ 0.10, * p ≤.05, ** p ≤.01

Social issues: USCrime / law and order: UK

 Controlling for party does not alter the significance or direction of the reported main effects or interactions  No separate party effect on the State of the Union address  Democrats attend more to environment issue and ‘other’ category for statutes of congress  Labour attend more to health and social issues for Queens speech  Conservatives attend more to economy, and ‘other’ category in Acts of Parliament; Labour attend more to foreign affairs.  Modelling seat share not vote share (and seat share*ownership), controlling for seat share in the vote share models, and vice versa  Alternative treatment of missing data in the construction of the rank variable, either at the median or the lowest rank positions

 Issue ownership theories are not just relevant to party and candidate campaigns.  Campaign strategies may provide voters with information about future government priorities.  Issue salience and issue ownership considerations are trade-offs for parties in government; this could be similar to campaign ownership effects.  Issue ownership provides a particularly useful explanation of government agendas for less popular governments.  Effects cannot be extrapolated from one issue domain to all others (as characterises some literature in this field).

Jane Green and Will Jennings Universities of Manchester and Southampton Valence Politics: How Competence Matters to Voters, Parties and Governments How issue ownership and salience shape government agendas University of Vienna, 22 nd October 2012

27