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This study provides a first step toward filling a gap in our understanding of the sources of issue salience and of the ability of political actors to manipulate the dimensions of social choice. It investigates how daily issue agendas of political parties and the news media (press and television) affected each other during the 1997 U.K. general election campaign. Using a time-series cross-section design (including data on nine different policy dimensions), ordinary least squares regressions with panel-corrected standard errors show that TV news broadcasts responded systematically to preceding issue selection by both the Labour party and the Conservatives. While the press seemed to respond predominantly to stimuli by the Conservatives, none of the parties were influenced in their agenda choices by any of the media outlets.

Investigates whether the Labour and Conservative parties influenced press and television news coverage of issues with their daily press releases or whether issue selection by the parties was media-driven; based on content analysis of front pages from weekday issues of six daily newspapers and weekday evening news bulletins from three TV channels.

This is a study of agenda building during an election campaign, which is a dynamic process and hence calls for the application of time-series analysis. The data, from the 1997 General Election campaign in the UK., consist of repeated observations at regular time intervals. The variables are political parties and media actors (television and the press), whose daily attention to different issues and policy dimensions was content analysed and then quantified. While some simple methods can be applied to the quantification of changing attention to individual issues, a more sophisticated time series model can be applied only when data are aggregated to the level of policy dimensions. For the 1997 campaign, issues were grouped into nine separate policy dimensions. Instead of treating policy dimensions separately, a time-series cross-section (TSCS) design was applied, with policy dimensions as cross-sections and campaign days as time units. The main purpose of time series analysis is to establish Granger-causality between different variables, which have repeated observations on each cross-section. In order to accomplish this, separate regressions, with either parties or media as dependent variables, were carried out. ; TARA (Trinity?s Access to Research Archive) has a robust takedown policy. Please contact us if you have any concerns: rssadmin@tcd.ie

This article aims to further our understanding of the nature of the UK Independence Party. Our approach differs from much of the existing literature on party families, by analysing public attitudes towards the UK Independence Party in comparison with other parties. Multidimensional unfolding is utilised to map UK Independence Party's place in the British party system, Tobit regressions are employed to compare UK Independence Party's support base with that of the British National Party and the Conservatives and, finally, latent class analysis is used to assess the heterogeneity in UK Independence Party's support base. The conclusion is that, with increasing success, the UK Independence Party has established itself as the only viable electoral option for British extreme right voters while also making serious inroads into more traditional conservative circles, who are Eurosceptic but not extreme. This bridging position between the mainstream and the extreme makes the UK Independence Party distinctive from other British parties and has parallels with the positions of anti-establishment, European Union sceptical and immigration-critical parties elsewhere in Europe.

The principle that parties should make policy commitments during election campaigns and fulfil those commitments if elected is central to the idea of promissory representation. This study examines citizens' evaluations of promise keeping and breaking. We focus on two aspects of trust as explanations of citizens' evaluations. When trust is defined in terms of mistrust, it implies that vigilant and well-informed citizens base their evaluations on what governments deliver. When trust is defined in terms of distrust, it implies that citizens use heuristic thinking when evaluating governing parties' performance, regardless of what those parties do. Our evidence is from a survey experiment in the British Election Study, which asked respondents to evaluate whether governing parties fulfilled specific election pledges made during the previous election campaign. The findings indicate that both mistrust and distrust affect citizens' evaluations.

Some of the most important propositions in the political marketing literature hinge on assumptions about the electorate. In particular, voters are presumed to react in different ways to different orientations or postures. Yet there are theoretical reasons for questioning some of these assumptions, and certainly they have seldom been empirically tested. Here, we focus on one prominent example of political marketing research: Lees-Marshment's orientations' model. We investigate how the public reacts to product and market orientation, whether they see a trade-off between the two (a point in dispute among political marketing scholars), and whether partisans differ from non-partisan voters by being more inclined to value product over market orientation. Evidence from two mass sample surveys of the British public (both conducted online by YouGov) demonstrates important heterogeneity within the electorate, casts doubt on the core assumptions underlying some political marketing arguments and raises broader questions about what voters are looking for in a party. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

In a recent article, Michael Laver has explained 'Why Vote-Seeking Parties May Make Voters Miserable'. His model shows that, while ideological convergence may boost congruence between governments and the median voter, it can reduce congruence between the party system and the electorate as a whole. Specifically, convergence can increase the mean distance between voters and their nearest party. In this article we show that this captures the reality of today's British party system. Policy scale placements in British Election Studies from 1987 to 2010 confirm that the pronounced convergence during the past decade has left the Conservatives and Labour closer together than would be optimal in terms of minimising the policy distance between the average voter and the nearest major party. We go on to demonstrate that this comes at a cost. Respondents who perceive themselves as further away from one of the major parties in the system tend to score lower on satisfaction with democracy. In short, vote-seeking parties have left the British party system less representative of the ideological diversity in the electorate, and thus made at least some British voters miserable.

Some of the most important propositions in the political marketing literature hinge on assumptions about the electorate. In particular, voters are presumed to react in different ways to different orientations or postures. Yet there are theoretical reasons for questioning some of these assumptions, and certainly they have seldom been empirically tested. Here, we focus on one prominent example of political marketing research: Lees-Marshment's orientations' model. We investigate how the public reacts to product and market orientation, whether they see a trade-off between the two (a point in dispute among political marketing scholars), and whether partisans differ from non-partisan voters by being more inclined to value product over market orientation. Evidence from two mass sample surveys of the British public (both conducted online by YouGov) demonstrates important heterogeneity within the electorate, casts doubt on the core assumptions underlying some political marketing arguments and raises broader questions about what voters are looking for in a party.