The premise of the literature on issue emphasis/ownership is that political competition is primarily about parties choosing to emphasize issues favorable to them. What this literature neglects, however, is that parties are also expected to be responsive to public concerns and pay attention to the general political agenda – even though this means talking about issues disadvantageous to them.
Against this backdrop, the paper investigates how these two mechanisms play out in political campaigns for the issues immigration and European integration. What are determinants at the level of individual parties that explain varying levels of issue-emphasis? And how strongly does the general agenda constrain parties’ strategies of selective emphasis? The paper explores these questions by assessing the salience and issue-emphasis of these challenger issues in six European countries over two decades based on data from a quantitative media content analysis.
