Emphasis-Based or Opinion-Based Policy Change? How Political Parties Respond to the Electorate's Issue Salience of the Environmental Issue

Most contemporary democracies are built on the principle of political representation. In this regard, political parties have an important linkage-function connecting citizens with decision-makers. A key element of representation is parties’ responsiveness to the voters’ issue salience. Most studies dedicated to responsiveness by political parties revolve around spatial models and unidimensional policy shifts on a left-right scale. Only a few studies differentiate between parties’ emphasis-based (altering the issue emphasis) and opinion-based policy change (altering the issue position). However, these models have not been included in the studies of responsiveness yet. Therefore, the overall research interest of this paper can be divided into two sub-questions: Firstly, which segments of the electorate do parties respond to? And secondly, in terms of how parties respond to increased salience within the electorate, do they rely on opinion-based policy change or on emphasis-based policy change? The main argument is that whether parties respond to the electorate by altering the position or altering the salience is dependent on the segments of the electorate the parties want to appeal to. For this reason, the potential voter is introduced as a novel variable in addition to the established mean voter and party supporter segments. Parties’ responsiveness to the public opinion’s demands are examined with the European Voter Study and Euromanifesto data for six Euorpean elections from 1989 to 2014 across 21 countries. Parties’ responsiveness is examined by looking at the environmental issue as understudied yet publicly relevant “new politics” issue. For the emphasis-based policy change, it is shown that parties respond to the issue salience of their potential voters, which qualifies this variable for further research. Contrastingly, the findings suggest that parties do not encourage in emphasis-based policy change as response to their party supporters or the mean voter. Regarding the opinion-based policy change, none of the three electoral variables proves to be significant. This points to the relevance of creating distinctive measures and shows the need for investigating parties’ inducements for opinion-based policy change. Nonetheless, the here presented results inform the understanding of the way parties compete over the environmental issue and have important implications not only for party competition, but also more generally for the linkage between voters and parties in multiparty systems.