When Do Issues Get Important to Voters, and How Do Parties Respond?

That the electoral relevance of particular policy issues varies from time to time is a past dispute. However, the causes of this variation are still understudied. While several strands of the literature focus on parties’ strategic endeavors to influence electoral salience by emphasizing certain issues in their campaigns or party manifestos (e.g., Riker 1982, Belanger and Meguid 2008, Wagner and Meyer 2014), others argue that parties’ issue emphasis follows the electoral demand (e.g., Klüver and Sagarzazu 2016). We take the structure of voter preferences into account and analyze to what extent shifts in the policy preferences of the electorate cause electoral salience. We examine whether issues get more important to voters when the electorate is more polarized on an issue dimension. Further, we analyze the role of exogenous shocks on both voter polarization and issue salience. We draw on cross-sectional time-series analysis of German election data and focus on two different policy issues whose electoral saliences significantly vary from the 1980s to today: immigration and nuclear energy.