A Party Competition Theory of Governing Party Agendas: Evidence from the U.S. and U.K.

Substantial research in political science has been dedicated to the idea that, during election campaigns, political parties will seek to emphasise issues on which they have an advantage in their reputation for competence and commitment to policy concerns, and downplay those on which they suffer from a poor standing. Theories of ‘selective emphasis’ (Budge and Farlie 1983) and ‘issue ownership’ (Petrocick 1996) have become paradigmatic in how we understand party strategies at election time, shaping a generation of scholars. We also know, however, that parties in government have a much wider array of social and economic problems, and policy concerns, to deal with. Decision-makers must manage an abundance of information about policy issues, pressure from a range of sectoral interests and the ebb and flow of day-to-day events in domestic politics and world affairs. Much of the business of government is problem driven. Key to this attention-driven of model (Jones 2001; Jones and Baumgartner 2005) is the scarce nature of government attention, requiring policy-makers to prioritise between competing concerns. In light of these ideas, we offer an alternative account of the ownership- and problem-driven logics of party attention. Parties in government are both issue-owners, holding a set of issues on which they have interests and long-standing commitments to deliver policy change, and problem-solvers, being engaged in the day-to-day running of government and the search for solutions to policy problems. They are therefore required to manage these competing concerns, to promote issues on which they have a reputation for competence, and dealing with salient issues that are of concern to the public. In this paper we summarise the key ideas behind our party-based theory of governing party agendas, and discuss the implications of empirical validation of these ideas, with time series analysis of data on policy agendas and public opinion from the US and the UK over more than half a century.