All about Issues: Electoral Systems, Interparty Dynamics, and Public Opinion Shifts

This paper goes beyond the institutional effects on interparty competition and argues that public opinion shifts and campaign strategies are, at least in part, due to electoral systems’ effect on issue competition between parties. When the threshold for parliamentary representation is high (such as in majoritarian systems), large, mainstream parties do not face tough competition from single-issue parties, and thus are more likely to champion for fewer issues, but do so more intensely against each other. Conversely, when the threshold for representation is low (as in proportional representation systems), single-issue parties are more likely to gain parliamentary representation. Consequently, large, mainstream parties face more pressure to talk about issues that single-issue parties advocate for, but, due to resource limits, cannot address each issue as in depth as parties in majoritarian systems. This has serious implications on public opinion shifts and election campaigns. In PR systems, there are more issues discussed in the public sphere by all parties. Thus, not only would the opposition have less opportunity to accuse the government for ignoring certain issues, but the government’s failure to fulfill their issue pledge would generate more negative public opinion shifts. In contrast, in majoritarian systems, the fewer number of issues in public debates implies that opposition parties have more opportunities to criticize the government for failing to address a broader range of issues, but these criticisms would be less likely to shift public opinion.