Parties strive to set the ‘terms of the debate’ in elections by selectively emphasising issue areas that enhance their popular appeal. Yet, do citizens respond to parties’ issue emphasis, or do they mainly respond to objective factors such as economic and environmental conditions, crime rates, immigration flows, and so on? We report a time-series, cross-sectional analyses of the relationship between the public's issue attention, parties’ issue emphases and objective national conditions across seven issue areas in 13 western publics between 1971 and 2021, finding a strong association between objective conditions and citizens’ subsequent issue attention, but weaker associations to party system issue attention. There are stronger links, however, between parties’ issue emphases and their supporters’ subsequent attention.

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small‐N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross‐cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert‐survey‐based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two‐level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models.

Few political parties are willing to lead the public debate on how the European Union should develop and parties rarely publicly discuss issues on the EU agenda. This is probably one of the most important democratic problems in the contemporary EU. When and why parties are willing (or not willing) to discuss European cooperation is therefore an essential issue in which political science should engage. Previous research has shown that parties that are internally divided on EU issues downplay these issues in order to avoid internal disputes. At the same time, parties that have severe intraparty conflicts over the issue are unable to contain the debate. Thus, parties that are unified in their position on EU issues and parties that are heavily split speak about the EU, but others do not. Also, earlier research has shown that political parties downplay issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters. It is argued in this article that the focus should not be solely on intraparty conflict or whether or not a party's voters are hesitant or disunited, but rather on how these factors interact in order to better understand how parties act strategically regarding EU issues. Using a new dataset that relies on quantitative content analysis of quality newspapers during the national election campaigns in the period 1983–2010 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, it is found that parties that have a high degree of internal dissent on European issues, while at the same time having an equally divided electorate, are the parties that are most present in the public debate. Hence, it is the interaction between these two important factors that explains much of the variation in the amount of attention paid to European issues in national election campaigns.

This paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents’ satisfaction with democracy and self‐reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience‐based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior.

How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis on a collectivist host ideology. This has implications on how these ideologies relate to the two‐dimensional policy space. Combined with salience of policy dimensions, such a perspective allows for a better understanding of the occurrence of populism among right‐ and left‐wing populist parties. Using expert survey data on parties in Europe, we find strong and robust empirical support for the expected patterns.

Voters who perceive the economy to be weak are generally less likely to support the incumbent government. Yet there is a debate over whether all people respond equally to economic shifts or if the state of the economy is more salient for those who feel economically vulnerable. This article examines whether insecure employment situations and employability concerns strengthen responses to the government's economic record. Data from Latin America and Eastern Europe confirm that workers who feel anxious about being fired or who believe it would be difficult to find a new job place significantly greater weight on sociotropic evaluations than do those with more secure employment situations. Thus incumbents who create risks for vulnerable workers are sanctioned, while those who create opportunities are rewarded most.

This article explores the relationship between salience, stereotypes, and cooccurring language variables in the social perception of language. Following previous work, we argue that sociolinguistic perception is dependent upon the ability of listeners to map the linguistic cues contained in a speech signal to stereotypes. However, we contend that the understanding of which language features contribute to those stereotypes, and how they do so in the specific context of talk, has been limited because of the tendency to focus on preselected variables and to control for the context in which they occur. We advance an account of the role of stereotypes in the social perception of language by using a new tool for capturing, visualizing, and querying listeners' real-time reactions to voice samples. Our survey instrument collects reactions to two topically distinct guises from the same speaker (taken from the Scilly Voices corpus), both of which contained a similar number of regionally distinctive accent features. As our survey instrument includes a review function enabling listeners to provide information on why certain features were notable to them, we are able to interrogate listeners' ability to respond to unspecified linguistic features. Ultimately, this enables us to build a more nuanced account of the interaction between a range of linguistic features and their relationship to message content, and allows us to demonstrate that both do evaluative and perceptual work.

Our findings have important implications for those interested in understanding the situated meaning of linguistic features and, in particular, how researchers might continue to develop exemplar models of the ways in which social information is indexed to linguistic features. We argue that no experiment can be context-free and, as a result, researchers must consider ways of modeling the effects of co-present variants on a given exemplar, not just the social indices of specific exemplars themselves.

Debates about the European Union's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has to be linked to decision‐making moments and should feature a balance between government and opposition. The recent literature discusses various partisan incentives that support or undermine these criteria, but analyses integrating these arguments are rare. This article provides a novel comparative perspective by studying the patterns of public EU emphasis in more than 2.5 million plenary speeches from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados over a prolonged period from 1991 to 2015. It documents that parliamentary actors are by and large responsive to EU authority and its exercise where especially intergovernmental moments of decision making spark plenary EU salience. But the salience of EU issues is mainly driven by government parties, decreases in election time and is negatively related to public Euroscepticism. The article concludes that national parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability and suffer from an opposition deficit in particular.

This article reports on patterns in the production and perception of New Zealand English r-sandhi. We report on two phoneme-monitoring experiments that examine whether listeners from three regions are sensitive to the distribution of r-presence in linking and intrusive environments. The results provide evidence that sound perception is affected by a listener's experience-driven expectations: greater prior experience with a sound in a given context increases the likelihood of perceiving the sound in that context, regardless of whether the sound is present in the stimulus. For listeners with extremely limited prior exposure to a variant, the variant is especially salient and we also observe an experiment-internal effect of experience. We argue that our results support models that incorporate both word-specific and abstract probabilistic representations.

What determines the outcomes of negotiations is a central question in political science, and such negotiations are crucial in coalition systems where political parties distribute policy payoffs during coalition negotiations. In this paper, we argue that due to the combination of the non-separability of most public policies and the shared responsibility for policy outcomes under coalition governments, which policies a party manages to get included in a coalition agreement will reflect these policies’ popularity among the other governing coalition parties, rather than policy payoffs being driven by proportionality or relative salience. Using a unique dataset containing novel data on the budgetary impact of every measure proposed in election manifestos and coalition agreements over five government formations, we can directly observe the policy payoffs extracted by each party for participating in government, using a measure that is directly comparable across parties, policy areas, and time. The results have substantial implications for our understanding of the formation process and functioning of coalition governments.

Congruence between the policies implemented by elected representatives and voters’ policy preferences is fundamental to representation and democratic accountability. Can we anticipate a closer alignment between voters’ policy preferences and the policies explicitly adopted by elected representatives on the more electorally significant issues? We address this question using a simple game theoretic model, where we demonstrate that greater salience of a particular issue in elections leads to less congruence between the policies implemented by elected representatives compared to voters’ policy preferences on that very issue. This finding carries significant implications for the connection between electoral salience and representation on valence issues, and has particular relevance for understanding the democratic foundations of security and counterterrorism policies.

We provide the first large-scale statistical investigation of the role of the saliency of (dis)honesty on future behavior in a multi-wave experiment with 1,260 subjects. In the first wave, we vary the saliency of subjects’ past dishonesty and explore the impact on behavior in tasks that include the scope to lie. In the second wave, we vary the degree of competitiveness in one of our core tasks. In a real effort task with individual incentives, being asked to recall experiences that involve honesty, or dishonesty reduces dishonesty in the task. This effect persists, albeit with a smaller effect size, when we purposefully introduce competitive incentives to this task in wave 2. On the other hand, in a competitive environment in which subjects could earn more by lying to their counterparts, inducing them to think more about (dis)honesty pushes them toward becoming more dishonest.

Salient normative status dimensions, or the socially significant and widespread ideational bases on which states seek to be viewed positively in international societies, pattern inter-state relations and signal fluctuating values underpinning an international order. Their dynamics, however, are not well understood. This article introduces an analytical framework to study relations between issue salience and status dimension salience in an international society over time. To what extent have democracy, human rights, economic development, social development and fighting poverty, gender equality, and environmental protection gained, lost or retained salience – both as issues and as sources of states’ domestic-level social identifications? Empirically, the article analyzes trends in the salience of issues and of normative status dimensions in the six above-mentioned issue areas, using manually-coded content analysis and automated text analysis of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) General Debate (GD) speeches between 1978 and 2023. Findings include that there has been an expansion of the characteristics, efforts and aspirations with which state representatives in this venue express their states’ positive social identities, adding new layers to the normative foundations underpinning international order.

Monetary incentives are a procedural pillar in experimental economics. By applying four distinct monetary incentive schemes in three experimental finance applications, we investigate the impact of an incentive scheme’s salience on results and elicit subjects’ perception of the experienced scheme. We find (1) no differences in results between salient schemes but a significant impact if the incentive scheme is non-salient. (2) The number of previous participations has a significant impact on the perception of the incentive scheme by subjects: it strongly correlates with subjects’ motives for participation, positively contributes to subjects’ understanding of the incentive scheme, but has no influence on subjects’ motivation within the experiment. (3) Subjects favor more salient over less- or non-salient schemes in the gain domain and negatively evaluate high salience in the loss domain.

We examine experimentally how complexity affects decision-making, when individuals choose among different products with varying benefits and costs. We find that complexity in costs leads to choosing a high-benefit product, with high costs and overall lower payoffs. In contrast, when complexity is in the benefits of the product, we cannot reject the hypothesis of random mistakes. We also examine the role of heterogeneous complexity. We find that individuals still (mistakenly) choose the high-benefit but costly product, even if cheaper and simple products are available. Our results suggest that salience is a main driver of choices under different forms of complexity.

The axioms of expected utility and discounted utility theory have been tested extensively. In contrast, the axioms of social welfare functions have only been tested in a few questionnaire studies involving choices between hypothetical income distributions. In a controlled experiment with 100 subjects placed in the role of social planners, we test five fundamental properties of social welfare functions to determine the efficacy of traditional social choice models in predicting social planner allocations when presented with choice sets designed to test the axioms of the theory. We find that three properties of the standard social welfare functions tested are systematically violated, producing an Allais paradox, a common ratio effect, and a framing effect in social choice. We find support for scale invariance and a preference for tail-increasing transfers. Our experiment also enables us to test a model of salience-based social choice which predicts the systematic deviations and highlights the close relationship between these anomalies and the classical paradoxes for risk and time.