Postwar Issues in 23 Democracies
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Ian Budge [1]
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[1] Essex University
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- Localización: Working Papers: Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials, ISSN-e 1133-8962, Nº. 44, 1992
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The paper starts by considering problems in the definition and measurement of political issues -in particular, whether issue-creation involves all parties and both leadership and electors; or whether issues can be "created" by only one of these. Confrontational approaches to the handling of issues are contrasted with saliency theories. The choice of a conceptual approach affects the way issues and change are measured and represented, whether this is done through typologies or by spatial analysis of party movements.
Spatial analysis presents two possibilities in regard to issue change: parties may change positions over time within the space; but the space itself (defined in terms of issues relevant at each time-point) may change. Both are considered on the basis of codings of sentences in party election programmes across a number of democracies, since the war. This is supplemented by trends in newspaper reports of campaign issues over the same period, which seem to indicate that, in the long term, issues are generated by the objective problems facing governments at the time. The discussion ends by briefly considering consequences of issues for government formation and action, and how far commitments to take action on issues are put into effect, as party mandate theory would imply.
The question of issue change is so vast, extending from party competition and government change through media and communication studies to election studies and voting behaviour, that it is narrowed down here to comparative research done over the last 15 years on party interrelationships in elections and governments, in roughly the same group of-democracies -Western Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan and Israel. Within these constants a variety of data -surveys, documents, reported events- have been used and analysed by various techniques, including spatial analysis. The distinction between party leaders and electors has always been central and where possible their mutual influence on each other has been examined.
Use of different sources, techniques and subjects for analysis throws into relief questions usually neglected at a purely abstract level -such as: how do we identify issues in the first place?- and how do we put them into the same frame of analysis for comparative purposes? These are the first questions the paper takes up, before going on to more theoretical points, (which still affect measurement and operationalisation however).
