Salient Issue Research Articles

Parliamentary questions as an intra-coalition control mechanism in mixed regimes

AbstractResearch on intra-coalition control shows that monitoring increases with the ideological distance between coalition partners. However, the focus of scholarship has been primarily on parliamentary regimes, not mixed regimes. In mixed regimes, intra-coalition control becomes more complex due to a dual executive. Parties must simultaneously monitor each other and the directly elected Head of Executive (HoE). This article examines intra-coalition control in mixed regimes by analyzing parliamentary questions from 21 German city councils. The German local level resembles a mixed regime. The executive consists of the coalition cabinet supported by the council majority and the directly elected mayor as the HoE. The results show that the division of governmental responsibilities affects intra-coalition control. When a coalition party is aligned with the HoE, the balance of power within the coalition is affected, and the other partners intensify controlling the aligned party. Additionally, policy divisiveness and issue salience are driving factors for intra-coalition control.

Determination of heavy metals in Iranian food packaging plastic

Dissemination of End-users to heavy metal is a salient issue where many researchers have been attentive on this subject for decades. These Metals can unfurl the Human Body via food contact consumption. So this research aims to investigate the content of heavy metals (lead, cadmium, chromium, iron, cobalt, copper, barium nickel, zinc, and arsenic has been determined in thirty-two different Iranian plastic food packaging containers by using Inductive-coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) using Microwave digestion system. In Adding to that, The Investigated packed materials like which Includes Dairy Products, mayonnaises, and kinds of ketchup. The Results ended up claiming heavy metals ranges are Pb(0.018-1258 mg/kg), Cu(0.41-31.13 mg/kg), Ni(0.06-0.866 mg/kg), Zn(7.27-88.69 mg/kg), Fe(4.7-901.6 mg/kg), Cr(0.87- 273.13 mg/kg), Cd(0.003-0243 mg/kg), Co (LDL - 0.358 mg/kg) and As(0.017-0.387 mg/kg). Lead (Pb) was detected at concentrations of 0.018-1258 mg/kg in eight of 32 packages. The highest concentrations were detected for Lead in the yellow and green-colored samples.

How much does issue salience matter? A model with applications to the UK elections

AbstractExtensive research applies counterfactual simulation methodology to study parties’ optimal policy positions in multiparty elections. In recent years, this methodology has been extended to the study of variation in issue salience. We employ this method to estimate the electoral effects of changes in the salience of specific positional issue dimensions on parties’ success. Applied to British Election Study survey data from 2017 and 2019, we find that plausible issue salience changes could have shifted the parties’ projected vote shares by several percentage points. Our approach implies that the governing Conservative Party had electoral incentives to downplay positional issues, to magnify the relative effects of its non‐policy advantage due to perceived competence and performance, among other factors. Labour would also have benefitted from reduced salience of Left‐Right ideology. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats had strong electoral incentives to emphasize their moderate Left‐Right position.

Issue salience and affective polarization

ABSTRACT Which voters hold polarized affects for political parties in Western Europe? We consider distinct characteristics of different political issues that shape political actors’ behaviors and argue that voters are more affectively polarized when they put salience on cultural issues because their stances on the issues are embedded in their deep-seated identity, value, belief, and morality. Empirically, we use measures of affective polarization that incorporate the multiparty systems of Western European countries. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (Module 3), we find that voters who put salience on cultural issues are more affectively polarized than others. The result implies that rising affective polarization in the past decades might have been related to increasing priorities on cultural issues. It also implies that political parties may potentially weaken voters’ affective polarization by manipulating their issue agenda.

Morality on the ballot: strategic issue salience and affective moral intuitions in the 2020 US presidential election

PurposeWhile morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media.FindingsCandidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies.Practical implicationsThis study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations.Originality/valueThis work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations.

Issue salience and feedback effects: the case of pension reforms

ABSTRACT What is the relationship between social policy reforms and issue salience in public opinion? Extensive research analyses policy feedbacks on policy preferences and the influence of policy preferences on policy change. Scant research, however, considers the link between reforms and issue salience – i.e., the perception of importance citizens attach to a topic. We address this gap in the literature through the comparative study of the salience of the ‘pension issue’. Drawing on a novel dataset covering 2010–2020 and 28 European countries, we argue that the passage of pension reforms shapes pension salience. Multilevel fixed effects models indicate that pension reforms that include either contracting or expansionary provisions are positively related to pension salience. In contrast, expansionary and contracting reforms, by themselves, are not robustly associated with pension salience.

Attacks and Issue Competition: Do Parties Attack Based on Issue Salience or Issue Ownership?

ABSTRACT Various studies have been devoted to explaining the conditions under which parties engage in attack behavior. However, the existing literature has overlooked the issues on which parties attack. This study addresses this gap by arguing that the issues on which parties attack others are conditioned on their salience and the parties’ ownership. We argue that parties decide to increase attacks on issues that receive high levels of scrutiny in society and in the media (salience hypothesis). At the same time, the attention devoted to attacks is also expected to be higher on issues that parties own (issue ownership hypothesis). Therefore, attention to attacking others on a salient issue is expected to be the highest for parties that own a salient issue (congruence hypothesis). Using data on parties’ attacks during question time sessions from Belgium and the United Kingdom, together with a diverse set of measures on salience and ownership, we confirm our expectations in both cases. Parties attack others on salient issues and on issues that they own, and when a party has ownership over a salient issue, it will devote the greatest attention to attacking on that issue. These results provide an understanding of parties’ attack behavior and contribute to the broader issue competition literature.

Exclusionary Inclusion? Peace Agreements and Provisions on Child Protection

ABSTRACTPeace agreements often serve as roadmaps for peacebuilding and the reconstruction of the post-conflict state. They do this by, among other things, delineating issues to be addressed as part of the transition from conflict to peace, reforms to be enacted, and the groups that are to benefit from them. It follows that what and who is included in a peace agreement matters. Often overlooked in the scholarship, however, are the potential implications—positive and negative—of the language adopted in peace agreements. With attention to language, this article examines how peace agreements address a particular but salient issue: child protection. It first provides an overview of existing provisions on the subject before contemplating the disempowering potential of the terminology used. The article demonstrates the need for more clarity in how commitments are constructed in peace agreements.

"Creepy Towards My Avatar Body, Creepy Towards My Body": How Women Experience and Manage Harassment Risks in Social Virtual Reality

Online harassment against women - particularly in gaming and virtual worlds contexts - remains a salient and pervasive issue, and arguably reflects the systems of offline structural oppression to control women's bodies and rights in today's world. Harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) is also a growing new frontier of research in HCI and CSCW, particularly focusing on marginalized users such as women. Based on interviews with 31 women users of social VR, our findings present women's experiences of harassment risks in social VR as compared to harassment targeting women in pre-existing, on-screen online gaming and virtual worlds, along with strategies women employ to manage harassment in social VR with varying degrees of success. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on harassment in social VR by highlighting how women's marginalization online and offline impact their perceptions of and strategies to mitigate harassment in this unique space. It also provides a critical reflection on women's mitigation strategies and proposes important implications to rethink social VR design to better prevent harassment against women and other marginalized communities in the future metaverse.

To know is to act? Revisiting the impact of government transparency on corruption

AbstractTransparency is expected to reduce corruption by enabling the public to uncover it and thus hold officials accountable. This assumes citizens care about corruption and have mechanisms for enacting accountability. Yet, paradoxically, transparency has been prescribed as a cure against corruption precisely in contexts where such mechanisms are weak. This article integrates research from different disciplines to better understand when and how transparency reduces corruption. It finds that citizens do react to information about corruption even in countries with weak institutions and wide‐spread corruption, especially if the information is widely shared, corruption is a salient issue, and there are some expectations of sanctions for malfeasance. Furthermore, even partial compliance with transparency policies can make a difference. More research should explore when and why bureaucrats comply with accountability pressures from above and below, how expectations about sanctions are formed and lead to ‘indignation rather than resignation,’ as well what the systemic effects of transparency policies are and how they evolve over time.

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN PERCEPTIONS TOWARDS THE USE OF FORCE

The existence of gender differences in public attitudes has long been debated and it is maintained that women and men have different attitudes towards certain policy areas. One of those areas is the use of force in foreign policy. Women are less supportive of the use of force in foreign policy than men. The reasons for these differences have been tried to be explained through the impact of the factors such as partisanship or ideology; economic marginalization; political marginalization; negative responses to war casualties; feminist consciousness; motherhood; socialization; issue salience. While public opinion surveys have been regularly conducted on foreign policy in Turkey, the gender dimension is rather understudied. In this article, I first argue that there are gender differences in public perceptions towards the use of force in Turkey and I aim to explore the reasons for these differences based on two sets of focus group discussions data gathered in 2021 and 2022.

Policy issue salience and legislative output of populist governments: evidence from immigration policies

ABSTRACT Research on political representation suggests that legislative activity is influenced by governing parties’ policy emphases in their election campaigns. We argue that populist governments are an exception as they may find it difficult to draft and implement laws on an issue even if it is salient to them. The anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manichean-discourse nature of populist party platforms significantly alters their ability to legislate on their campaign issues. We test this claim using data on the saliency of governments’ immigration policies in their election campaigns and subsequent legislation on immigration. The empirical analysis is based on 14 democratic states from 1998 to 2013. The results support the theory that populist governments will exhibit a relatively weak relationship between their issue emphases in election campaigns and the number of policies they enact on immigration. This research has important implications for our understanding of populism, political representation, and immigration policy.

Issue Responsiveness in Canadian Politics: Are Parties Responsive to the Public Salience of Climate Change in the Question Period?

This paper explores how politicians respond to the public salience of policy issues when determining which topics to publicly address. Using new data and state-of-the-art methodology, our study provides a fresh perspective on this fundamental question. We focus on a multi-party parliamentary system, specifically the Canadian House of Commons, with a specific emphasis on the issue of climate change. To assess the attention given by political parties to various policy issues, we analyze transcripts from the Question Period spanning from April 2006 to June 2021. To gauge the public’s level of concern for these issues, we incorporate data obtained from Google Trends. Employing an instrumental variable estimation strategy, our study causally estimates the extent to which the public salience of climate change influences elite attention. Our findings reveal that the public salience of climate change significantly influences the attention given to this issue by parties, albeit with noticeable partisan variations. Moreover, our research highlights the effectiveness of the Question Period in compelling the government to address challenging or potentially embarrassing issues. Lastly, we uncover evidence suggesting that the Liberal Party of Canada successfully increased the public salience of climate change during its tenure in government.

Real-World Developments Predict Immigration News in Right-Wing Media: Evidence from Germany

ABSTRACT Exclusionist positions on immigration have become a key component of right-wing ideology in most countries around the world. Combining group threat and news values theory, this study sheds light on the emergence of right-wing discourses on immigration based on one of Germany’s most influential right-wing print outlets. I employ supervised and unsupervised machine-learning methods on almost 54,000 articles published between 1998 and 2019 to test whether real-world conditions shape immigration news. Results show that reporting on immigration generally increased over time and peaked during the refugee inflow in 2015/16. Immigration numbers, foreigner crime rates, and Jihadist terror attacks predict the salience of the immigration issue in the overall news as well as discursive shifts within immigration news. During times of high immigration, articles were more likely to address topics related to deportation and closing borders or the criminalization of immigration. Terrorism was more present in immigration news after attacks, especially after attacks in Germany. Foreigner crime did not significantly increase reporting on crime in immigration news. In short, right-wing immigration discourses seem responsive to real-world developments and events that enable exclusionary rhetoric and a threatening portrayal of immigrants.

Mainstreaming the populist radical right? Online news exposure and voting behavior in the 2019 European Parliament election

AbstractHow does media exposure relate to support for radical right populist parties (RRPPs)? We contribute to this classic debate by analyzing the web browsing histories and survey responses of six thousand study participants in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK during the 2019 European Parliament election. Linking direct measures of online news exposure to voting behavior allows us to assess the effects of the salience of issues politicized by RRPPs on their electoral support. The likelihood to vote for RRPPs was higher when the EU was more salient in individual media diets, while exposure to the less salient issue of immigration did not increase the propensity to vote for RRPPs. Alongside consistent results for other party families and interactions with pre-existing voting intentions, the findings indicate that the electoral effects of online media are contingent on the overall salience of a specific issue and voters’ predispositions.

“Being grateful for the crumbs”: Empathy, stress and vulnerability experienced by teaching-mothers in the performing arts in Australian schools

Teacher attrition is a salient issue across the Western world. Whilst this has been widely discussed in the literature, what is missing in the discourse, is a gendered focus. This narrative inquiry into the experiences of Australian women who resumed teaching after becoming parents offers insight into how parenthood can complement and enhance teachers’ pedagogy and relationships with students. Narrative portraits also reveal how the intersection of normalised performative expectations of performing arts teachers and inflexible leadership is not conducive to emotional or financial wellbeing. Findings show how leadership and culture marginalise these teachers leading to burnout, guilt, and attrition.

Varieties of antigenderism: the politicization of gender issues across three European populist radical right parties

ABSTRACT This research contributes to the study of populist radical right parties’ (PRRPs) role in gendered democratic backsliding by analyzing their articulation and symbolic representation of gender issues. We compare the politicization of gender issues across three European PRRPs, examining how context-specific gendered opportunity structures – the level of contestation of gender issues in their country, the resonance of antigenderism among their electorate, and their issue repertoire and historical trajectory – shape the extent and ways in which the German AfD, the Italian Lega and the Sweden Democrats politicize gender issues. We conduct a quantitative content analysis of PRRPs’ framing of gender issues and construct topic networks based on the parties’ Facebook and Twitter posts during the European Parliament election campaign 2019. We analyze the salience of gender issues, the broader topical context in which they are embedded, the specific gender issues addressed, and the parties’ positions on these issues. Our results show how context-specific gendered opportunities shape PRRPs’ national gender discourses: A low level of contestation, evidenced by a high public recognition and legal protection of gender and sexual equality, seems to foster a femonationalist framing, while antigenderist discourse is less pronounced in such a context. Instead, a higher level of contestation, expressed in a lower public recognition and legal protection of gender and sexual equality, seems to foster antigenderist discourse. A transnational femonationalist framing, shared by all analyzed parties, relates to a common nativist ideological core.

Key predictors for climate policy support and political mobilization: The role of beliefs and preferences

Public support and political mobilization are two crucial factors for the adoption of ambitious climate policies in line with the international greenhouse gas reduction targets of the Paris Agreement. Despite their compound importance, they are mainly studied separately. Using a random forest machine-learning model, this article investigates the relative predictive power of key established explanations for public support and mobilization for climate policies. Predictive models may shape future research priorities and contribute to theoretical advancement by showing which predictors are the most and least important. The analysis is based on a pre-election conjoint survey experiment on the Swiss CO2 Act in 2021. Results indicate that beliefs (such as the perceived effectiveness of policies) and policy design preferences (such as for subsidies or tax-related policies) are the most important predictors while other established explanations, such as socio-demographics, issue salience (the relative importance of issues) or political variables (such as the party affiliation) have relatively weak predictive power. Thus, beliefs are an essential factor to consider in addition to explanations that emphasize issue salience and preferences driven by voters’ cost-benefit considerations.

Privacy and anti-surveillance advocacy: the role/challenge of issue salience

PurposeThe proliferation of surveillance-enhancing laws, policies and technologies across African countries deepens the risk of privacy rights breaches, as well as the risks of adverse profiling and social sorting. There is a heightened need for dedicated advocacy and activism to consistently demand accountability and transparency from African states, governments and their allies regarding surveillance. The purpose of this paper is to understand the issue frames that accompany anti-surveillance and privacy advocacy in Ghana and the related implications.Design/methodology/approachUsing a qualitative and interpretivist approach, the author focuses on three different surveillance-oriented incidents/programs in Ghana and analyzes the frames underpinning the related advocacy and narratives of various non-state actors.FindingsPrivacy and anti-surveillance advocacy in Ghana tends to be less framed in the context of privacy rights and is more driven by concerns about corruption and value for money. Such pecuniary emphasis is rational per issue salience calculations as it elevates principles of economic probity, transparency and accountability and pursues a high public shock value and resonance.Practical implicationsEconomics-centered critiques of surveillance could be counterproductive as they create a low bar for surveillance promoters and sustains a culture of permissible statist intrusions into citizens’ lives once economic virtues are satisfied.Originality/valueWhile anti-surveillance and privacy advocacy is budding across African countries, little is known about its nature, frames and modus compared to such advocacy in European and North American settings. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is likely the first paper or one of the first dedicated fully to anti-surveillance and advocacy in Africa.

Discourse and the Environment: Complexity, Conflicts, and Crises

The environment has become a salient issue in many public arenas, articulating a sense of concern or worry for the degradation of our natural environment and living conditions, caused by human activity. Discursively speaking, the environment has emerged as an umbrella term for issues such as ›air and water pollution‹, ›biodiversity‹, ›waste management‹, ›nuclear energy‹, ›organic farming, ›wildlife protection‹, and ›climate change‹. This article presents some suggestions for approaching the environment from a discourse studies perspective, concentrating on three issues: The complexity of the environment as a discursive phenomenon, conflicts between diverging environmental concerns, and »polycrisis« as a societal condition for environmental crises.