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The environment was David Cameron’s signature issue underpinning his modernization agenda. In opposition the ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ strategy had a positive impact on the party’s image: the environment operated as a valence issue in a period of raised public concern, particularly about climate change, and Cameron’s high-profile support contributed to the cross-party consensus that delivered radical change in climate policy. Although the Coalition government has implemented important environmental measures, the Conservatives have not enhanced their green credentials in government and Cameron has failed to provide strong leadership on the issue. Since 2010, climate change has to some extent been transformed into a positional issue. Conservative MPs, urged on by the right-wing press, have adopted an increasingly partisan approach to climate change, and opinion polls reveal clear partisan divisions on climate change amongst public opinion. As a positional issue climate change has become challenging for the Conservatives, showing them to be internally divided, rebellious and inclined to support producer interests. This article makes a contribution to our understanding of Conservative modernization, while also challenging the dominant assumption in the scholarly literature that the environment, particularly climate change, is a valence issue.

In much of the world, public transportation infrastructure is sorely needed. Political economy models suggest that provision lags because uneven access and use of public transit fragments political coalitions. Yet, traditional survey techniques tell us little about who supports valence issues, such as mass transit. I instead adopt a novel survey approach from economics designed to elicit preference intensity. I then sample households at different distances from a subway project in Bogotá, Colombia. Contra conventional expectations, I find little evidence that local geography shapes preferences. Those who use public transit the least and pay the most for its construction—the upper class—are its strongest supporters. An experiment and focus groups suggest that middle- and upper-class groups want others to take public transportation to reduce congestion and shorten their commutes. One implication is that a growing middle class might help to strengthen urban public goods provision.

Empirical evidence suggests that most parties in Western Europe do not take centrist policy positions, despite the centripetal force of the voter distribution. While most scholars focus on the reasons for parties’ divergence, this paper focuses on the reasons for the electoral failures of parties that take centrist Left–Right positions. This paper demonstrates that centrist parties, such as the British Liberal Democrats and the German FDP, suffer from multidimensional disadvantages. Using the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the European Election Studies surveys, I show that centrist parties are systematically disadvantaged regarding non-policy issues, such as competence, integrity, and party unity (i.e. valence issues). Second, I demonstrate that given their valence image there is no set of policy positions centrist parties can take to substantially improve their vote shares. While (Left–Right) centrist parties usually take positions that are far more supportive of European integration than the mass publics, moderating their positions is expected to increase centrist parties’ vote-share but not as much as it is expected to increase the vote-share of Christian Democratic parties. These results have important implications for the study of political representation, electoral campaigns, and parties’ policy shifts.

Crises were highly relevant in the 2022 Italian general election. The label of “crisis” was associated with multiple policy issues, ranging from the environment and health to foreign policy. Previous studies have extensively discussed the impact of crises on voter behavior, demonstrating that voters are particularly concerned with parties’ valence attributes, such as the effectiveness of policies and leaders’ ability to resolve emergencies. However, limited attention has been paid to assessing how parties mobilize the crisis paradigm on social media. This study seeks to bridge this gap by analyzing the impact of crisis-related content on Facebook user engagement, with a special focus on distinguishing the relative effectiveness of populist versus mainstream parties in deploying such narratives. Moreover, this research explores how the intertwining of crisis narratives with portrayals of party responsibility or irresponsibility influences the virality of social media posts. To answer these questions, we manually coded 4,827 election campaign posts to create an original dataset. The evidence shows that crises have an impact on boosting user engagement, although this effect seems to be limited to populist parties. The results also suggest that irresponsible claims cease to be rewarding during a crisis. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the strategic use of crisis narratives by political parties on digital platforms and underscores the complex interplay between crisis communication and public engagement in the contemporary political landscape.

There are times in the political life of any nation in which its imagining and reimagining become more intensely political, more conscious and more consciously intersubjective. Brexit has provided, provides today and will surely continue to provide a series of such moments. In and through a critical appreciation of Benedict Anderson’s famous reflections on the nation as an ‘imagined community', I consider the (necessarily) imagined character of Brexit and the reimaginings of Britain that its imagining envisaged. I reflect on whether—and if so how and in what ways—‘actually existing Brexit’ is likely to pose a reality check on imagined Brexit, exploring in the process some of the wider political implications.

Elected leaders increasingly undermine liberal democratic institutions with the support of their voters, openly challenging liberal democratic institutions in election campaigns. However, political scientists thus far have lacked the theoretical and empirical tools to study the role of elections in democratic backsliding. This article theorizes the degree to which democracy in general and liberal democracy more specifically can and should be conceptualized as valence and positional issues in multiparty electoral competitions of established liberal democracies. By investigating how German citizens and parties of the postwar period spoke about democracy per se and liberal democracy in their regional and national election manifestos, this article shows that democracy per se and liberal democracy, in particular, have been issues of different qualities in German postwar elections. While parties have used references to democracy in general as a mixed issue, showing both signs of valence and positional issues, parties’ emphasis on liberal democracy is shaped by a positional logic. Social and direct democracy have also been positional issues. Studying democracy and its various conceptions as electoral issues will help us address many important questions concerning the stability of democracies, shifting researchers’ focus to the competition of parties over citizens’ support for reforms that undermine or stabilize liberal democracy.

The article reconstructs the events of the Suvignano farm, in the Sienese area, confiscated in 1996 to an entrepreneur from Palermo considered close to Cosa nostra and assigned in 2018 to a company owned by the Tuscany Region. Unlike other studies on confiscated assets, mainly focusing on quantitative aspects or their management, the paper proposes a case study based on an integration of techniques and sources, from interviews with qualified witnesses to the consultation of institutional documents. The analysis aims to explore the social and political significance that Suvignano assumes for the local community and the political class. After the definitive confiscation in 2007, Suvignano becomes a political resource disputed between different actors, local and national. Around this political resource take place two challenges, led and won by a Tuscan leftist institutional network, distant heir of the red subculture. The first challenge is against a similar Sicilian institutional network. The second is against local political actors: the traditional (Forza Italia) and the new (Salvini-Lega) centre-right, as well as the emerging 5 Stars Movement. The article shows how these two challenges are won thanks also to the Tuscan civil society, ready to mobilize against a \"public evil\", as the mafia is usually represented. In a phase in which the political consensus becomes uncertain, the centre-left parties find in the fight against the mafia a powerful source of political legitimacy.

The economy is so powerful in determining the results of U.S. presidential elections that political scientists can predict winners and losers with amazing accuracy long before the campaigns start. But if it is true that \"it's the economy, Stupid,\" why do incumbents in good economies sometimes lose? The reason, Lynn Vavreck argues, is that what matters is not just the state of the economy but how candidates react to it. By demonstrating more precisely than ever before how candidates and their campaigns affect the economic vote,The Message Mattersprovides a powerful new way of understanding past elections--and predicting future ones. Vavreck examines the past sixty years of presidential elections and offers a new theory of campaigns that explains why electoral victory requires more than simply being the candidate favored by prevailing economic conditions. Using data from presidential elections since 1952, she reveals why, when, and how campaign messages make a difference--and when they can outweigh economic predictors of election outcomes. The Message Mattersdoes more than show why candidates favored by the economy must build their campaigns around economic messages. Vavreck's theory also explains why candidates disadvantaged by the economy must try to focus their elections on noneconomic issues that meet exacting criteria--and why this is so hard to do.

Focusing on the 2000, 2008 and 2011 Spanish elections, this paper provides three contributions to the literature on electoral competition from a Downsian perspective. Firstly, an answer is offered to the three paradoxes that arise when applying the basic proximity vote model to electoral competition in Spain. Secondly, a more solid theoretical and empirical grounding is provided for the existing proposals to integrate non-positional issues into the Downsian model. Finally, a type of logistic regression is employed which is more appropriate for understanding the behaviour of the median voter, whose role is crucial in Spanish election results. Our findings have important implications in understanding the workings of one of the most commonly used models in political science. Adapted from the source document.

In this paper, a descriptive case study of a social entrepreneurial firm is used to demonstrate stakeholder salience and stakeholder social issue management valence. The methodology is to use a semi structured interview with a social entrepreneur to identify and map the firm's stakeholders' salience and stakeholders' social issue management valence. The resulting map uses spheres, sized proportionally to social issue management valence, to represent the various stakeholder groups. Each map shows the positioning of stakeholders according to their salience at critical points in the life of the social entrepreneurship. This paper contributes to stakeholder theory through its use of an innovative methodology to combine and view the stakeholders and their importance to the social entrepreneur on a single map. This map incorporates the elements of stakeholder salience with stakeholder social issue management valence. This mapping approach enables us to visualize how salience and valence positions change at critical times. Social entrepreneurs applying this mapping method can balance the allocation of their time and attention to stakeholders while simultaneously keeping with their social mission.