Issue Emphases, Saliency Theory and Issue Ownership: A Historical and Conceptual Analysis

Saliency approaches derive from the basic idea that political parties define their policies by emphasising certain topics more than others, particularly in public documents and debates. However, the approaches diverge on whether parties always emphasise the same ‘owned’ issues or can emphasise different ones in different elections with a view to winning votes. The article explores the way these differences developed and summarises them in a typology of ‘issue ownerships’, within which models linking ‘ownership’ to election outcomes can be located.