The Strategic Use of Foreign Events in Parliamentary Debate Issue Competition: Danish and Norwegian Responses to October 7

The parliamentary floor represents an important arena for political debate. Recent research shows that politicians use foreign events strategically through parliamentary speeches to achieve electoral success. However, it is not clear how politicians do so to increase attention to their preferred issues. This article argues that by combining key insights from issue competition and legislative debate theory, we can see how issue ownership and the opposition's greater freedom to focus on certain issues interact to shape responses to foreign events. This is demonstrated through a parliamentary speech attention framework tested on Danish and Norwegian responses to the October 7 attacks in Israel. Issue ownership was more strongly associated with attention responses for opposition than government parties, with Denmark driving multiculturalism responses and Norway driving immigration responses. The article shows how foreign events can become assets for issue‐owning opposition parties and thus advances our understanding of issue competition in parliamentary debates.