Making and shaking government? The Danish People s Party as parliamentary support party and political agenda-setter. NB - Very first draft!

Transcription

1 Making and shaking government? The Danish People s Party as parliamentary support party and political agenda-setter NB - Very first draft! Paper prepared for the session Parliament and Government at the Danish Political Science Association conference, Vejle, October 2012 Gunnar Thesen IRIS, Stavanger, Norway & Department of Political Science and Government Aarhus University, Denmark gt@iris.no / thesen@ps.au.dk

2 Introduction The Danish election of 2001 brought the Danish People s Party from the margins to the mainstream of Danish politics (Andersen 2004: 1). The party captured 12 pct of the votes, and for the ten years to come, it served the function as parliamentary basis of the Liberal-Conservative coalition that replaced the Social-Democratic led government ( ). Along with this key position came policy influence, which, for DPP and its predecessor the Progress Party, until 2001 had been relatively low and mostly indirect (Andersen & Bjørklund 2000). Several major reforms (eks) were designed through negotiations between DPP and the government, and DPP played the role as a permanent partner of the government in the yearly state budget agreements (Christiansen 2011). Still, DPP remained outside office, thus combining opposition status and policy influence. In the present paper, this situation (not uncommon in consensual multiparty systems) is used as a basis to explore the broader question of the potential trade-off between policy influence and vote-seeking behavior in political communication. The question is approached from the perspective of political agenda-setting, focusing specifically on the agenda-setting strengths of opposition parties. Recent studies find the opposition to be more successful in focusing on favorable issues, pushing these up on the political agenda and thus forcing the government to respond (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010). Furthermore, the media s agenda-setting power is an important part of the competition between opposition and government (Thesen 2012). While the government prefers to respond to good news reflecting positive developments in social problems, opposition parties use bad news to criticize the government and draw attention to its lack of competence. This pattern is skewed in favour of the opposition, because a negativity bias in the media offers more opportunities for opposition parties to politicize government weakness, relative to the limited amount of good news that could serve to benefit those in office. These accounts of party competition and political agenda-setting rest on, and ascribe differences in agenda-setting patterns to, variations in policy responsibility through office position. However, they do not take into account substantial sharing of policy responsibility between government and opposition parties. The aim here is thus to explore how policy responsibility, gained through the role as a support party, affected 1

3 DPPs capitalization of agenda-setting opportunities. To what extent were they free to politicize bad news which, implicitly or explicitly, blamed the government for negative issue developments? Or in other words, how did the DPP strike the balance between the role as government maker and government shaker? DPPs agenda-setting strategy while serving as a parliamentary basis of the Liberal- Conservative government, is in this paper examined by studying their responses to the media agenda. In the next section, expectations are derived on the basis of (mainly) extant agenda-setting research and the DPP s position in Danish politics during the Lib- Con rule from Broadly speaking, I concentrate on two approaches. First, I will discuss what kind of similarities and differences that could be expected between DPP and the left of government opposition (Social Democrats, Social Liberals, Socialist People s Party, Red-Green Alliance). Second, I propose within-dpp differences in agenda-setting patterns, related to variations in policy influence and competence image across issues. The design section elaborates on the material used to empirically investigate the propositions of the paper: a sample of radio news stories (N=2161) from Denmark ( ), and the parliamentary questions through which DPP and the left opposition followed these stories up. Subsequently, results from preliminary analyses are reported before the final section offers a tentative conclusion. Can government makers be government shakers? Propositions on the agendasetting strategies of DPP As mentioned in the introduction, a couple of recent studies have focused on the opposition-government game when examining the agenda-setting opportunities and strategies of political parties (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010; Thesen 2011). Underlying the division between opposition and government in these studies, is the idea that policy responsibility affects the latitude and attention of parties. Parliamentary democracy as a chain of delegation offers greater policy influence to governing parties than to opposition parties (Müller et al., 2006: 21). Thus, being in government means that parties have authority to influence what the state does (and does not do) in order to confront the many problems in society. Along with this power comes, of course, responsibility. The democratic institution of elections, which delivers the government its 2

4 delegated powers in the first place, also allows for accountability by providing the opportunity to hold parties responsible (cf. Powell, 2000). The opposition, meanwhile, is left mostly with the scrutinizing and not the policymaking function of parliament. Thus, the first consequence of parliamentary opposition, as Norton (2008: 244) notes, is that opposition parties are significant actors in exposing Government to public challenge and oversight, but least effective in affecting outcomes of public policy. In other words, government strengths in law-making are met by opposition strengths in agenda-setting. More precisely, the opposition utilizes the nonlegislative activities of the legislature (parliamentary questions, interpellations and debates) as agenda-setting tools in issue competition, and do so to an increasing extent (Green-Pedersen, 2010). By way of its words, the opposition enjoys the ability to hold the executive to account and ensure that it is required to explain and justify its actions an inactions before the representatives of the people (Baldwin 2004: 302). Green-Pedersen and Mortensen (2010) show how the differences between government and opposition parties present the latter with more opportunities to focus continually on issues that are advantageous to them, whereas government parties are compelled to respond to issues brought up on the party system agenda. By controlling the party system agenda, the opposition parties can thus force governments to address issues (2010: 273). Another recent agenda-setting study suggests that party responses to news play a crucial role in this competition between opposition and government, elaborating on how policy responsibility together with news tone and blame attributions shape the agenda-setting strategies of political parties (Thesen 2012). In short, opposition parties respond to bad news, trying to politicize negative developments in social problems for which the government could be held responsible. However, the clear-cut distinction between parties in and out of office does not in many consensual multiparty systems correspond perfectly to a distinction between parties with and without policy responsibility. Minority government and strong opposition influence are considered characteristics of Danish politics (Gallagher et al. 2006: ). The present case, where DPP secured the Liberal-Conservative coalition its place in office, serves as an example of how minority government and consensus politics make way for considerable opposition party influence. During the Lib-Con rule 3

5 from , DPP was able to negotiate several settlements and budgets that satisfied many of its core policy goals. The level of policy influence and responsibility was therefore quite different for DPP, compared to the left-of-government opposition that included the Social Liberals, the Social Democrats, the Socialist People s Party and the Red-Green Alliance. Differences between the agenda-setting strategies of the two blocs of opposition could also be expected when considering that the left opposition could, and eventually did, form an alternative coalition without governing parties, while DPP supported the government parties and arguably nurtured hopes to share office with them in the future. Overall then, the special situation of DPP as a government maker with considerable policy influence could supplement previous findings on opposition parties agendasetting strategies vis-à-vis the media. At a general level, two opposing perspectives could be argued. On the one hand, one can stress that although the role as support party meant policy influence, DPP was still outside office. It could therefore pursue the typical opposition role as a critical adversary of the office-holders, by responding to news that undermine the public s perception of government competence. In this best of both worlds perspective, the support party role involves a minimal trade-off between the policy influence gained through compromise and agreements with the government, and the ability to apply vote-seeking and competitive strategies in political agenda-setting. On the other hand, one could stress that the comprehensive cooperation between DPP and the government, in combination with shared responsibility for a number of policies, constrained DPP, reducing its will and capacity to exploit news negativity. In other words, the support party role involves a significant trade-off between policy influence and traditional opposition strategies that could maximize votes at the cost of the government. The argument here is that the trade-off depends on which conditions of political agendasetting we study. The subsequent discussions thus propose two situations where DPP and the left opposition are expected to behave similarly (indicating minimal trade-off), and one situation where they behavior is expected to differ (indicating significant tradeoff). 4

6 DPP and left opposition response to bad news and blame attributions Government power shapes the attention of political parties, including their preferences for different news tones. Opposition parties and challenger candidates inclination towards negativity in political communication seems to be a strong finding, documented by studies of party campaign behaviour across political systems, party ideology and time (cf. Skaperdas & Grofman 1995; Fridkin & Kenney 2004; Håkansson 1999; Elmelund- Præstekær 2010). And, as already mentioned, a recent study points to a similar negativity bias in opposition parties responses to news (Thesen 2012). The argument is that the opposition uses bad news as politicization opportunities, because it highlights social problems that could reflect poorly on the government s performance. It is important to note that a negative news tone in itself does not necessarily attribute any blame to the government. But questions related to government competence could still easily be raised, simply because office position is accompanied by formal responsibility and a tendency to be held accountable even if the government bears no direct responsibility for (a) problem, and even though (it) may not be amenable to government solutions in the first place (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010: 262). In this context, DPPs position outside office is relatively sheltered, increasing the probability that they will function as a government shaker rather than an influential government support party; delivering, instead of receiving, critique in the debate ensuing the news story. The expectation is in other words that news negativity prompts a best of both worlds scenario, where DPP responds to bad news in much the same way as the left opposition: (P1) DPP and left opposition response to news attention is more likely to increase when news of negative developments in social problems increases However, a support party with policy influence cannot hope to be sheltered behind its opposition status in every political debate surrounding negative developments in social problems. Thus, a distinction should be made between bad news in general and news that highlight policy responsibility by featuring explicit attributions of blame to the government. News containing blame attributions could change DPP agenda-setting strategies, to the extent that it threatens to shed a critical light on the party s responsibility for a problem. From this perspective, it is useful to distinguish between two types of blame attributions, according to whether the content relates to policy 5

7 substance or more to the way politics is performed. Opposition parties with a low level of policy influence would be expected to respond regardless of the type of blame attributions that feature in the news, as both types present opportunities to politicize government failure (Thesen 2011). But for a support party that more often works closely with the government, affecting the making of policies, the two types hold different implications. Looking at the former category first, news stories that attribute blame to the government for a policy problem could in many cases directly or indirectly touch upon the role of DPP: either generally, as a support party ensuring a majority for a policy direction argued to have caused the problem; or more specifically, as a participant in negotiations and decisions related to the news story in question. The will to act as a government shaker will arguably dampen, because the ensuing debate could end up compromising DPP as well as the government. Consequently, the expectation is that DPP faces a trade-off between the role as influential support party and the role as a proactive and critical agenda-setter: (P2) DPP response to news attention is, unlike left opposition response, not likely to increase when news contains blame attributions related to policy substance. The second type of blame attributions, which often figure in political news, relates less to policy substance, and more to the way in which politics is performed. The literatures on personalization of politics (cf. Karvonen 2010) and political scandals (cf. Thompson 2000) have demonstrated how the declining importance of social cleavages and the convergence of parties policy positions, stimulate competition on other dimensions of political life. A recent study of electoral outcomes in West-European democracies, shows that events indicating lack of integrity and competence significantly depress the vote shares of involved parties (Clark 2008). These scandal-like events have also been found to prompt a strong increase in opposition parties responses to news (Thesen 2011). Their damaging potential derives from the fundamental character of the values that they question. Clark labels it a nonpolicy-related aspect of valence (ibid.: XXX). The valence concept (Stokes 1963, 1992) has mainly been put to use on policy issues where parties or candidates hold identical positions (reduction of crime, economic growth etc), but also covers values which politicians are expected to adhere to, such as honesty, trustworthiness and competence. Parties, and their constituencies, often disagree on how social problems are to be handled. But no party and no voter would disagree that 6

8 political representatives should be able to deal with these problems in a competent and honest manner, regardless of which political solution is chosen. If not, the question whether elected leaders are fit to govern is inevitably raised. The strong personal aspects separate what could be labelled non-policy blame attributions from policy (substance) blame. From the perspective of DPP, non-policy blame increases the willingness to pursue a news story. The reason is that attention concentrates on the way politics is performed and, hence, on the failures and missteps of specific officeholders (most often government ministers) for which DPP bears no responsibility. As with P1, a best of both worlds scenario seems plausible, meaning that the support party role does not limit DPPs ability to act upon the opposition advantage inherent in scandal-like news that could compromise the government: (P3) DPP and left opposition response to news attention is likely to increase when news contains blame attributions related to non-policy valence events. Variation in DPP response across issues: The effect of issue ownership and (perceived) issue influence Finally, the paper will examine DPPs agenda-setting strategies towards the media based on the party s competence image and influence for different issues. Several recent agenda-setting studies find that media coverage more often sparks opposition party attention when it deals with issues that the parties care about or own (Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010; Vliegenthart and Walgrave 2011; Thesen 2012). According to the ownership theory, a party owns an issue when the voters consider it the most competent to deal with it (cf. Petrocik 1996). DPP has won considerable electoral support during the recent decade, mainly based on its restrictive position on immigration and its tough position on crime. On the block level, a bourgeois-led coalition enjoys ownership of these issues compared to a social democratic-led coalition (cf. Andersen 2003). But like its sister parties of the New Right party family in Europe, it is DPP that commands the most preferable competence evaluations on immigration and crime on the right-wing of Danish politics. Thus, I expect DPP to be more inclined to respond to immigration and crime issues, both because they believe these issues deserve special attention, and because they hope to increase their electoral support if these issues become salient. 7

9 The more interesting question which the issue profile of DPP raises however, relates to how their role as a support party arguably means that ownership is translated into increased policy influence for owned issues. As previously suggested, DPP has been able to use their leverage to move policies in their direction generally, but above all for issues which matter most to DPP. This is for instance suggested by specific reforms, such as that introduced as early as 2002 which guaranteed a substantial and restrictive change in immigration policies (Andersen 2003). Furthermore, DPP influence is also evident in the legislation of the Lib-Con government. Christiansen and Pedersen (2011: 19-21) show how a substantial share of laws concerning immigration were based on legislative agreement between DPP and the coalition parties, and hence, not preplanned in the coalition agreement but rather put on the agenda by the support party in exchange for its explicit support. Consequently, if blame attributions to the government in fact dampen DPP responses to news (as proposed in P2), this effect should be more pronounced for owned issues where the DPP mark on legislation was most visible. Not only because of how actual policy influence restrains their use of the core opposition advantage in agenda-setting: lack of responsibility for negative developments in social problems. But also because these are the issues that the public associates most strongly with DPP, and therefore also the issues for which the public is most likely to perceive the support party as influential. Thus, a combination of actual and perceived influence represent a DPP-dilemma when news blames the government on issues of immigration and crime. As long as the question of responsibility is not raised, these issues should make for attractive agendasetting opportunities. But when (policy) blame attributions are present, responding to news stories would mean risking to attract negative attention and blame for policy failures. The final proposition in other words combine a best of both worlds and a significant (policy influence vs vote-seeking) trade-off perspective: (P4) DPP response to news attention is likely to increase for news about owned issues, but only insofar as the news do not attribute blame to the government. Design and data The propositions of the paper are tested with data on media and opposition party agendas in Denmark. A sample of more than 2000 news stories from one year (2003-8

10 2004) was coded. Next, each story was forwardtracked to see whether it made it to the opposition s agenda in the following four weeks. The sections below elaborate on the independent and dependent variables applied in the empirical analyses. Independent variables The news stories were collected using Danish radio news broadcasts (twice daily) from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation which in this period held a de-facto monopoly on national radio news. Studies of the Danish media system point to the influential role of these broadcasts in linking the agenda of morning papers and evening TV news (Lund 2002), making them the best single source for measuring the agenda of the mass media in general (Green-Pedersen & Stubager 2010: 669). Each individual news feature of the radio broadcasts constituted the coding unit. After reading a summary of each feature, variables were assigned values measuring its content in terms of news tone, blame attributions etc (see below). The individual news features were subsequently aggregated on news story level to form the unit of analysis. Time and place specific events or statements, and not recurring social problems, determined the grouping of individual features. For instance, news features on unemployment figures are produced regularly. But even though they are thematically identical, they are indeed separate news stories based on different events. This collection procedure produced the following variables 1 : News saliency, or the intensity of media attention reflecting a stories placement on the media agenda, is measured as the number of radio news features broadcast about a story. The relationship between news saliency and political agendas captures the original core agenda-setting idea and is well established in the agenda-setting literature. I therefore expect to see a strong relationship between the level of news attention and the probability of a political response from both DPP and the left opposition. The coding of news tone (good, bad and neutral 2 ) was done from the point of view of government, directly addressing the role of policy responsibility and the oppositiongovernment competition central to the argument in the paper. The operationalization draws on Baumgartner & Jones (1993: 51) coding of news content: if you were an 1 The quality of the coding, for both independent and dependent variables, was checked through intercoder reliability tests. Results were satisfying, with Krippendorffs Alphas ranging from 0.79 to See Appendix Table A.1 for coding examples. 9

11 industry leader [minister], would you be pleased or unhappy to see such a title? Obvious examples would be news about increasing inflation, industry closures, crime, accidents, spread of new diseases and so on. However, also stories where the government is content with a specific policy but nevertheless met by criticism (not contradicted by government support) qualify as bad news. The assumption is that the minister in charge would have preferred a different news content, or no story at all. Policy (substance) blame 3 was measured through the presence of government criticism in news items. The word criticize, or its synonyms, need not be present, but the item should contain references that point to conditions, actions or intentions which the sender/addresser clearly sees as censurable and for which government is blamed. The variable thus covers attribution of responsibility for something the government shouldn t have done, something it should have done or something it is going to do but should refrain from doing. The coding of non-policy blame was based on Clark s notion of non-policy valence events (2008). The variable is meant to capture news that question the policy-neutral values that politicians want to be identified with, and are expected to live up to. Two values are in focus here: competence and integrity. The former typically relates to failures or deficiencies in the making or implementation of policies. One example is the so-called tdc-story, where a tax-hole which the previous government had proposed to close was ignored by the ministry and ended up costing the state a total of 973 million DKR. Other indicators of incompetence is when the government is criticized by recognized and credible actors like for instance the European Human Rights Court, or when proposals or statements are withdrawn shortly after they were issued reflecting poor judgement or a lack of strategical foresight. The latter value, integrity or honesty, most often concerns stories with an element of scandal or breach of promises. Examples cover economical infidelity, tax-fraud and professional misconduct / preferential treatment. Issue ownership was coded partly based on results from the Danish election surveys (1998, 2001 and ) measuring the issue competence images of the two blocs (Social Democratic or bourgeois led coalition) through several elections. The survey questions 3 See Appendix Table A.2 for coding examples of both policy blame and non-policy blame. 4 Made available from by The Danish Election Project. 10

12 tap voters images of the two blocs for different issues, and so ownership was assigned to the news story material on issue-level using the existing issue content coding of the radio news database. 5 The resulting ownership variable applied in the left opposition models thus indicates whether a Social Democratic led coalition holds ownership of the issue group to which the news story belongs (true of unemployment, environment, social welfare, health and housing). As discussed in the previous section, DPP ownership included immigration and crime. Besides the main explanatory variables presented above, the empirical models include a couple of control variables meant to accommodate the reciprocal nature of the media politics relationship. For the first, labelled Opposition initiation, each story was coded according to whether the opposition played a role in initiating the story. The resulting variable indicates instances where the empirical material might be at odds with the agenda-setting idea and where the media-politics relationship possibly could be better described as indexing (Bennett 1990) or party influence on media agendas. Thus, the code reflecting opposition initiation reflects the judgment that a stories would not have entered the news agenda (at that specific time) had it not been for the involvement of the opposition. The second control variable measures government response to the media agenda. The variable was coded using the Prime Minister s weekly press-meetings 6, which was checked for references to each of the news stories in the sample. The meetings are typically held every Tuesday at the Prime Minister s Office, during approximately the same period as Parliament is seated (September to early June). On average, one week a month is without a press-meeting as the PM is occupied with other meetings or journeys. The meeting takes place right after the weekly ministerial conference, and starts with a minutes speech from the PM mainly divided between presentation of issues that have been discussed in the ministerial conference and a few topics of choice on which he speaks more freely. The measure does not capture those parts of government s issue attention expressed through other ministers and other contexts, but 5 The issues in the dataset are the ones applied in the Danish agenda-setting project ( It is a modified version of the coding system of the American policy agendas project ( 6 The press-meetings were introduced by Liberal PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Video recordings were made available by Local Eyes TV and Ritzaus Bureau. 11

13 this is alleviated by the fact that the PM represents the whole government. He divides his attention amongst the different ministries, as also his comments to the agenda of the ministerial conference show. Therefore the measure should still qualify as a government agenda and not only a PM agenda. The inclusion of the Opposition initiation and Government response variables strengthens the specification of the news to politics relationship in the empirical models, serving to curb endogeneity as their estimates could be expected to influence both independent and dependent variables. Dependent variables In the period under study, , government power in Denmark had just shifted (2001) from a social democratic led coalition (Social Democrats and Social Liberals) to a bourgeois coalition (Liberals and Conservatives). In addition to the Social Democrats and the Social Liberals, the left of government opposition was made up of the Red Green Alliance and the Socialist People s Party. Both the left opposition and the DPP agendas were proxied through the institution of parliamentary questioning, used to control the government but at the same time broadcasting and building party profiles (Wiberg and Koura 1994). The institution is transparent and easily accessible in its content (Q&A), and thus attractive both for the opposition and for the news media. Studies show that non-legislative activities do in fact work as instruments of political agenda-setting for the opposition (Baumgartner 1989; Green-Pedersen & Mortensen 2010). Also, parliamentary questions have been used extensively in agenda-setting studies (cf. Green-Pedersen & Stubager 2010; Vliegenthart & Walgrave 2011a; Soroka 2002) and this strengthens the reliability of comparisons between the current study and previous research. For each story coded in the radio news, the opposition s questions 7 were thoroughly read to check whether the story had made it to the left opposition and DPP agenda in the following four weeks. 7 For spring 2003, data was made available through the Danish agenda-setting project ( Questions from the session were collected from the Folketing s web archive (webarkiv.ft.dk). 12

14 Table 1. Descriptives of variables applied in the analyses (N=2161) Variable name Mean Std. Dev. Min Max News saliency (no. of items) News tone (pct. bad) Policy (substance) blame Non-policy blame Left opposition ownership DPP ownership Opposition initiation Government response Left opposition response (no. of questions) DPP response (no. of questions) Results Multivariate regression was used to estimate the relationships between independent and dependent variables. 8 The first section below presents the results for the first three propositions, comparing how DPP and left opposition responses to news stories are conditioned by news tone, policy blame and non-policy blame. The second section looks at the fourth proposition, adding an interaction term (between issue ownership and policy blame) to the DPP model in order to investigate how DPP agenda-setting strategies differ according to variation in policy influence across issues. DPP vs left opposition response (P1, P2, P3) Table 2 presents the results of two models, one for left opposition and DPP respectively. Note first that both models confirm the core agenda-setting idea, showing a significant and positive effect of news saliency on party response. 8 Because the dependent count variable was overdispersed (variance larger than the mean), negative binomial regressions were chosen (Long and Freese, 2006). 13

15 Controls Table 2. Negative binomial regressions, dependent variables: Left opposition (Social Democrats, Social Liberals, Red Green Alliance Socialist People s Party) and DPP response intensity (no. of parliamentary questions tabled)* Left opposition DPP Saliency 0.284*** 0.398*** (0.047) (0.093) Opposition initiation (0.362) (0.595) Government response 1.285** * (0.417) (1.525) P1 News tone (pct bad) 0.012*** 0.014** (0.002) (0.004) P2 Policy blame 1.036*** (0.236) (0.463) P3 Non-policy blame 1.426** (0.488) (0.891) Constant *** *** (0.221) (0.402) N 2,161 2,161 Pseudo R square *Standard error reported in parentheses. *** p<0.001, ** p<0.01, * p<0.05, p<0.10. Moving on to the propositions, the news tone variable is also positive and significant, proving that negative news exercises a positive influence on the intensity of DPP, as well as left opposition, response (P1). To give a more complete interpretation of the results in Table 2, predicted counts of party responses were estimated for every observation in the sample at substantially interesting values of the independent variables. These calculations show that a switch from a one-sided good story to a one-sided bad story, quadruples the intensity of DPP reactions to news attention (from.018 to.071 estimated questions). As the effect is comparable to that of news tone on left opposition response, the indication is that policy influence of the kind held by DPP as a support party, does not disturb the basic government opposition divide as far as opposition preferences for news negativity is concerned. The government is fair game, not only for its alternative coalition but also for the part of the parliamentary opposition that secures its place in office. 14

16 Looking at the results on policy blame (P2) however, left opposition and DPP agendasetting strategies could be clearly discerned. While left opposition response is positively affected by policy blame attributions in the news, this coefficient falls short of statistical significance in the DPP model. One of the most important strategies of opposition attack in political agenda-setting (Thesen 2011) is thus of no use for the support party studied here. Interestingly, it is also negative, suggesting a tendency (although not significant) for DPP to shy away from stories where responsibility is attributed to the government. This result hints at the restrictions on DPP politicization choices, or more generally the agenda-setting costs of policy making influence through the role as a support party. The stories which for other opposition parties are especially attractive could often turn out to be self-incriminating for opposition parties supporting the government. Finally, the results on blame attributions related to non-policy valence events apparently suggest a different logic (P3). News featuring non-policy blame produces a clearly positive and significant effect on both DPP and left opposition response. Estimated predicted counts of party responses show that attributions of non-policy blame to the government quadruples and quintuples (!) the intensity of left opposition and DPP reactions respectively. While DPP would table a mean of.042 parliamentary questions for stories without government criticism related to government integrity or competence, an average of.209 questions could be expected when stories involve for instance ministers caught lying or serious incompetence/malpractice in policyimplementation. As with P1, the direction and size of the effect is the same for left opposition and DPP, delivering strong support to P2. In other words these stories present occasions where DPP response is often risk-free, implying no trade-off between support party influence and a vote-seeking and competitive strategy in political agendasetting. A last noteworthy result is that government attention (as measured through government response to the stories) negatively affects DPP reactions to news stories. In light of the positive relationship between left opposition and government responses to news, the implication is that the government-opposition dynamics, after all, work differently between the government and its support party. Although the government must tolerate that DPP is free to attack (cf P1 and P3), the negative relationship between what the government and DPP attends to means that neither seems preoccupied with 15

17 each other s issue priorities. A possible interpretation, perhaps deserving of future research attention, could be that DPP in some ways still operated at the margins of Danish party and issue competition. Despite the mainstreaming effect of the role as the government s parliamentary support party, their issue profile and agenda-setting strategies vis-à-vis the media arguably still stood out, creating a distance between DPP and center of the opposition-government game. 9 A supplementary model (not shown) using the same independent variables to explain government response to news, confirms the lack of DPP influence showing instead a significant effect of left opposition responses on government attention. These results question the ability of DPP to push issues originating in the media on the agenda of the government, suggesting a supplement to previous findings on the agenda-setting strengths of opposition parties (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010, Thesen 2012). Caution is therefore due before concluding that DPP could enjoy the best of both worlds. Variation in DPP response according to ownership and (perceived) policy influence (P4) Table 3 presents the results of two models, both explaining DPP response, estimated to test the fourth proposition of the paper. To recapitulate, issue ownership was expected to strengthen DPP response. However, because owned issues also are those issues for which DPPs policy influence as well as public perception of DPP responsibility - is likely to be strongest, the proposition held that ownership exercises a positive effect only when news do not attribute blame to the government. The reason is that this could soon turn into a DPP disadvantage, attracting attention to the support party s role in policy-making related to news stories on immigration and crime (owned issues). To test this argument, an interaction between issue ownership and policy blame was included (see DPP-II, table 3). Looking first at the main effects model (DPP-I), putting the moderating impact of policy blame proposed in P4 on hold, the issue ownership variable represents the only change from the DPP model of table 2. The results indicate that issue ownership matters and that stories relating to owned issues are significantly more prone to DPP politicization than others. This further supports previous findings suggesting issue ownership as an 9 In fact, the support party role in itself could possibly enhance such a mechanism, simply because the government knows it can rely on DPP to secure its place in office. Therefore, it focuses on the attacks of the left opposition as votes lost in this direction are more likely to shorten its stay in office. 16

18 Controls important contingent variable in political agenda-setting (Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010; Vliegenthart and Walgrave 2011; Thesen 2011). Table 3. Negative binomial regressions, dependent variable: DPP response intensity (no. of parliamentary questions tabled)* DPP - I DPP- II Saliency 0.383*** 0.379*** (0.083) (0.083) Opposition initiation (0.577) (0.575) Government response * * (1.399) (1.388) News tone (pct bad) 0.013** 0.013** (0.004) (0.004) Policy blame (0.453) (0.492) Non-policy blame 1.766* (0.860) (0.865) Issue ownership 1.113*** 1.189*** (0.337) (0.355) P4 Ownership X Policy blame (1.090) Constant *** *** (0.411) (0.410) N 2,161 2,161 Pseudo R square *Standard error reported in parentheses. *** p<0.001, ** p<0.01, * p<0.05, p<0.10. Next, note that the coefficient of the interaction term introduced in model DPP-II (P4, Ownership X Policy blame) is insignificant. However, both the significance and the size of an interaction effect should be examined across the alternatives of the two variables (Brambor et al. 2006) before evaluating the proposition. Consequently, I have estimated the predicted counts (of DPP response) for news stories with and without DPP ownership and policy blame based on model DPP-II. The results are presented in table 4. 17

19 Table 4. Predicted counts of DPP response for news stories with and without ownership and policy blame. Issue ownership with Policy blame without with without Difference * * Significant at p<0.05. The predicted counts in the right hand column show that issue ownership significantly increases DPP response when news do not contain blame attributions to the government. In the context of blame-free news, unowned issues on average prompt.034 DPP parliamentary questions while owned issues are followed up by an average of.111 questions. The difference is significant, unlike the one found between owned and unowned issues when news do contain policy blame (left hand column of predicted counts). In other words, the ownership effect found in the main effects model (DPP-I) hides a variation caused by the presence or lack of policy blame attributions to the government. P4 is thus supported, meaning that issue ownership gives rise to two opposing agendasetting strategies for DPP. On the one hand, like normal opposition parties DPP is able to focus on favourable issues (cf. Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010) and use news attention as a source for efforts to push these issues higher up on the political agenda (cf. Thesen 2012). On the other hand, considerable policy influence on immigration and crime issues, as well as a strong connection between DPP and these issues in public perception, arguably introduces a restriction on DPPs ability to act as a government shaker on par with left opposition parties. Preliminary conclusion The empirical investigation of DPP agenda-setting strategies towards the media agenda provides support for the propositions of the paper. On the one hand then, DPP is often able to fulfil the key role of opposition parties. Apparently eager to shake (if not to break) the government, the support party makes use of many of the agenda-setting advantages that the media offer for opposition parties, such as bad news, non-policy valence events and news on owned issues. 18

20 On the other hand, the investigations above also suggest some limitations to the arguably tempting combination of policy influence and agenda-setting advantages. As argued in P2 and P4, the restrictions on DPP politicization of news seem to be rooted in the policy influence and responsibility gained through their role as a government support party. Policy blame attributions in news are not, unlike for the left opposition, seized by DPP as politicization opportunities. The same cautious agenda-setting strategy is also observed when news on owned issues, for which DPP has achieved a high degree of policy influence and a strong reputation in the public, contain policy blame attributions. Furthermore, the negative relationship between DPP and government response to news suggests that, although the party might try to shake government, it isn t always successful. Thus, there are indications that the role as a support party bears with it some level of trade-off between policy influence and the opportunity to set the political agenda and pursue vote-seeking and competitive agenda-setting strategies. The trade-offs illustrated in this paper are of course likely to vary according to context. For instance, minority governments that more often build different majorities from vote to vote, negotiating legislation with several opposition parties, make for a stronger diffusion of opposition party policy influence. Hence, although the overall effect on the agenda-setting competition between the opposition and government might be similar, the restraints on the individual parties that occasionally part-take in legislative majorities will be reduced. The conditions under which support parties are able and willing to enjoy the best of both worlds is thus still an open question, where variables such as government strength, party positions and political landscapes, traditions and institutions of consensus politics should be taken into account. 19

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23 Table A.1 Examples of good, bad and neutral stories Good Bad Neutral Traffic, fewer speeding offences Fewer people die of cancer Great potential for voluntary mergers of municipalities Great user satisfaction with courtsponsored mediation Wage-earners fear of losing work increase Security problems at Barsebäck (nuclear plant) House prices and inequalities across Denmark Fewer burglaries solved Prohibition against photographing in courts ( defence lawyers applaud, while the press protests ) Upturn to come ( economic rise next year [...] But the treasury will lack 27 billion DKR ) Fewer work-related accidents More traffic accidents Al Qaeda crushed, risk of terror ( Al Qaeda nearly crushed, still Regions get control of recent years rise in expenses Record entrepreneurship among immigrants DSB trains are on time! Negative growth in Denmark Children get too much sugar Agriculture, farms close down as never before the risk of international terror as high as ever ) UN climate conference, Russia ( did not get an answer to the big question: will Russia accept the Kyoto-agreement? ) Table A.2 Examples of policy (substance) blame and non-policy valence blame Substance blame Unemployment, government passive Bill proposal, civil agents, critique Government fails on gender equality National Audits Office critiques Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs Early retirement plan, critique Non-policy valence blame Minister for the Environment accused of giving preferential treatment to friends Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries spoke falsely about number of pigs UN criticizes Danish immigration law Decline in taxation revenue, miscalculations Breach of promise, home care service for the elderly 22