Making and shaking government? External support parties as political agenda-setters

Transcription

1 Making and shaking government? External support parties as political agenda-setters Abstract: External support parties are crucial to minority rule, but their experiences from combining parliamentary opposition and support for minority governments are nevertheless sparsely researched. The paper addresses this gap, exploring whether support party status affects the agenda-setting advantages that the media offer opposition parties. It is argued that support parties, despite enjoying policy influence and close co-operation with the government, share many of the agendasetting strengths that normal opposition parties use. The argument is applied to the Danish People s Party (DPP) who supported a Liberal-Conservative coalition in Denmark ( ). The DPP s responses to a sample of radio news stories, measured through parliamentary questions, are compared to the agenda-setting strategies of normal opposition parties. Results indicate some restraints on the agenda-setting possibilities of support parties, but also find that the DPP politicized news that attracted negative attention to the government s performance. Apparently, the role as a government maker does not preclude regular performances as a government shaker. The combination of policy influence and agenda-setting strengths suggests both a motivation for the support party role, and a mechanism by which support parties could avoid the negative electoral consequences of office. Gunnar Thesen Senior researcher, International Research Institute of Stavanger, Norway & postdoctoral scholar, Department of Political Science and Government Aarhus University, Denmark gt@iris.no mailing address: International Research Institute of Stavanger, P.O. Box 8046, N Stavanger, Norway phone:

2 Introduction Different support party arrangements between minority governments and opposition parties are crucial to the existence and functioning of minority rule (Strøm 1990). Yet, for the most part, our knowledge of parties occupying this hybrid space in parliament-executive relations is still limited (Bale and Bergman 2006a: ; Bale and Dann 2002: ). This applies not least to the patterns of trade-offs, between policy, office and votes, that support parties face. For instance, it is assumed that support party status offers an opportunity to influence policy while still maintaining identity and electoral support (ibid.: 350). In order to empirically examine one of the mechanisms underlying this assumption, this paper asks whether support parties are able to follow vote-seeking and competitive agenda-setting strategies towards the media agenda that could enable them to reap electoral benefits, or whether the policy influence and responsibility attained by support parties limit their latitude in this regards. The question is approached from the perspective of political agenda-setting, studying the news responses of the Danish People s Party (DPP) which from 2001 to 2011 served as parliamentary basis of a Liberal-Conservative minority coalition in Denmark. Along with the DPP s support party position came policy influence. Still, the party remained outside office, facing a combination of the two roles as government maker and government shaker. Regarding the latter, recent studies point to how opposition parties enjoy several agenda-setting strengths in its competition with the government (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010; Seeberg forthcoming; Thesen forthcoming). For instance, a negativity bias in the media 2

3 (Soroka 2012) 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 (Thesen forthcoming). However, this research on party competition and political agenda-setting does not take into account substantial sharing of policy responsibility between government and opposition parties. The aim here is thus to explore how policy responsibility and influence, gained through the role as a support party, affected DPPs capitalization of agendasetting 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? The DPP s agenda-setting strategy while serving as a support party, is in this paper examined by comparing their news responses to those of the left-opposition which during the Lib-Con rule enjoyed significantly less policy influence. In the next section, a short introduction to the opposition s agenda-setting strength and to support parties is used as a basis for two opposing perspectives on the agendasetting costs and benefits associated with support party status. The third section goes on to develop concrete expectations as to when each perspective one predicting a support party bonus, the other predicting a support party trade-off - is likely to be the most fitting description of DPPs situation from 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- 3

4 opposition followed these stories up. Subsequently, results are reported before the final section offers a tentative conclusion. A support party bonus or trade-off? Opposition strengths in political agenda-setting vs the liabilities of policy influence While occupying office, parties have the authority to influence what the state does (and does not do) in order to confront the many problems in society. Along with policy influence comes, of course, responsibility. Thus, government is likely to be blamed for negative issue developments regardless whether it is actually responsible or not. The opposition is often found fronting the row of critics, using the government s policy responsibility as a platform when trying 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). In short, government strengths in law-making are met by opposition strengths in agenda-setting. Green-Pedersen and Mortensen (2010) show how this difference between government and opposition parties affect their latitude and attention. Opposition parties are presented 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 the competition between opposition and government (Thesen forthcoming). While the government prefers to respond to good news 4

5 reflecting positive developments in social problems, opposition parties use bad news to criticize the government and draw attention to its lack of competence. Due to news negativity (Soroka 2012), this pattern is skewed in favour of the opposition. However, the straight-forward distinction between parties in and out of office does not in many multiparty systems correspond perfectly to a distinction between parties with and without policy responsibility and influence (Strøm 1990: 42). Danish politics for instance, is characterised by minority governments and strong opposition influence (Gallagher et al. 2006: ). Thus, while majoritarian democracies tend to throw up support parties only occasionally and only as a last (and often brief) resort (Bale and Dann 2002: 351), multiparty systems dominated by minority governments often face a situation where the executive coalition is in need of external support to build legislative majorities and to secure its place in office. Minority rule, and it s documented viability and effectiveness (Strøm 1990), is in other words made possible by different support arrangements between government and opposition parties. These range from informal understandings to written agreements for full consultations and policy vetos (Powell 1982:143) On the one hand then, we find the strongly institutionalized contract parliamentarism (Bale and Bergman 2006b), where the government has an explicit written contract with one or more parties outside the cabinet and where support parties might even secure positions in the administration (i.e. Sweden and New Zealand (post mid-90s). Strøm s externally supported cabinets (1990: 61-62) are closely related, as they rest on a pre-negotiated (prior to government 5

6 formation), comprehensive and explicit if not necessarily written - support agreement (i.e. Italy, Israel, France, Finland and also sometimes Denmark). On the other hand, we find the more informal arrangements where neither a written nor necessarily an explicit and comprehensive commitment exists, but where a minority cabinet nevertheless receives consistent support from one or more opposition parties 1. Although this wide range of arrangements, and especially the latter category, reflects the difficulties in classifying a party as a support party (cf. Lijphart 1999:104), the population should at least not include opposition parties that intermittently might part-take in legislative coalitions but still remain part of an alternative executive coalition. In other words, a support party is not only concerned about affecting policies but also when push comes to shove forms part of the government s parliamentary basis. Fusing existing knowledge on opposition agenda-setting strengths and support party experiences, two opposing perspectives on trade-offs between policy influence and agenda-setting strategies could be argued. The first, labeled a support party bonus, emphasizes the opportunities of support party status: policy and spending can be influenced but identity and electoral support maintained (Bale and Dann 2002: 350). Staying outside government offers an opportunity to escape the incumbency effect draining government parties of votes (cf. Rose and Mackie 1983; Müller and Strøm 2000; Narud and Valen 2008). Bale and Dann 1 In this relaxed definition, the support party population would certainly increase, including more cases in the already mentioned countries as well as cases from additional systems such as Sweden (pre mid-90s, Norway, Canada, and perhaps even Belgium and Austria (cf. Herman and Pope 1973). 6

7 (2002: 354) illustrate how support parties are clearly aware of this, suggesting that the electoral cost of ruling is relevant to decisions about non-participation. It is therefore a reasonable assumption that support parties will try to make use of their position outside office, pursuing the typical opposition role as a critical adversary of the office-holders. In this bonus 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 voteseeking and competitive strategies in political agenda-setting. The second perspective, labeled a support party trade-off, on the other hand stresses how comprehensive cooperation between support parties and the government, in combination with shared responsibility for a number of policies, constrains support parties, reducing their will and capacity to exploit news negativity. Bale and Bergman (2006a) find that the Greens in both Sweden ( ) and New Zealand ( ) experienced frustrations concerning media representations and strategies while supporting Social Democratic and Labour-led minority cabinets respectively. The support parties, they conclude, were vary of appearing too critical or disruptive for fear it would undermine the reputation for constructive cooperation they were striving to build up (ibid.: 206). Adding to this I would argue that a careful, and thus clearly atypical, opposition strategy towards the media is rooted also in the actual policy influence exercised by support parties. Appearing critical and drawing attention to negative issue developments is simply not an equally attractive option for opposition parties that share policy responsibility, as they could easily end up at the receiving end of the negative 7

8 public attention generated. In other words, the support party role involves a significant trade-off between policy influence and traditional opposition agendasetting strategies that could maximize votes at the cost of the government. Balancing bonus and trade-off: Propositions on the agenda-setting strategies of the DPP The Danish election of 2001 brought the Danish People s Party (DPP) 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 as an external support party of the Liberal-Conservative coalition that replaced the Social- Democratic led government ( ). In the population of support party arrangements, the present case belongs to the more informal end of the continuum. No written or pre-negotiated commitment existed, but the relationship nevertheless exhibited significant stability and durability. During the Lib-Con rule from , following three elections (2001, 2005 and 2007), the DPP was able to negotiate several settlements that satisfied many of its core policy goals (cf. Bale 2003: 82; Christensen 2010: Furthermore, the DPP played the role as a permanent partner of the government in the yearly state budget agreements (Christiansen 2011). 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. Overall then, DPP as a government maker with considerable policy influence should prove an informative starting point for empirical investigations into the 8

9 trade-offs and bonuses faced by support parties. Hoping to provide some insights in this respect, the present paper analyses DPP agenda-setting strategies vis-à-vis the media comparing them with those of the opposition proper. The argument is that which of the two outcomes that could be expected a bonus or a trade-off - depends on the extent to which news highlights policy responsibility. The subsequent discussions thus propose two situations where DPP and the leftopposition are expected to behave similarly (indicating a support party bonus), and one situation where their behavior is expected to differ (indicating a support party trade-off). Finally, I propose within-dpp differences in agenda-setting patterns, related to variations in policy influence and competence image across issues. DPP and left-opposition response to bad news and blame attributions 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. Elmelund-Præstekær 2010). As already mentioned, a recent study points to a similar negativity bias in opposition parties responses to news (Thesen forthcoming). 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. Regarding news negativity, one should note that bad news does not necessarily attribute responsibility for a problem to the government. Governing parties nevertheless often attract negative attention on the basis of their formal responsibility. The DPP on the other hand, sheltered by its 9

10 position outside office, mostly escapes this fate. Bad news then, is in itself not a liability for the DPP as there is little reason to expect that it s potential influence or responsibility will get any attention. Consequently, the party is more likely to 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 support party bonus 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 increase when news of negative developments in social problems increases However, bad news often highlight policy responsibility by featuring explicit attributions of blame to the government. This 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 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 present opportunities to politicize government failure (Thesen 2011). But for a support party, the two types of blame 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 10

11 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 pro-active and critical agenda-setter: (P2) DPP response to news attention will not, unlike left-opposition response, 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. Scandal-like events indicating lack of integrity and competence have been found to depress the vote shares of involved parties (Clark 2009), and also 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 (2009) labels it a nonpolicyrelated aspect of valence. The valence concept (Stokes 1963) 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 11

12 handled. But no party and no voter would disagree that political representatives should be able to deal with these problems in a competent and honest manner, regardless of which political solution is chosen. The strong personal aspects separate what could be labelled non-policy blame attributions from policy (substance) blame. From the perspective of DPP, nonpolicy 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 bonus 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 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 forthcoming). 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 12

13 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 2004). 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 rightwing of Danish politics. Thus, I expect DPP to be more inclined to respond to immigration and crime issues, both because it cares about these issues and because it hopes to increase their electoral support if these issues become salient. 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 equals increased policy influence for issues of crime and immigration. 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 2004). Furthermore, DPP influence is also evident in the legislation of the Lib-Con government. Christiansen and Pedersen (forthcoming: 12-13) show how a substantial share of laws concerning immigration were based on legislative agreement between DPP and the coalition parties and not pre-planned in the Lib- Con coalition agreement. The indication is thus that policy influence on issues of immigration provided pay-off for the DPP s explicit support to the government. 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 13

14 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 co-responsible. 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 agenda-setting opportunities. But when 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 combines a support party bonus and trade-off perspective: (P4) DPP response to news attention increases 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 ( ) was coded. Next, each story was forwardtracked to see whether it made it to the opposition s agenda measured through parliamentary questions - in the following four weeks. The sections below elaborate on the independent and dependent variables applied in the empirical analyses. 14

15 Independent variables The media agenda was measured using 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 and Stubager 2010: 669). The individual news features constituted the coding units. After reading a summary of a feature, variables were assigned values measuring its content in terms of news tone, blame attributions etc (see below). The 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 2 : News saliency was measured as the number of radio news features broadcast about a story. Saliency effects capture the original core agenda-setting idea and are 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. 2 The quality of the coding, for both independent and dependent variables, was checked through inter-coder reliability tests. Results were satisfying, with Krippendorffs Alphas ranging from 0.79 to

16 News tone (good, bad and neutral 3 ) was coded from the point of view of government, directly addressing the role of policy responsibility and the opposition-government competition central to the argument in the paper. The operationalization draws on Baumgartner and Jones (1993: 51) coding of news content: if you were an 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 blame 4 was measured through the presence of government criticism in news features. The word criticize, or its synonyms, need not be present, but the feature 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. Note that the coding separated criticism voiced by the opposition and criticism from actors outside the oppositiongovernment game. Opposition-generated blame was subsequently filtered out and applied as a control variable (Blame from opposition) when modelling opposition response to news (see discussion below). 3 See Appendix Table A.1 for coding examples. 4 See Appendix Table A.2 for coding examples of both policy blame and non-policy blame. 16

17 Non-policy blame was based on Clark s notion of non-policy valence events (2009), aiming to distinguish 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 socalled 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. The Danish election surveys 5, which measure issue ownership on the bloc level (Social Democratic or bourgeois led coalition), show a stable bourgeois advantage on crime and immigration. The survey from 2007, however, also included a most important problem question followed by a question regarding which party the respondent thinks would be best at handling the problem. For problems related to crime and immigration, the results clearly point to the DPP as issue owner. Besides the main explanatory variables presented above, the empirical models include three control variables meant to accommodate the reciprocal nature of the 5 Made available from by The Danish Election Project. 17

18 media politics relationship. The first, Blame from opposition, was introduced above. For the second, labelled Opposition initiation, each story was coded according to whether the opposition played a role in initiating the story. Opposition initiation thus reflects the judgment that a story would not have entered the news agenda (at that specific time) had it not been for the involvement of the opposition. The two first control variables together indicate 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. The third 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 meeting takes place at the Prime Minister s Office right after the weekly ministerial conference. It 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 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. 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. 18

19 The inclusion of the control 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-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 (cf. Baumgartner 1989; Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010). Also, parliamentary questions have been used extensively in agenda-setting studies and this strengthens the reliability of comparisons between the current study and previous research. 19

20 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. Table 1 about here Results Multivariate logistic regression was used to estimate the relationships between independent and dependent variables. 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 ownership and policy influence across issues. DPP vs left-opposition response 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. Table 2 about here 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). 20

21 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 probabilities 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 one-sided good news to one-sided bad news, quadruples the likelihood that the DPP will table a parliamentary question related to a news story (from.012 to.048). The effect is comparable to that of news tone on left-opposition response, indicating 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. Looking at the results on policy blame (P2) however, left-opposition and DPP agenda-setting 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. 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 21

22 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. Predicted probabilities of party responses suggest a DPP response for 2.8 pct of the stories without criticism related to government integrity or competence. But when stories involve non-policy blame, such as ministers caught lying or serious incompetence/malpractice in policy-implementation, a parliamentary question could be expected in 7 pct of the cases. Although the size of the effect is larger for the left-opposition, the results thus deliver support for P2. In other words these stories present occasions where DPP response is often risk-free, implying limited trade-off between support party influence and a vote-seeking and competitive strategy in political agenda-setting. A last noteworthy result is that government attention (as measured through government response to the stories) does not affect DPP responses to news. A supplementary model (not shown) using the same independent variables to explain government response to news, confirms the lack of a significant relationship between the DPP s and the government s attention to stories in the media. In light of the positive relationship between left-opposition and government responses, 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 22

23 P3), neither seem preoccupied with 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 the centre of the opposition-government game. Furthermore, this finding questions the ability of the DPP to push media issues on the political agenda from its position as a support party, suggesting a supplement to previous findings on the agenda-setting strengths of opposition parties (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010, Thesen forthcoming). Variation in DPP response according to ownership and (perceived) policy influence 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). 23

24 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 important contingent variable in political agenda-setting (Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010; Vliegenthart and Walgrave 2011; Thesen 2011). Table 3 about here 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 probability (of DPP response) for news stories with and without DPP ownership and policy blame based on model DPP-II. The results are presented in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 about here The two bars on the left hand show that issue ownership significantly increases the probability that the DPP responds when news do not contain blame attributions to the government. In the context of blame-free news, unowned issues prompt a parliamentary question in 2.5 pct of the cases while owned issues on average are met by a DPP reaction 4.7 pct of the time. The difference is significant, unlike the 24

25 one found between owned and unowned issues when news do contain policy blame (the two right hand bars of predicted probabilities). 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 agenda-setting 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 forthcoming). 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. Can government makers be government shakers? Concluding remarks In the present paper I have tried to illustrate how sharing of policy responsibility between government and opposition parties sometimes present attractive win-win situations for support parties, while at other times the cost of ruling seems to rub off on the governments external supporters. 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 opposition parties, such as bad news, non-policy 25

26 valence events and news on owned issues. Support party status does in other words open for a specific bonus, allowing for agenda-setting strategies that could shake government and secure electoral gains despite substantial policy influence and co-responsibility. 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. Overall, I nevertheless would like to emphasize the bonus aspects. Several factors could possibly have pulled the agenda-setting strategies of the DPP and the leftopposition in different directions. Most notably, the latter parties aimed at, and eventually succeeded in (2011), forming an alternative coalition without any of the governing parties, while the DPP supported the Lib-Con coalition and arguably 26

27 nurtured hopes to share office with it in the future. Despite this, the analyses find similarities in how the two blocs of opposition use negativity and scandal as a basis of news politicization. The opposition role as a government shaker is indeed hard to surrender, and apparently a tool for support parties wanting to demonstrate their identity as well as their lack of responsibility when things go wrong. 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. At the other extreme of the support arrangement continuum, contract parliamentarism (Bale and Bergman 2006b) arguably introduces a more binding commitment where an openly critical and opportunistic agenda-setting strategy would appear at odds with the explicit and comprehensive agreement between government and support party. Furthermore, future research should also assess whether the structure of party competition influences support party behaviour. Denmark falls into the category of bipolar or two-bloc multiparty-systems (cf. Bale 2003; Green- Pedersen and Thomsen 2005), in which smaller parties at the wing (or extreme) rarely will withdraw their support for mainstream parties within their own bloc effectively helping the opposing bloc into office. However, both centre-right and 27

28 social democratic led minority cabinets in Denmark have previously relied heavily on the support of centrally situated opposition parties, most often the Social Liberals. Given that such support parties, in a longer perspective, could choose between supporting (and joining) cabinets of different colours, they clearly face another opportunity structure. For DPP, enjoying the support party bonus involves a risk of shrinking and alienating their only prospective coalition partners. For the Social Liberals, and other centrally situated support parties in more open structures of party competition, a critical and vote-seeking agenda-setting strategy need not undermine future policy influence and office aspirations but instead lead towards a shift from one bloc to another. The conditions under which support parties are able and willing to enjoy a bonus is thus still an open question, where variables such as government strength, support party size, party positions and political landscapes, traditions and institutions of consensus politics should be taken into account. Finally, from a broader perspective on the viability of minority rule (Strøm 1990), a key question is how the trade-off and bonuses studied here translates onto the electoral arena. While a lot of factors could potentially explain the electoral rise prompting DPP into the mainstream of Danish politics (cf. Rydgren 2004), their continued success during the Lib-Con rule are at least suggestive of a support party premium. DPP was able to sustain their support from 2001 to 2011 (12.0 and 12.3 pct), whereas the vote share of the Liberal Conservative coalition gradually shrunk (from 40.3 pct to 31.6 pct). DPP thus seemingly managed to exercise policy influence while keeping their identity and electoral support. Of course, the extent 28

29 to which this can be attributed to their support party status and the agenda-setting bonus is unknown. However, the results at least point to important avenues of future comparative research. The relative success of minority governments (vs majority governments) at the polls, a feature normally attributed to the diffusion of policy responsibility, has been repeatedly documented (cf. Rose and Mackie 1983; Strøm 1990; Narud and Valen 2008). Yet there are no systematic efforts to examine the performance of external support parties. In theory, they should experience some of the electoral strains that minority governments are spared from, seeing that support parties are endowed with the policy influence and responsibility difference that separates majority from minority cabinets. The case of DPP suggests otherwise, highlighting the need to learn more about the electoral consequences of support party status. By implication then, important aspects related to both the causes and consequences of minority rule still remain underexposed. 29

30 References Andersen, J. G The Danish People s Party and new cleavages in Danish politics, working paper, Centre for comparative welfare studies, Aalborg University. Baldwin, N. D. J Concluding observations: Legislative weakness, scrutinising strength?, Journal of Legislative Studies 10, Bale, T Cinderella and her ugly sisters: the mainstream and extreme right in Europe's bipolarising party systems, West European Politics 26, Bale, T. & Bergman, T. 2006a. A Taste of Honey is Worse Than None at All? Coping with the Generic Challenges of Support Party Status in Sweden and New Zealand, Party Politics 12, Bale, T. & Bergman, T. 2006b. Captives No Longer, but Servants Still? Contract Parliamentarism and the New Minority Governance in Sweden and New Zealand, Government and Opposition 41, Bale, T. & Dann, C Is the Grass Really Greener? The Rationale and Reality of Support Party Status: A New Zealand Case Study, Party Politics 8, Baumgartner, F. R Conflict and rhetoric in French policymaking. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Baumgartner, F. R. & Jones, B. D Agendas and instability in American politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 30