JOP 88/2 pp. 586-600 2026-04-01 Original Do Politicians Listen to Youth Wings? Evidence from an Elite Experiment
Henrik Bech Seeberg
Abstract
Most political parties have youth wings. They are major recruitment and campaign vehicles for parties, but do politicians listen to them when it comes to policy positions? Short of research, I provide a first answer to this question via a large-scale survey experiment of politicians across a range of issues. I show that politicians listen to their youth wings not because of who the youth wings are but because of what they say. The politicians do not adjust because the argument comes from the youth wing but because the youth wing takes a more ideologically pure and, therefore, radical stance than the mother party or refer to their expertise on the issue. These results apply particularly to politicians who applaud the youth wings’ policies in general and politicians who are electorally vulnerable. This has important implications for research on political representation and our understanding of preference aggregation in political parties.
JOP — 2026-03-30
Original Elite Rhetoric and the Running Tally of Party-Group Linkages
Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard, Frederik Hjorth
Abstract
（原文未提供摘要）
中文 精英修辞与政党—群体联系的动态记录
Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard, Frederik Hjorth
APSR — pp. 1-19 2026-03-03 Original Initiate and Elevate! How Political Parties Can Set an Agenda
DANIEL SANDVEJ ERIKSEN
Abstract
The study of political agenda setting is a cornerstone in political science. Within this literature, political parties are implicitly portrayed as being capable of proactively initiating discussions. However, this fundamental notion of party agency deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. In response, this article crafts a new model (the Issue Initiation Model) that opens the window into parties’ efforts to set an agenda and traces how they initiate and elevate their agenda. The model is tested on an original dataset covering more than 5.5-million tweets by political parties and MPs, coupled with over 750,000 news articles and 419,000 parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and Denmark from 2015 to 2022. Results show how parties and their MPs can proactively redirect the attention of other actors through strategic planning and orchestrated actions. By theorizing and empirically testing the implicit notion that parties can proactively initiate discussions, this article has important implications for political agenda setting.