## Exploring party-issue linkages as an indicator of issue ownership in election news coverage

A study of two Danish national elections

## MARK BLACH-ØRSTEN

Roskilde University

## MADS KÆMSGAARD EBERHOLST

Roskilde University

## Abstract

Research  on  issue  ownership  has  placed  political  parties  at  the centre of studies. Recent research argues that this focus should be expanded.  First, researchers  have  found  that  the  salience  of different political issues is affected by events exogenous to political parties,  such  as  real-world  events  and  societal  trends.  Second, researchers have pointed to the news media as an additional arena for  issue  ownership  competition  and  maintenance,  making  the concept of party-issue linkages in election coverage an additional topic  of  study.  This  article  contributes  to  election  research  by exploring party-issue linkage as an indicator of issue ownership for both political parties and political leaders in the two most recent national Danish elections. Both elections were affected by societal trends and real-world events. Based on large-scale content analysis and  using  descriptive  statistics,  we  find  a  clear  shift  in  media saliences  from  2019  to  2022.  We  also  find  changes  in  party-issue linkage  for  both  political  parties  and  specific  political  leaders, especially regarding the most salient issues of the elections.

## KEYWORDS

elections, issue salience, issue competition, news media, agenda setting

## Introduction

Despite the continued focus on the professionalisation of political campaigns (Mykkänen et al., 2022) and so-called designer politics (Scammell,  2016),  recent  research  suggests  that  controlling  the issues  that  dominate  the  agenda  is,  in  many  ways,  beyond  the control  of  politicians  and  political  parties  (Gilardi  et  al.,  2022). Factors external to national politics, such as global societal trends or real-world  events,  can  upset  even  the  most  carefully  planned political  campaign  (Dennison,  2019).  In  their  study  of  changing issue salience in 28 European countries, Dennison and Kriesi (2023, p. 497) concluded that 'electoral outcomes partially reflect societal trends  and  events  over  which  parties  have  only  limited  control'. Indeed, outside events and crises have played leading roles in recent Danish  national  elections.  In  the  2011  election,  the  ongoing international  economic  crisis,  beginning  in  2008,  influenced  the election  agenda  (Kosiara-Pedersen,  2012;  Stubager  et  al.,  2013), while  in  the  2015  summer  election,  the  issue  of  refugees  and migration rose in importance (Kosiara-Pedersen, 2016) on the back of the escalating European refugee crisis that began in the spring of that year. Later analysis even named the refugee/migration issue a game changer in the campaign (Hansen & Stubager, 2017). Finally, in 2019, it was the ongoing international climate crisis that pushed the  issue  of  climate  and  the  environment  to  become  one  of  the defining issues of the campaign (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2020; KosiaraPedersen, 2020; Hansen & Stubager, 2021). The most recent national election, which took place in 2022, added more external events and crises to the political agenda, most notably, the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Blach-Ørsten & Eberholst, 2023; Hansen & Stubager, 2024).

In  this  article,  we  focus  on  the  media  saliences  of  different political issues, as well as on party-issue linkages and party-leader linkage in the news media, as indicators of both issue ownership and issue  competition.  We  investigate  the  shifts  in  the  2022  election compared to the 2019 election, both of which occurred in volatile times. Since legacy news  media  still dominate  the political information landscape in Denmark (Blach-Ørsten & Mayerhöffer, 2021), we understand issue salience as 'media salience', that is, the amount of attention news media gives to specific issues (Moniz & Wlezien, 2020). Regarding issue ownership and issue competition, we build on recent studies that argue that political parties compete in the news media regarding engaging in popular issues, causing socalled issue overlap, and even try to 'steal' issues from one another (Schwarzbözl et al., 2020; Merz, 2016; Green-Pedersen & Mortensen, 2015; Spoon et al., 2014). This is especially the case in multi-party systems  such  as  Denmark,  where  many  parties  challenge  each other's ownership of the popular issues (Aalberg & Jenssen, 2007).

Based on large-scale content analysis of news outlets (N = 1411) and four weeks of election coverage (news items) from both 2019 (N = 54,090) and 2022 (N = 48,623), this article contributes to election studies in several ways. First, while election studies often only focus on  a  single  election,  this  article  compares  the  two  most  recent consecutive  elections.  Second,  the  article  does  not  focus  on  the relationship between the party agenda and media agenda as is often the case. Instead, the focus is on the media saliences of different issues and the party-issue linkage (Schwarzbözl et al., 2020; Merz, 2016)  across  two  elections.  This  focus  allows  us  to  investigate changes in both issue salience and the news media's party-issue linkage which in theory indicate changes in issue ownership and issue competition for both parties and party leaders.

## Agenda setting, media salience and issue ownership

While international studies often debate the decreasing power of legacy news media to set the political agenda (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008),  studies  with  a  focus  on  the  Nordic  countries  find  little evidence  to  suggest  that  legacy  news  media  have  become  less important as agenda-setters (Djerf-Pierre & Shehata, 2017; Johansson & Strömbäck, 2019). Larger studies of news use in the same countries also show that legacy news media still dominate as information sources, even though younger news users also favour using social media (e.g., Schrøder, Blach-Ørsten & Eberholst, 2023). Studies focusing on political knowledge in the modern high-choice media environment also find that using traditional or online news media correlates better with political knowledge than consuming a diet of social media (Castro et al., 2022). Finally, studies of hybrid media election campaigns in Denmark find that while it has become the  new  normal  for  many  politicians  to  be  active  on  X  (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, few are very active and manage to capture many  followers  and  much  attention  (Jensen  &  Schwartz,  2020). Summing up studies on the general relationship between politics and the  mass  media,  Van  Aelst  and  Walgrave  (2016)  confirm  the influence of news media on politics. However, they also highlight that this influence is contingent on the specific issue at stake in the media coverage and whether political parties feel ownership of the issues at stake as well as whether the parties are in government or opposition. In other words, it matters which issues the news media focus on and which political parties feel ownership of these issues. The  prominence  of  political  issues  is  typically  addressed  as  a question of salience. Moniz and Wlezien (2020) distinguish between the personal salience of an issue, which is the degree to which an individual engages with that issue, and the prominence or visibility of  issues  in  the  news  media or on the agenda of political parties, which  they  name media or political salience.  Since  this  article focuses on the news media, we use the term 'media salience' in the rest of the text.

Issue ownership, on the other hand, refers to the fact that political parties, in the minds of voters, are associated with specific issues and thus considered to be more competent to deal with these issues than  other  parties  (Petrocik,  1996;  Green-Pedersen  &  Mortensen, 2015). Issue ownership  can  be  explored  from  at  least three perspectives: first, as related to party communications and the party agenda; second, as related to voters' considerations of which party is  more  competent  to  handle  a  given  issue,  also  labelled  the associative  dimension  of  issue  ownership  (Walgrave,  Lefevere  & Tresch, 2012); and third, as related to issue salience in the media coverage  (Walgrave  &  De  Swert,  2007;  Merz,  2016;  Tresch  & Feddersen, 2019), a line of inquiry also labelled wave-riding theory (Ansolabehere  &  Iyengar,  1994;  Dennison  &  Kriesi,  2023).  This article's focus is on issue salience in the news media, which is linked to  the  notion  of  news  media  coverage  as  an  indicator  of  issue ownership, a relationship described by Merz (2016) as party-issue linkage. Walgrave et al. (2009, p. 157) state that '(…) appearing in the media to talk about an issue is one way parties use to claim and maintain issues (…)', and Merz (2016, p. 437) similarly observes that 'party-issue linkages in media coverage are one of the main sources of issue ownership'.

Originally, issue ownership was conceived of as stable and based on  political  parties'  historical  origins,  which  are  related  to  social class. Recent research debates whether this largely remains the case or  whether  issue  ownership  should  be  conceptualised  as  more dynamic and evolving over time (Walgrave et al.; 2009; Spoon et al., 2014;  Seeberg,  2017).  An  argument  supporting  the  latter  position suggests  that  issue  ownership  is  more  dynamic  and  evolving  in multi-party systems such as those of the Nordic countries, where many parties compete for the ownership of popular issues (Aalberg &  Jenssen,  2007).  Regarding  issue  competition  in  multi-party systems,  Green-Pedersen  and  Mortensen  (2015)  state  that  issue competition  may  play  different  roles  for  diverse  types  of  parties. Investigating the party agenda in a Danish context, they argue that mainstream parties need to maintain support from many voters and may thus need to be more flexible regarding issue competition and the changing saliences of different issues. Niche parties, which focus on a small number of particular issues related to their identities, are thus likely to be unaffected by issue competition from election to election.  Thus,  a  'green  party'  will  always  focus  on  climate  and environmental  issues  even  if  other  parties  shift  their  agendas (Green-Pedersen  &  Mortensen,  2015).  In  sum,  the  more  parties there  are,  the  more  party  competition  there  is,  and  the  more dynamic the battle for issue ownership.

Indeed, recent studies show that political parties and politicians compete for ownership of different issues in the news media, but that competition is particularly intense for ownership of the most media-salient issues (Gilardi et al., 2022). Merz (2016) highlights the significance of media salience, as he observes that parties emphasise  different  issues  from  election  to  election  to  'ride  the wave of public opinion', that is, to emphasise in their communications those issues that have high media salience (Merz, 2016, p. 441; Dennison & Kriesi, 2023, p. 486). Indeed, wave-riding theory argues that candidates will address the issues that voters find most important with both media salience and voter surveys being used as measures of importance (Burdina, 2014; Dennison & Kriesi, 2023). In other words, parties do not just focus on the issues they own.  If  other  issues  become  more  salient  in  the  news  media  or public opinion surveys, they seek to own these other issues as well. Hence, if an issue originally  owned  by  one  party  becomes increasingly salient in the news media, it will become interesting or necessary  for  other  parties,  especially  mainstream  parties,  to compete for ownership of it. A case in point in Denmark is the issue of refugees and migration, which was originally owned by the rightwing Danish People's Party but for which many parties, including the Social Democrats, have since competed for ownership (GreenPedersen, 2006; Meret, 2021). Adding to this dynamic is the fact that issue salience is often determined by factors beyond the control of political  parties  (Gilardi  et  al.,  2021),  especially  in  volatile  times when outside events affect the agenda. The focus of this article is exclusively on the media agenda. The aim is to investigate, using descriptive  statistics,  changes  in  the  media  saliences  of  different political issues from one election as well as changes to party-issue linkage and party-leader issue linkage.

## Background to the 2019 and 2022 election campaigns

The  political  system  in  Denmark  is  a  parliamentary  democracy. Elections  to  the  Danish  Parliament  are  based  on  proportional representation and held at least every four years, but it is within the power of the prime minister to call elections sooner if they so wish (Kristensen & Blach-Ørsten, 2020). The lack of fixed election dates makes the Danish system stand out in a Nordic context, and this fact is often mentioned to explain, at least in part, the constant attention to opinion polls in Danish media and the political parties' constant focus on being in permanent campaign mode (Kristensen & BlachØrsten, 2015). Denmark practises negative parliamentarianism: the government does not need to have a majority in the parliament, but there must not be a majority against it either. Historically, Danish governments have often been minority governments (Kristensen & Blach-Ørsten, 2020). Another characteristic of the Danish political system is that it is truly a multi-party system, with a high number of political parties, a development that stems from both established parties splitting into new ones (Binderkrantz & Carlsen, 2002) and new parties being added to the mix (Kosiara-Pedersen, 2020, 2023).

The Danish media system can be labelled a 'Nordic media welfare state' (Syvertsen et al., 2014), and as a media system, it falls under Hallin and Mancini's (2004) grouping of a 'democratic corporatist model'. Media use in Denmark still favours public service radio and television as well as the online news sites of the major broadsheet and tabloid newspapers (Schrøder, Blach-Ørsten & Eberholst, 2023). These characteristics jointly make Denmark an interesting case of study. With 14 parties running in the 2022 election and 13 in 2019, Denmark had more parties seeking election than both Sweden 1 and Norway 2 in  their  most  recent  elections.  The  number  of  political parties  makes  Denmark  a  special  case  for  the  study  of  issue competition  since  many  of  the  parties  will  have  to  compete  for ownership of the same issues. In  this  article,  we  focus  on  the  11 parties that stood for election in both the 2019 and 2022 national Danish elections, as some of the parties running in 2019 did not run in 2022, and 2022 also saw the creation of three new parties. The parties running in both 2019 and 2022 were the Social Democrats, the Liberal Party, the Danish People's Party, the Conservatives, the Christian Democrats, the New Right, the Alternative, the Red-Green Alliance, the Social Liberal Party, the Liberal Alliance, and the Green Left/Socialist People's Party (Kosiara-Pedersen, 2020, 2023). Traditionally,  the  Social  Democrats,  the  Liberal  Party,  and  the Conservatives have been the large mainstream political parties in Denmark,  with  the  niche  parties  the  Alternative,  the  Red-Green Alliance, and the Green Left/Socialist People's Party making up the opposition  to  the  left  and  the  niche  parties  the  New  Right,  the Liberal  Alliance,  and  the  Danish  People's  Party  making  up  the opposition to the right.

For the sake of simplicity, Danish politics is usually divided into two blocs (Green-Pedersen, 2020), known as the 'red bloc' and 'blue bloc'. The Social Democrats and opposition to the left make up the 'red bloc' with the Social Liberal Party sometimes joining this bloc and  sometimes  not.  The  Conservatives  and  the  Liberal  Party together with the opposition to the right make up the 'blue bloc' with  the  Social  Liberal  Party  sometimes  joining  this  bloc  and sometimes  not  (Green-Pedersen  &  Kosiara-Pedersen,  2020).  The sorting  of  Danish  politics  into  two  blocs  is  consistent  with  an analysis of voter behaviour, suggesting that just eight percent of the voters shift between blocs in national elections. It is also a common metaphor used by journalists, commentators, and politicians alike (Thomsen & Thomsen, 2023).

In 2019, the national election was  a  race  between  Mette Frederiksen (the Social Democrats and the red bloc) and Lars Løkke Rasmussen (the Liberal Party and the blue bloc). However, in 2022, three  candidates  ran  for  the  position  of  prime  minister:  Mette Frederiksen  (the  Social  Democrats),  Jakob  Elleman-Jensen  (the Liberal  Party),  and  Søren  Pape  Poulsen  (the  Conservatives).  The 2019 and 2022 election campaigns both ran for four weeks and are thus considered 'long' in Danish election campaign history 3 .  The 2019 election  also  overlapped,  although  not  completely,  with  the 2019 European Parliament (EP) election. This affected both elections, with the EU being a focus in the national election and the issues of both climate and the environment as well as refugees and migration  being issues in  both  election  campaigns  (KosiaraPedersen, 2020; Blach-Ørsten et al., 2020).

## Research questions

Politicians  compete for ownership of different issues in the news media,  but  they  especially  compete  for  ownership  of  the  most salient  issues.  The  association  of  parties  with  different  issues  in news  media  coverage  is  called  party-issue  linkage.  Party-issue linkage  is  a  central  source  of  issue  ownership  and  thus  a  central component  of  issue  competition  and  can  occur  when  a  party  is mentioned in connection with an issue or when a party politician is quoted in connection with an issue. Merz (2016, p. 438) states that 'a party-issue linkage can be a quote from a party's politician or a whole interview in regard to a specific issue, or the mentioning of a party's issue position, or any other coverage that ties a party to an issue'. An important caveat to this approach is the fact the news media do not give equal access to all parties or party leaders or place the  same  focus  on  all  issues  (Merz,  2016).  Previous  studies  have shown the media to both favour the top candidates (Blach-Ørsten et al.,  2020)  and  the  sitting  government,  the  so-called  incumbency bonus (Hopmann, De Vreese & Albæk, 2011).

Based on the above, we ask the following three research questions (RQs).

RQ1: Related to the question of media salience, we ask how the media salience of different political issues can be compared in the 2022 and 2019 elections.

RQ2:  Related  to  the  issue  of  party-issue  linkage,  we  ask  first, regarding parties, how party -issue linkage in the media in 2022 can be compared to that in the 2019 election ; and second

RQ3: Related to the issue of party-issue linkage with a focus on individual politicians, how party leader-issue linkages in the media in 2022 can be compared to those in 2019.

## Methodology

In this article, we investigate the differences between the 2022 and 2019 national elections using large-scale content analysis of Danish election coverage. We use the Infomedia database for our study. We sample 1411 outlets and a collection of nine political issues, each of which  is  made  up  of  search  strings  that  were  developed  in  an iterative  process  together  with  Infomedia  for  previous  studies (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2020). In total, our automated content analysis consists of four weeks of media election coverage (news items) in both 2019 (N = 54,090) and 2022 (N = 48,623). Our sample includes 1411  content  providers  that  make  one  or  more  mentions  of  the national elections. Our media sample mirrors the digitalised highchoice media environment that characterises today's Danish media system. The 1411 outlets thus include a broad number of online and offline media ranging from legacy news media, magazines, and local news media to online news sites as well as public service television and radio, specialised news sites, special interest organisations, and other relevant homepages. This inclusive approach helps to ensure that the sample include interviews and statements politicians have given to media other than mainstream news outlets.

The study in this article presents unique, historical comparative data on the two elections. We were precluded from accessing larger and smaller news media owned by Berlingske news media, as they do not allow access beyond a three-year period. Consequently, our historical study does not include Berlingske (one of the three leading national newspapers) or B.T. (one of the two leading tabloids). Our historical focus also affects the number of political parties included in the analysis: as we focus on the 11 political parties that stood for election in both 2019 and 2022, we exclude, for the 2019 election, the Klaus Riskær Pedersen Party and the Hard Line Party and, for the 2022 election, the Danish Democrats, the Independent Greens, and the Moderates  (the  last of  which  became  one  of  the  three government parties following the election).

Our  analysis  focuses  on  nine  political  issues  that  have  been selected based on previous studies of the political, public, and news media agendas in Denmark (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2020):

- Health and elder care , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, hospitals, hospital reforms, health personnel, care for the elderly, chronic disease, and local and regional health and elder care.
- Climate and the environment , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, global warming, CO2, the circular economy, the green transition, pollution, climate policy, and climate quotas.
- Schools and daycare , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, schools, kindergartens, and childcare.
- Finance and the economy , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, the national budget, GNP, national economics, finance, and tax.
- The European Union (EU) , which includes a focus, on amongst other things, European politics and institutions.
- Defence , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, defence politics, defence budgets, the military, and the navy.
- Refugees and migration , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, migration, migration policies, migration status, and immigration law.
- Pensions , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, retirement, early retirement, pension, and pension systems.
- Culture, sport, and leisure , which includes a focus on, amongst other things, free time, sports, theatre, culture, and children's theatre.

An  automated  content  analysis  was  run  through  the  Infomedia database  in  a  specialised  dashboard  that,  through  proprietary search strings, was set up to identify political parties, party leaders, and  the  selected  issues.  It  distinguishes  between  mentions  and quotes. A mention refers to the proximity between words, such as a party, a politician, and an issue, while quotes are direct quotes in the text  made by a named politician. Each issue was identified using search strings that were developed by the authors and Infomedia in an iterative process beginning with the 2019 election. The search for issues was run on headlines as well as text, including transcribed audio, and for a news item to be included in the analysis, a search word connected to one of the nine issues had to be mentioned in the headings or at least four times elsewhere in the news item. As the search  strings  are  proprietary,  they  cannot  be  published  widely;

however, they were all built up using several keywords that define and exclude content. An example of a search string is included as Appendix  A.  Researchers  can  contact  the  authors  for  further information on search strings and the sample. One news item can contain references to several issues, mentions, and quotes.

Different  issues  within  issue  ownership  have  historically  been linked to different political blocs and parties (Damsbo-Svendsen & Seeberg, 2024). Thus, looking at the study's nine issues from a bloc perspective, those of health and eldercare, climate and the environment,  schools  and  daycare,  pensions,  and  culture,  sport, and leisure have traditionally been focused on by the red bloc, while defence,  finance  and  the  economy,  the  EU,  and  refugees  and migration  have  traditionally  been  focused  on  by  the  blue  bloc. However,  in  recent  elections,  issue  competition  has  increased around  several  of  the  issues.  Although  the  issue  of  health  and eldercare has traditionally been linked to the red bloc and the Social Democrats, the blue bloc has challenged this ownership since the 2000s; in the same period, the Social Democrats have challenged the blue  bloc's  ownership  of  the  issue  of  refugees  and  migration (Damsbo-Svendsen  &  Seeberg,  2024).  The  climate  issue  has  also been challenged by the blue bloc, especially immediately after the 2019  'climate'  election.  A  survey  of  voters'  understanding  of  the issue ownership of the top issues in the 2022 election placed the red bloc  as  owner  of  health,  climate,  and  schools  and  daycare  while giving the blue bloc a slightly dominant ownership of issues such as finance and defence At the same time, voters seemed to believe that both  blocs  would  be  competent  at  handling  concerns  about refugees and migration (Damsbo-Svendsen & Seeberg, 2024).

Other studies of the public or political agendas have focused on more or different issues than those we have included here in our study of the news media agenda. Thus, surveys of the public agenda in the 2019 national election included 16 different political issues (Holstein, 2019), while Green-Pedersen's (2006) study of long-term change  in  Danish  party  politics  was  based  on  the  creation  of  24 issues to analyse the political agenda from 1953 to 2003. Our list of issues does not include a separate focus on law and order. However, many law  and  order-related  issues  in  Denmark  have  focused  on refugees and migration, and we have included search words with a focus on immigration law and other laws relevant to this question.

The overall capacity of the news media agenda to manage issues has been frequently questioned in relation to issue competition. If more  issues  become  relevant,  how  will  the  agenda  of  the  news media  adapt?  Here,  the  answers  seem  to  be  that  there  is  some capacity  to  expand  the  agenda,  (McCombs  &  Zhu,  1995;  Edy  & Meirick,  2018).  Previous  studies  of  the  news  media  agenda  in Denmark (Blach-Ørsten & Willig, 2016) suggest that of the ten top stories, only around half resonate with the audience. This finding suggests that while the news media agenda may, in theory, have a huge issue capacity, the audience's attention span does not. In sum, our  nine  political  issues  seek  to  represent  an  updated  list  of  the relevant  issues  of  our  time  while  at  the  same  time  taking  into consideration the more limited agenda of the news audience.

## Analysis

Previous studies and reports have looked at the 2019 (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2020; Kosiara-Pedersen, 2020; Stubager & Hansen, 2021) and 2022 national elections (Blach-Ørsten & Eberholst, 2023; KosiaraPedersen, 2023; Hansen & Stubager, 2024) and addressed the most prominent political issues and, in some cases, their media saliences. However,  no  study  has  compared  party-issue  and  party-leader issue linkage in news media across the two elections as we do here. In the 2019 national election, which ran almost concurrently with the 2019 EP elections, the issues of the EU as well as climate and the environment took first  and  second  place  in  media  salience,  with 27% and 21% of the media coverage, respectively. These issues were followed closely by those of schools and daycare (17%) and refugees and migration and health and elder care (both 11%). In 2022, the top five  issues  were  health  and  elder  care  (27%),  climate  and  the environment (25%), schools and daycare (13%), defence (10%), and finance and the economy (7%).

The  salience  of  specific  issues  is  often  determined  by  events outside the control of political parties. The 2022 election campaign, for  example,  was  particularly  affected  by  the  Russian  invasion  of Ukraine, which put issues such as finance and the economy and defence on the public agenda in new ways (Schjørring, 2022). At the same time, an escalating crisis in the Danish public health sector, including  a  mass  shooting  by  an  untreated  psychiatric  patient, pushed the issue of health and elder care to the top of the voters' agenda (Schjørring, 2022). The Danish news media also broke two major scandals during the election, one regarding Danish defence and the other regarding elder care. Both stories had clear impacts on  the  media  and  political  agenda  in  the  days  following  their publication in terms of reach, as both were covered extensively in the news media, and of demand for political action, as politicians were  forced  to  address  both  the  scandals  and  solutions  to  them (Blach-Ørsten & Eberholst, 2023).

As shown by RQ1 and depicted in Figure 1, we have focused on the differences in the media saliences of the political issues in the two elections. Figure 1 shows these differences, most of which seem clearly related to the circumstances surrounding the two elections. Thus, in 2022, three issues gained in media salience compared to 2019:  health  and  elder  care,  climate  and  the  environment,  and defence. Leading the change is a 16% increase in media salience for the issue of health and elder care in 2022. At the same time, issues that  were  popular  in  2019,  such  as  the  EU  and  refugees  and migration, fell considerably in 2022. This trend is easily explained regarding the EU, as there was no concurrent EP election in 2022. However,  the  decline  in  the  issue  of  refugees  and  migration indicates a policy change in Denmark, as this issue has played an increasingly decisive role in Danish politics since the 1990s (Green -Pedersen  &  Krogstrup,  2008;  Dambo-Svendsen  &  Seeberg,  2024). The continued attention to the issue of climate and the environment is also important. Historically, the salience of this issue has varied greatly.  It  entered  the  agenda  in  the  1960s  but  never  figured permanently  among  the  top  issues  (Blach-Ørsten  et  al.,  2020); however, this changed in 2019 and seems to be changing still, as the issue  gained  four  percent  in  media  salience  in  2022  despite competition from outside events and a focus on health and elder care topping the media agenda.

Figure 1: Differences in Media Issue Salience 2019/2022.

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Note:  Media  issue  salience  shifts  in  the  2019/2022  elections.  Positive  values indicate that the issue is more salient in 2022 than in 2019. Based on 58,052 news articles from Danish news media: 33,324 in 2019 and 24,818 in 2022.

The  overall  capacity  of  the  media  agenda  to  manage  an  infinite number of political issues is frequently questioned in relation to the study of issue competition (McCombs & Zhu, 1995; Edy & Meirick,

2018). While international research seems to suggest that there is capacity  to  expand  the  agenda,  Figure  1  indicates  that  as  more attention is given to some issues, less attention is given to others. Indeed, three issues (refugees and migration, the EU, and schools and  daycare)  received  much  less  attention  in  2022  than  in  2019, while three others (defence, health and elder care, and climate and the environment) received more attention. It is also notable that the overall  number  of  news  articles  decreased  from  2019  to  2022, indicating that the agenda did not expand. Two issues (finance and culture and sport and leisure) increased by one percent in 2022, but that  is  too  small  a  change  to  be  considered  a  difference.  Rather, these topics, along with the issue of pensions, seem to be stable, most  likely  because  there  was  no  change  in  the  related  issue competition.

Turning to RQ2, the party-issue linkage in news media coverage is  central  to  our  understanding  of  issue  ownership  and  issue competition (Merz, 2016). Looking at Figure 2 and the question of the differences in party-issue linkage in the 2022 and 2019 elections, we find a clear shift in the numbers of mentions in the news media coverage of some of the issues to which each party is linked. We also find a good deal of issue overlap, where parties were linked to the same issue in 2022, especially regarding the top issue of health and elder care. This issue was increasingly linked to all the parties in the media coverage, both niche and mainstream. At the same time, the niche and mainstream parties to the centre right (blue bloc), such as the  Liberal  Party,  the  Liberal  Alliance,  and  the  Danish  People's Party,  were  being  more  linked  to  the  issue  of  climate  and  the environment than in the 2019 election. This indicates that not only were almost all the parties linked to the top issue of health and elder care, but the parties in the blue bloc were also increasingly linked to the originally 'red-bloc' issue of climate and the environment - an issue to which they were not similarly linked in the 2019 election. These changes may be associated with the news media's focus on the issue of climate and the environment. However, they might also be  because  the  political  parties  in  the  blue  bloc  more  actively focused on this issue in their 2022 election campaign. Indeed, rightwing parties, such as the Danish People's Party, have tried to include a more frequent focus on climate, acknowledging that the lack of this focus was one of the reasons that they did not do well in the 2019 election (Redder, 2019).

At the same time, both the niche and mainstream parties on the centre  left  (red  bloc),  such  as  the  Social  Democrats,  the  Social Liberal  Party,  the  Green  Left,  and  the  Red-Green  Alliance,  are  all increasingly linked to the defence issue in the news media coverage. This is, of course, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the massive political and media focus that followed it. However, being linked to the issue of defence, which is traditionally associated with right-wing parties and  the blue bloc,  has  not  been  without challenges,  especially  for  the  Red-Green  Alliance.  The  party  has argued  that  Denmark  should  leave  NATO  and  the  military  be defunded;  however,  during  the  campaign,  it  had  to  take  a  more positive view of the military due to the invasion of Ukraine, which did not go over well with all the party's voters (Kjeldsen & Ricther, 2022). From a bloc perspective, this also indicates that both blocs were  affected  by  the  changes  in  issue  salience  and  party-issue linkage: the blue bloc was more often linked to the issue of climate and the environment, an issue traditionally owned by the red bloc, while the red bloc has more often been linked to the issue of the defence, an issue traditionally owned by the blue bloc.

Figure 2: Party-Issue Linkage, Issue Ownership, and Issue Competition (Mentions), Differences 2019/2022.

<!-- image -->

Note: Based on 109,436 mentions of the party in connection with the issue: 66,146 in 2019 and 43,290 in 2022. One news item can generate several mentions of one or  several  parties.  Positive  values  indicate  an  increase  in  mentions;  negative values indicate a decrease.

As in Figure 1, we see that the shift in issues came at the cost of issues that dominated the agenda in 2019. Two issues namely, the EU and refugees and migration, both of which played a major role in 2019, were much less visible on the agenda in 2022. The importance of this shift can be seen from the fact that the two niche parties most linked to the issue of refugees and migration in 2022, the New Right and the Danish People's Party, were instead linked to other issues, such as health and elder care, defence, and climate and the environment. For  the  Danish  People's  Party,  there  was  a  nine  percent  drop  in mentions related to the issue of 'refugees and migration', while the New Right saw an even decline of 16%. Indeed, the leader of the New Right  later  blamed  the  lack  of  focus  on  this  issue  on  the  media agenda, saying that it was difficult for her to talk about immigration if the issue she was asked to address was the mental well-being of young people (Bruhn, 2022).

In our final RQ, we focus on the party leaders and the linkages that the news media make between different party leaders and different issues. We call these 'party-leader issue linkages', and as mentioned above, we see them as a central component of both issue ownership and issue competition. We focus solely on the party leaders, who traditionally  attract  the most  media  attention,  especially  those running as candidates for the post of prime minister. In 2019, two candidates ran for prime minister, the leaders of the Liberal Party and the Social Democrats. In 2022, the leader of the Conservatives also ran for the position, raising the number of candidates to three. Looking at the three candidates in Figure 3, the leaders of both the Liberal Party and the Social Democrats were linked increasingly to three of the same issues: defence, climate and the environment, and health  and  elder  care.  In  contrast,  the  leader  of  the  Conservative Party was increasingly linked to just one very traditional Conservative issue: defence.

Figure 3: Party-Leader Issue Linkage, Issue Ownership, and Issue Competition (Quotes) 2019/2022.

<!-- image -->

Note: Based on 15,180 quotes from party leaders in news items related to issues: 9085 in 2019 and 6095 in 2022. One news item can generate several quotes.

Eight  of  the  11  party  leaders  were  quoted  between  11%  and  42% more in relation to the issue of health and elder care in 2022 than in 2019, with the leading centre-right parties the Danish People's Party (42%  more)  and  Liberal  Alliance  (34%  more)  having  by  far  the biggest  increases.  Only  three  party  leaders  did  not  display  the tendency to be linked increasingly to the issue of health and elder care: those of the Conservatives, the Red-Green Alliance, and the Christian  Democrats.  At  the  same  time,  six  party  leaders  were quoted between 12% and 34% more in 2022 on the issue of defence than in 2019. Here, the leaders of the Conservatives (34%), the Social Liberal  Party  (30%),  and  the  Red-Green  Alliance  (30%)  were responsible for the biggest increases.

Mirroring  both  Figure  1  and  Figure  2,  in  Figure  3,  we  see  how being increasingly linked to some issues led to party leaders being linked less to others. In 2022, this was particularly the case for the former  'top'  issue  of  refugees  and  migration.  While  this  issue originated  in  the  blue  bloc,  especially  with  the  Danish  People's Party,  it  developed  into  a  mainstream  issue  during  the  first  two decades of the 2000s. However, in 2022, nine of 11 party leaders were quoted between three percent and 24% less on this issue than in 2022. The leader of the Social Democrats saw the highest drop in linkage to this issue in 2022 compared to 2019 (24%), followed by the leader of the Danish People's Party (22%).

## Discussion and conclusion

Like all elections, the 2022 national Danish election had its share of winners  and  losers.  Of  the  11  parties  on  which  we  focus  in  this historical  analysis,  the  Liberal  Party,  the  Social  Liberal  Party,  the Conservatives,  the  Red-Green  Alliance,  the  Christian  Democrats, and the Danish People's Party all lost seats in Folketing in the 2022 election,  with  the  Liberal  Party  taking  the  hardest  hit  (KosiaraPedersen,  2023).  On  the  other  hand,  the  Social  Democrats,  the Liberal  Alliance,  the  Green  Left/Socialist  People's  Party,  the  New Right, and the Alternative all gained in the 2022 election (KosiaraPedersen, 2023). Not all gains or losses can be explained by media salience  or  party-issue  linkage  in  the  news  media  coverage.  For instance, the fact that three candidates ran for the position of prime minister split the media attention between the candidates, but not equally. Mette Frederiksen, the Social Democrats, who also enjoyed the traditional incumbency bonus, attracted by far the most media attention  across  all  news  media  platforms  (31%).  The  two  other candidates,  Jacob  Ellemann-Jensen,  the  Liberal  Party,  (11%)  and Søren Pape Poulsen, the Conservatives, (12%), attracted less than half the same amount of attention in total. Both Ellemann-Jensen and Pape Poulsen also struggled throughout their campaigns, with Pape  Poulsen  followed  into  the  election  by  a  series  of  political scandals (Blach-Ørsten & Eberholst, 2023). However, a recent study of  issue  ownership  and  the  2022  election  based  on  voter  surveys suggests that the Social Democrats had a strong election due to issue ownership of the issues named health and elder care and climate and  the  environment  in  the  current  study  (Damsbo-Svendsen  & Seeberg, 2024, p. 327).

Regarding issue competition, it is interesting how the two niche parties to the right, namely, the Danish People's Party and the New Right, were affected by the shifting media agenda and shifts in party -issue linkages. Both parties had previously focused particularly on the issue of refugees and migration, but in the 2022 campaign, the Danish People's Party was instead linked to the top issue of health and elder care, most likely because elder care has traditionally been another top issue of which the party can claim (co)-ownership. The New Right was not similarly linked to any of the top issues of the 2022 campaign but to the much lower-ranking issue of pensions, which  was  not  otherwise  one  of  their  top  owned  issues.  Despite achieving an acceptable result in the election, the leader of the New Right  was  criticised  for  not  placing  more  focus  on  the  issue  of refugees and migration (Bruhn, 2022). This, in turn, led to internal upheaval within the party, which is presently fragmented: the leader has switched to another party, and its survival as a political party is an open question. At the same time, it is worth noting that looking only at party-issue linkage in the news media shows that the issue of  climate  and  the  environment  has  become  part  of  the  issue competition between both blocs, as has the issue of defence.

To  sum  up,  this  article  has  investigated  the  question  of  partyissue  linkage  in  the  news  media  as  an  indicator  of  both  issue ownership and issue competition. Party-issue linkage is recognised as an important additional variable of issue ownership. During an election, particularly, when issue competition is high, party-issue linkage may help political parties to claim or maintain ownership of the  most  salient  political  issues.  We  have  focused  on  a  unique historical  comparison  of  two  consecutive  national  elections:  the 2019 and 2022 national Danish elections.

Regarding our RQ1, we find a clear shift in the media saliences of different  political  issues  from  2019  to  2022,  caused  to  no  small extent by events external to the political parties. This adds evidence to  the  mounting  research  suggesting  that  outside  events  and societal trends influence national elections in a way that is beyond the  control  of  both  parties  and  party  leaders  (Dennison  &  Kriesi, 2023).  It  may  also  add  to  the  influence  of  the  news  media  if  the outside event is seen as breaking news, such as the sabotage of gas pipes in the Baltic Sea during the election campaign, in which case the coverage could crowd out other issues from the media agenda. The shifts also show a lower focus on the question of refugees and migration and a larger one on health and elder care, in particular, which was also pushed onto the news media agenda due to outside events, such as the Fields shooting,

However, the issue of climate and the environment, which was high  on  the  agenda  in  2019,  still  had  a  high  salience  in  2022, indicating that it had earned a more 'stable' place on the election agenda  than  previously  (see  also  Damsbo-Svendsen  &  Seeberg, 2024). The study of media salience also shows that while the news media agenda may theoretically have the capacity to accommodate an  increasing  number  of  issues,  its  capacity  is  more  limited  in practice,  as  three  issues  (refugees  and  migration,  the  EU,  and schools and daycare) received less attention in 2022 than in 2019, while three others (defence, health and elder care, and climate and the environment) received more attention. The EU may have been among the issues that received less attention because no EP election was running concurrently in 2022. However, right-wing parties did campaign on the issue of refugees and migration and parties in the red  bloc  campaigned  on  the  issue  of  schools  and  daycare,  but apparently with little effect on the news media coverage.

Regarding  RQ2  and  party-issue  linkage  in  the  news  media coverage, we find a good deal of issue competition and issue overlap in 2022, especially regarding the top issue of health and elder care. This issue is increasingly linked to all political parties, both niche and  mainstream.  This  indicates  that  most  parties  recognised  the importance of the issue for both voters and the media agenda and tried to ride the wave of its success by being linked to it in the news media (Burdina, 2014). At the same time, we find that the niche and mainstream  parties  of  the  centre-right  (blue  bloc),  in  particular, such  as  the  Liberal  Party,  the  Liberal  Alliance,  and  the  Danish People's  Party,  were  also  more  linked  to  the  climate  and  the environment issue than in 2019, again indicating the wave-riding of popular issues. In the red bloc, likewise, we find that both niche and mainstream parties, such as the Social Democrats, the Social Liberal Party, the Green Left, and the Red-Green Alliance, were increasingly linked to the issue of defence. From a bloc perspective, this could indicate that the blocs are trying to 'steal' these issues from each other. Thus, in 2022, the blue bloc was more actively linked to the issue of climate and the environment, an issue traditionally owned by the red bloc, while the red bloc was more actively linked to the issue of defence, an issue traditionally owned by the blue bloc. In sum, RQ2 thus supports investigating the news media agenda as an indicator  of  issue  competition,  the  stealing  of  issues  from  other parties, and the tendency for parties to ride the wave of issues that attract the most media salience.

Turning to RQ3, the same shift in party-issue linkage as found in RQ2 can be found in the quotes of the party leaders. Looking at all 11 party leaders, eight were quoted between 11% and 42% more in relation to the issue of health and elder care in 2022 than in 2019 with the leading centre-right parties the Danish People's Party and the Liberal Alliance seeing by far the biggest increase. Only three party leaders stand out from the tendency of being quoted more on the issue of health and elder care: those of the Conservatives, the Red-Green Alliance, and the Christian Democrats. This makes this issue the best example of how the media salience and party-issue linkage of a specific issue can result in both issue competition and issue  overlap.  It  also  indicates  that  party  leaders  are  indeed  well aware of the popular issues at stake in a campaign even though they and their parties do not necessarily own them, further indicating that party leaders might attempt to ride the wave of popular issues.

Overall,  the  three  RQs  suggest  that  media  salience  and  partyissue linkage can be seen as important indicators in the struggle for issue  ownership in a multi-party system such as the Danish one, where both niche and mainstream parties, as well as the two blocs, all compete for ownership of the most salient issues. The study also suggests that for parties, being linked to the most salient political issues is one of many elements in a successful election campaign. It also suggests that not being linked to the top salient issues or having the  party's  most  'owned'  issue  lose  salience  may  have  a  negative effect on a political campaign.

It is useful to compare our results to those of a recent study that investigated the salience of political issues in the 2022 election from the voters' point of view. Damsbo-Svendsen and Seeberg (2024, p. 310) found that three issues topped the voters' agenda in the 2022 election: climate, health, and finance. These results mirror the news media agenda presented in this study regarding two of three issues, showing that in the news media coverage, the issue of defence was more salient than that of finance. Further research could focus more on  the  relationship  between  all  three  agendas  in  the  traditional understanding  of  agenda-setting  studies:  the  voters'  agenda,  the media agenda, and the political agenda. This could help highlight not  only  which  issues  are  present  on  all  three  agendas  but  also differences in issue salience across the three. Future research could also look further at the role of social trends and outside events as challenges for political parties. What is the cost of riding the wave of a popular issue brought to the agenda by a societal trend? Does it make parties more legitimate in the minds of the audience, or less?

Still, an important caveat to consider when looking at the results presented in this study is that our focus represents only one side of the question of issue competition due to its focus on news media coverage.  Thus,  we  have  not  included  a  survey  of  media  users' understanding  of  the  changing  media  agenda.  The  study  is  also limited by its focus on nine issues, as the parties also ran on other issues  that  have  not  been  included  in  this  study  or  have  been collapsed  into  'bigger'  issues.  Thus,  this  study  may  not  have captured some of the nuances of the different political parties' party agendas in the two elections under study.

## NOTES

- 1 https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/uanset-hvem-der-endermed-statsministerposten-har-sverigedemokraterna-skrevet 2
- https://www.nrk.no/valg/2021/resultat/
- 3 https://www.ft.dk/da/folkestyret/valg-og-afstemninger/tal-ogfakta-om-valg-og-

afstemninger#1ECC9517FACB4120B7854B2DEA0A287B

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## MARK BLACH-ØRSTEN

Professor

Department of Communication and Arts Roskilde University oersten@ruc.dk

## MADS KÆMSGAARD EBERHOLST

Teaching Associate Professor Department of Communication and Arts Roskilde University makaeb@ruc.dk