Parties hold long-run reputations for competence on particular issues, so campaigns compete to make their own issues salient rather than to win argument on the other's.
Petrocik's 1996 account explains why campaigns so often talk past each other. If a party is trusted on health and distrusted on defence, its interest is in an election fought about health, whatever the other side proposes. The competition is over the agenda rather than over positions, and a party that is drawn onto its opponent's issue has already lost ground by arriving there.
In practice
- A firm known for reliability advertises reliability and never mentions price, against a rival doing the reverse.
- A candidate who spends a debate rebutting the other side's strongest subject has conceded what the debate is about.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works