Which Factors Influence Issue Salience in Electoral Manifestos? New Insights From the Salience of Social Services in Dutch Local Elections

Abstract Issue salience – the attention a party devotes to an issue – in electoral manifestos remains understudied at the local level. This paper studies three potential determinants of issue salience: contextual responsiveness (parties emphasize topics important to voters), party‐issue associations (parties emphasize the same issues across time and settings), and parties' expertise (parties emphasize complex issues only if they have sufficient expertise). This paper uses a dictionary approach to measure the salience of social services in the over 6,600 available electoral manifestos for Dutch municipal elections between 2014 and 2022. To operationalize voters' priorities, party‐issue associations and parties' expertise, these data have been linked with data on demographic ‘indicators of need’, party affiliation, the salience of social services in national party manifestos, and individual politicians. Mixed effects models show that contextual responsiveness and party‐issue associations affect the salience of social services in electoral manifestos, while parties' expertise plays no role.