Green-Pedersen, Christoffer. "The Growing Importance of Issue Competition: The Changing Nature of Party Competition in Western Europe". Political Studies, Vol.55, No.3 (2007): 607–628.

Green-Pedersen, Christoffer. "The Growing Importance of Issue Competition: The Changing Nature of Party Competition in Western Europe". Political Studies, Vol.55, No.3 (2007): 607–628.

• The most critical development in Western European voting trends has been the decline of class voting, to the point of essentially disappearing from the Nordic countries and become significantly less salient in other Western European countries (608).
• This trend has been replaced by 'issue voting', in that most votes now act on agreement with party positions on politically salient issues as opposed to class or social group identification with that party (609).
• The nature of political party competition has changed in a issue-driven atmosphere of voting, as parties now compete both to establish their positions on different issues and to set public agendas to include their favor issues as opposed to their opponents' issues (609-610).
• This focus on political issues does not preclude the traditional right-left division on economic and labor policies, but it does include a wider range of issues beyond this divide. For this reason, the traditional left-right divide is only sometimes salient in contemporary Western European politics (610-612).
• A comparative analysis of political issues discussed in party manifestos in Western Europe since the 1940s demonstrates a steep decline in the number of times that left-right economic issues are referenced and a diversification of the number of issues addressed in manifestos (615-616).
• An increased focus on a broad number of issues salient to voters has resulted in a decline in issue differentiation among political parties. Whereas previously conservative and leftist parties discussed different sets of issues, all parties now discuss the same issues in their manifestos, as these are the issues salient to voters and thus universally present on the agenda (618, 623).
• The author speculates the rise of the mass media in Western Europe has contributed to situations where political parties are forced to form common agendas of issues to remain competitive, because the political salient issues for the public are spread among all social groups by mass media (624).