| This work studies political issues and political competition. Political issues---contestable concerns within the public sphere---are multiple and infinitesimal, as people understand them in different contexts and at different levels. To become comprehensible and debatable political demands, individual preferences must be simplified into issue bundles or 'issue dimensions'. The key actors in this process are political parties that use strategic calculus to join disparate political preferences into ideological platforms. This dissertation examines the considerations and constraints that figure in this partisan calculus. The dynamic that arises is one in which politics is not so much a contest over positioning on issues, as conceived by classical spatial theory, but rather a competition over the content and structure of these issues. Politics is a struggle over the dimensional composition of political issues. |
