Determined by place or party? Issue salience in local election manifestos

Compared to national-level studies research on parties’ issue salience in local politics remains significantly underdeveloped. How local party branches balance the general party ideology with local context when deciding which issues to prioritise is still not well understood. This article addresses this gap by examining the drivers of issue salience in local election manifestos, specifically investigating the extent to which it is determined by the national party organisation and place-based municipal conditions. Drawing on an unprecedented dataset of 262 local election manifestos from 36 municipalities across two election cycles in Flanders (Belgium), the study measures and explains the emphasis on 17 policy issues using a supervised machine learning approach. Findings indicate that local parties’ issue salience is influenced by both national party preferences and local context, demonstrating their role as strategic actors who make deliberate choices about which issues to emphasise and de-emphasise.