Abstract Despite extensive research, the concept of issue salience remains fragmented across public opinion, party competition, and media studies. This article addresses this gap by proposing a triadic framework that integrates citizens, parties, and media within a single model of interaction. Salience is defined as an attribute of issues – a measure of their relative importance within systems of collective attention – and explained as the outcome of reciprocal processes of supply, demand, and mediation. The framework bridges disciplinary approaches and clarifies how salience circulates through feedback loops connecting the three spheres. By reconceptualizing salience as a dynamic and relational mechanism, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how democracies construct, contest, and sustain collective attention in hybrid information environments.
Many people around the globe, including in Europe, have been recently affected by various global crises. In the last 20 years, Europe has experienced the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, COVID-19, increasing extreme weather events associated with climate change, and the breakout of a new war between Russia and Ukraine. This exacerbation of crises has brought increasing scholarly attention to the ‘politics of crises.’ Scholars in political science have examined the politics of crises across a range of domains, such as energy (e.g. Aklin and Urpelainen, 2013; Hancock and Allison, 2020; Bayer et al. , 2025), finance (e.g. Mosley and Singer, 2009; Walter, 2013; Pepinsky, 2014; Copelovitch and Singer, 2020), pandemics (e.g. Worsnop, 2017; Youde, 2018), and migration (e.g. Rudolph, 2003; Hopkins, 2010).
