Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political
science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite;
parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the
common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of
policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65
years of UK Acts of Parliament this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect
parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone
do not explain changes in in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’
organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation
influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.