From Sympathy to Salience: Owning the Economic Agenda

Have advocates for issues like climate action, inequality, workers’ rights, and public services relied too heavily on sympathy and not enough on salience? Abigail Stahl is the Global Head of Narrative and Messaging at Global Fund for a New Economy. She explains how a shift in approach can open up new possibilities for shaping the political agenda and information ecosystem, which in turn can lead voters to rethink priorities and imagine different solutions.

Across much of Europe, progressive advocates face a frustrating paradox. Survey after survey shows broad support for things like stronger social protections, taking action to slow climate change, and greater economic fairness. And yet, they are losing ground on these very issues.

The missing piece is not always persuasion. It is salience: which issues feel most urgent and decisive the moment voters make their choice.

Sympathy measures agreement. Salience measures priority. As political scientist Sheri Berman writes, only salient preferences “decisively influence political behavior.” That distinction matters. Shaping what becomes salient is therefore not a communications afterthought – it is the heartbeat of political strategy.

Who wins the battle for attention?

Adept at bridging sympathy and salience, the contemporary right maintains focus on topics where it enjoys an advantage in public trust. It selects cultural wedge issues – migration above all – and works to ensure they consistently dominate public attention.

Naturally, media dynamics facilitate this. Conflict, novelty, and outrage drive news coverage regardless of the medium, and the right reliably supplies all three. In response, mainstream parties often fall into a predictable trap: attempting to neutralize these issues, they adopt tougher rhetoric or diluted versions of right-wing positions. But this rarely reduces salience. Instead, it reinforces it. The terrain of debate remains migration, identity, and cultural threat – areas where right-wing parties are often perceived as more credible.

Eurobarometer data illustrate how the right’s laser focus on migration changes what’s perceived as important. In mid-2022, more Europeans cited climate change than immigration as one of the top issues facing the EU. By 2023, that ranking had flipped. Net migration had fallen significantly, and climate change had not suddenly become less urgent. What changed was attention. Sustained political and media focus on anti-migrant narratives increased the salience of immigration regardless of underlying trends. Salience, in other words, is not simply a reflection of objective conditions. It is often politically constructed.

Steve Akehurst, Director of Persuasion UK, a leading expert in the study and application of salience dynamics, summarizes this finding: “Insofar as the climate agenda is struggling, it is because it is falling down the news agenda – not because we are losing the sympathy of mainstream voters. Our opponents are prospering… because they are able to dominate information ecosystems better than us, shaping voter priorities and conflicts within politics.”

From sympathy to strategy

For advocates and communicators, this creates three strategic options.

First, there are issues such as migration, crime, and national security, where the right retains higher levels of trust and has worked hard to maintain salience. On these issues the left often pursues persuasion in an attempt to narrow the trust gap, minimizing differences in tone. While understandable, it is structurally difficult to out-communicate on terrain the right has cultivated for years.

Second, the left broadly enjoys trust and relative agreement on the aforementioned issues – climate action, social protection, and reducing inequality. Yet these topics often struggle to break through as top priorities. The challenge here is not to persuade but to command sustained attention.

Third, there are highly salient economic concerns, especially the cost of living, that are frequently framed as technical or managerial problems. They are treated as questions of competence: who can manage inflation, who can reduce grocery prices, who can administer energy subsidies more efficiently. In this framing, the issue is not inherently political.

But it could be.

Each option suggests a different solution: attempt persuasion on issues opponents own; raise the salience of issues where people prefer progressive solutions; or politicize issues currently framed as technocratic. Progressives must offer credible alternatives on issues the right “owns,” but the greater strategic opportunity lies in raising salience and politicizing central economic concerns.

Reclaiming the economy: It’s not the weather

The right has shown that raising salience is possible with the proper communications  “infrastructure” – such as owned digital channels, trained spokespeople, and rapid-response press. Such infrastructure requires sustained investment, narrative discipline, and a willingness to tolerate conflict on advantageous terms that drive attention. It means thinking beyond policy announcements toward long-term agenda setting.

My organization, the Global Fund for a New Economy, invests in groups that give voice to people and topics that are often left out of economic debates. As a regranter and capacity builder, we support “communication hubs” around the world and in Europe, like Laintersección in Spain, Das Momentum in Germany, Huba Fundacja in Poland, and NEON in the UK. These hubs book advocates, activists, and issue experts into the media to change narratives. But comparatively, these groups and interventions are underfunded.

To drive attention, we must build communications infrastructure to compete at the scale of the millions of euros flowing into the continent from right-wing donors. This is not just about money. It’s also about talent development from programs like the Global Messaging Programme, amplification networks like Project Bullhorn in the US, and organizations working together to create a sense of “surround sound” – a consistent drumbeat that demands attention.

Strategic investments are not only in communications infrastructure but also in organizing and campaigning – anything capable of driving sustained public debate and raising the salience of economic issues.

In addition, we must politicize economic issues. The ups and downs of the global economy are often implied to be like the weather – shaped by forces outside of human control. Take the cost of living as an example. If framed as a problem of complex forces colliding like storm clouds or temporary mismanagement, the debate remains technocratic. If framed as a question of power – who is pulling the levers that set rents, who benefits from energy price spikes, whose profits rise while wages stagnate – it becomes political.

Not only does this framing shift mindsets and understanding, it begs for different solutions. Instead of tinkering with grocery prices, it demands systemic changes from our political leaders and those who own so many of our systems.

What this means for European progressives

These are not quick fixes. Outside of major crises, changing what voters see as decisive can be slow and resource-intensive. But competing on terrain defined by the right is unlikely to produce different outcomes.

Persuasion alone is insufficient. Agenda setting must be treated as political work in its own right. That means long-term investment in communications infrastructure, leaders willing to frame economic conflict clearly, and linking everyday hardship to questions of power and fairness.

The right has demonstrated that attention can be engineered. Progressives can work to rebalance the debate. The goal is not to manufacture outrage, but to ensure that when the public thinks about what matters most – rent, wages, bills, security – they find a clear account of who benefits, who pays, and who has the power to change it.