A valence issue is a political issue where there is a broad amount of consensus among voters. As valence issues are representative of a goal or quality, voters use valence issues to evaluate a political party’s effectiveness in producing this particular goal or quality.

The valence issue concept is a way of theorizing about how voters are motivated to vote for competing parties in an election. The concept was developed by Donald Stokes’s critique of voting behavior theories which Stokes foresaw as being too confined to ideas about a voter’s rationality and ideological impulses, as with spatial models of party competition. Since Stokes noticed during an overview of historical U.S. elections that voters sometimes were not bound by self-interest or ideology.

Valence issues can be contrasted and opposed to position issues, as position issues are organised by a voter’s ideology and their inclination for a selection of competing interests, rather than organised by the feelings of consensus found within valence issues. As valence issues can shape the outcome of an election and therefore a future government, voters and politicians both adjust their behavior according to valence issues.

The valence issue concept originates from Donald Stokes’s critical review of Anthony Downs’s theory of voting behavior which analogues supply and demand market logic. Downs concluded that voters, when determining their voting preferences, and political parties, when determining which policies to supply, made economical and rational strategic choices within an ideological space.

Stokes’s main problem with Downs’s model of voting behavior was that empirical reality, specifically the most recent U.S elections in Stokes’s time, did not fit with Downs’s theoretical assumptions. Thus, Stokes's conceptualisation of valence issues emerged from his focused critique on one of Downs’s assumptions about voters making decisions on their vote based on a set of ordered alternative policy preferences. Stokes believed this way of imagining the voter may work with position issues but not valence issues, since valence issues were political issues that competing parties could not take an alternative position on, as parties ordinarily would with position issues.

In an election fought over position issues, an individual party can differentiate themselves from other competing parties by advocating different policy positions, so as to gain a greater amount of support from the voter than other rivaling parties and therefore win the election. For example, three competing parties may altogether each present to voters separate ideas about the degree of economic intervention, all with the aim to find and attract the most electoral support. However, valences issues offer minimal room for parties to form alternative stances on, as voters are all seemingly in agreement about a particular stance.

The valence issue of corruption highlights Stokes’s belief in voters having a broad consensus of preferences on certain issues. In an election where corruption becomes an important issue there would not be one party which was pro-corruption and a rivaling party which was anti-corruption. Instead, both parties would oppose corruption and it would be up to voters to decide which party would be best at bringing about an end to corruption. Therefore, valence issues are issues that are used by voters to evaluate a parties competence based on whether the party can most effectively bring about a goal or quality embodied by the valence issue, or, whether the party is to blame or should be credited with a past or present good or condition that is representative of the valence issue.

Since Stokes established the valence issue concept it has been applied to polities beyond the U.S. Whereas the original interpretation of the concept was founded on observations Stokes made when reviewing American elections in the thirties and forties; in which Stokes identified economic recovery as a valences issue, the US elections of 1952; where Stokes recognized the Korean war and corruption as two valence issues, and the 1956 and 1960 election; which Stokes’s sees as dominated by the valence issue of U.S foreign policy.