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The design of the study: The distinguishing characteristics of our approach
... Several critiques have been levelled against the Manifesto Research Group (MRG)/ Comparative Manifestos Project (MRG/CMP) project over the years. Perhaps the most important are that manifestos have a soft-focus effect -meaning that parties avoid clear statements -and that voters tend to not read manifestos (Dolezal 2008: 67). ...
... As a result, the distances on the joint space corresponding to salient relationships between parties and ideological categories will be more accurate than the less salient ones (cf. Dolezal 2008, 72). ...
... In other words, we can only say that a party adopts culturally liberal positions only if it is located very close to that category, not necessarily because it is located in the upper end of the configuration (cf. Dolezal 2008, 73). Italy (1994-2009) The fact that our analysis begins in 1994 means that we are dealing with a radically new party system. ...
Estudio/Working Paper 143/2012, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
... More specific examples include Dolezal and his colleague's studies on the new globalization-related cleavages in Western Europe and their manifestation in the public sphere (see Dolezal, 2008;Dolezal, Hutter, & Wüest, 2012). ...
... Election studies are not always designed to research cleavages and cleavage-based voting behaviour, but they usually enable the researchers to test various hypotheses on the matter (see for election studies in CEE Tucker, 2002). Additionally, expert surveys are conducted and sometimes used to identify the major divides and issue dimensions in various CEE countries (see for examples Marks, et al., 2006; (Bornschier, 2007;Dolezal, 2008;Dolezal, et al., 2012). ...
The study of the Baltic States provides new pathways for advancing the
sociological approach of party system analysis in general and in the CEE context in
particular. It further allows us to consider several empirical issues related to
cleavages in the Baltic States, but also extends the scope of the sociological
approach into new spheres of research and even allows us to pursue even a limited theoretical innovation in the field.
... As a result, the distances on the joint space corresponding to salient relationships between parties and ideological categories will be more accurate than the less salient ones (cf. Dolezal 2008, 72). Even though all our unfolding solutions are completed for a two-dimensional space following our main hypotheses, we do not simply assume that the optimal dimensionality of the ideological space will be the same for every single election. ...
... In other words, we can only say that a party adopts culturally liberal positions only if it is located very close to that category, not necessarily because it is located in the upper end of the configuration (cf. Dolezal 2008, 73). Italy (1994-2009) The fact that our analysis begins in 1994 means that we are dealing with a radically new party system. ...
The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive account of the structure of ideological space in Southern Europe and contribute to the ongoing discussion concerning the impact of globalization on the domestic politics of European countries. We analyze party manifestos from European elections in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal using multidimensional scaling. Even though our findings largely support the hypothesis that components of the globalization divide tend to transform the content of the traditional cultural-political dimension, we observe that this transformation occurs in different ways across national contents.
... 5. For a more detailed presentation of these categories, see Kriesi et al. (2006), or Dolezal (2008. 6. Tables with the average issue positions and issue salience by party can be found in the appendix. ...
... 8. To be more precise, the analyses were performed with weighted metric multidimensional scaling, where the party 6 issue pairs were weighted for their salience during the campaign. More details on the method used can be found in Dolezal (2008) and Lachat (2008). 9. ...
New structural potentials related to the processes of globalisation and European integration have produced far-reaching changes in the structure of opposition in the French party system. Whereas the newly designed institutions of the Fifth Republic progressively brought about a ‘bipolar multipartism’ in the first two decades of their existence, the rising prominence of new cultural conflicts and of the issue of European integration have led to an increasing disunity of the parties within the left and right, to the emergence of the Front National as a powerful new actor, as well as to a general process of party system fragmentation. On the basis of four electoral campaigns between 1978 and 2002, this article analyses the transformation of the ideological dimensions underlying party competition and the positions of parties within this space, and assesses the implications for the electoral success of parties and for the general make-up of the party system.
... Benoit Often, these experts also rely heavily on information from the mass media for their judgment. I mention these critical points not to degrade these approachesthey have greatly improved our scholarly knowledge and have their specific meritsbut simply to show that it is not so easy to find an uncontested measure (for more criticism of these two particularly relevant approaches, see Dolezal 2008 andMudde 2011). 15 Van Bulck draws heavily on the works of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. ...
... A representative sample of articles for each election was then coded according to the core-sentence approach (Dolezal 2008;Dolezal et al. 2016;Hutter et al. 2016;Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings 2001). A core sentence can be defined as the smallest syntactical unit of a sentence containing a relational statement between a subject actor and an object actor. ...
Existing research on party behaviour has largely focused on the drivers of issue salience in direct party communication. However, less is known about party‒issue linkages in election campaigns covered by the mass media, from which most voters get their information about party positions. Against this background, this article explores how two important drivers of issue salience in direct party communication – issue ownership and systemic salience – play out in the media. Based on considerations about the news value of specific party‒issue associations, one would expect both relationships to be particularly important in the media. Despite substantial similarities in party‒issue linkages across platforms, a comparison of manifestos and newspaper content reveals evidence for this claim. In particular, smaller parties are hardly covered in the news on issues they do not own, while large parties are especially covered on salient topics. These findings contribute to our understanding of issue competition in mediated environments.
... With respect to election campaigns and public debates, we use the core sentence approach of media content analysis: our study of protest politics, by contrast, is firmly in the tradition of social movement research and relies on protest event analysis. The sampling strategies used for coding election campaigns and protest events have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Dolezal 2008;Koopmans 1995), so we highlighted our innovative approach for selecting articles relevant to public debates. Our description of analysis strategies explained how we categorized the universe of actors and issues and introduced our most important measures: position, salience, and conflict intensity. ...
What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers in the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.
... For more information on this content analysis, seeDolezal (2008) andLachat (2008b). ...
Parties are often associated with specific issues. They can "own" an issue when they develop a reputation of competence and attention in that domain and they can strategically emphasize specific issues in their campaign. This paper suggests that these associations lead voters to weight issues differently when evaluating different political parties. An issue associated to a given party should have a stronger impact on citizens' evaluations of that party than on the evaluation of its competitors. These hypotheses are tested in the case of the 1994 and 1998 Dutch elections. The results clearly show that the impact of issues on party evaluations varies across parties. The results further support the hypothesis that this variation is related to issue ownership. Short-term associations resulting from campaign strategies, in contrast, do not appear to influence how citizens evaluate parties.
... 7 The data are collected for six countries, among them Switzerland and Austria, for one election in the 1970s and numerous elections in the 1990s and 2000s. During the two months preceding election day, all articles in selected newspapers concerning the election or politics more generally are coded according to the subject (which political actor), the object (which issue) and the direction of the relationship between them, using a scale ranging from -1 to +1, with -0.5, 0 and 0.5 as intermediary positions (see Dolezal 2008a for the presentation of the data). ...
This paper focuses on the policy strategies adopted by social democratic parties and their impact on the class basis of their support. It is argued that political appeals matter for explaining the development of class voting. This argument is tested through a comparison of the policy strategies of social democratic parties in Austria and Switzerland and the evolving patterns of class voting in the two countries. Using election surveys and data on the policy positions and media representation of the political parties from the 1970s to the 2000s, the article finds that the Social Democratic Party in Austria maintained a strong working class base. In contrast, the Social Democratic Party in Switzerland facilitated a major transformation of the class basis of its support by emphasising new cultural issues. It became the party of the ‘new middle classes’, leaving the working class to realign in support of the Swiss People’s Party.
... These newspapers analyzed are Die Presse and Kronenzeitung in Austria, Le Monde and le Parisien for France, NRC Handelsblad and Algemeen Dagblad in the Netherlands, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Blick for Switzerland, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild in Germany, and The Times and The Sun in Britain. The articles were coded sentence-by-sentence using a method developed by Kleinnijenhuis and his colleagues (see Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings 2001; for a fuller description of the coding procedure and data used for the present article, see Dolezal 2008). The choice of this data has advantages as well as disadvantages. ...
While the endorsement of universalistic values by the New Left led to a first transformation of political space in Western Europe, the counter-mobilisation of the extreme populist right resulted in a second transformation in the 1990s. This article focuses on the discursive innovations and normative foundations that have driven the emergence of a conflict opposing libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values. An analysis using data from the media coverage of election campaigns confirms that the New Left and the populist right represent polar normative ideals in France, Austria, and Switzerland. A similar transformation of political space occurred in the absence of a right-wing populist party in Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. In these contexts, the author hypothesises the value conflict to prove less durable and polarising in the longer run. The analysis of an election in the mid 2000s confirms that party systems evolve in a path dependent manner in the two contexts.
This article examines whether money talks in political campaign coverage. Analyzing news coverage about twenty-nine recent direct-democratic campaigns in Switzerland, it shows that votes involving expensive campaigns and populist proposals—and ideally both—correlate with high media attention. This favors especially Switzerland's largest party with the most resources, the right-wing populist Swiss People's Party (SVP). A case study of one vote on media policy confirms these patterns and shows that news coverage is also shaped by the vested (self-)interests of media organizations. The results imply that news media, affected by the crisis in journalism, fail to cover a truly wide diversity of actors and topics.
This chapter confirms that, although resourceful actors dominate discourse in all countries, the accessibility and functionality of discourse decisively varies according to the institutional contexts. As a result, conflict intensity, measured as the polarization of policy positions and patterns of valence attributions, varies closely according to the different capitalist regime types and arenas. This leads to the conclusion that the relationship between conflict intensity and institutional contexts is systematic: open and coordinative discourses, such as, for example, in Germany, are very contentious, while closed and communicative discourses, such as, for example, in the UK, are particularly quiescent.
This chapter presents the methods of data collection and analysis. Most importantly, the measurement and aggregation of the four discursive actions—going public, policy position-taking, valence attributing, and framing—are presented. Further, the research design in terms of the country and newspaper selection as well as the underlying concepts of discourse coalitions are discussed.
This article examines whether money talks in political campaign coverage. Analyzing news coverage about twenty-nine recent direct-democratic campaigns in Switzerland, it shows that votes involving expensive campaigns and populist proposals—and ideally both—correlate with high media attention. This favors especially Switzerland's largest party with the most resources, the right-wing populist Swiss People's Party (SVP). A case study of one vote on media policy confirms these patterns and shows that news coverage is also shaped by the vested (self-)interests of media organizations. The results imply that news media, affected by the crisis in journalism, fail to cover a truly wide diversity of actors and topics.
Is the success of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a protest phenomenon or the mobilization of a political potential? We test both hypotheses on the grounds of the German National Election Study 2013. The analysis reveals that disenchantment with party politics is indeed relatively high among the AfD voters. However, they also hold homogenous positions on the most relevant issues. Moreover, these positions have a significant
impact on the vote choice for the AfD, even when we control for voters’ disenchantment with party politics. This supports the idea of the party’s success being rooted in the mobilization of a neglected political potential rather than just being a protest phenomenon.
This article contributes to the ongoing discussion concerning the impact of globalisation and European integration on the structure of ideological space in Western Europe. The empirical investigation is based on an examination of Euromanifestos data from four European countries – Germany, United Kingdom, Greece and Portugal – for a time frame of up to 30 years. The findings largely support the hypothesis of a transformation of the content of the standard cultural axis due to the emergence of conflicts over the desirability for regional and/or global integration. However, this transformation occurs in different ways and by different actors across national contexts. Whereas in the United Kingdom and Germany objections against ongoing integration processes have been mainly articulated by political parties of the conservative and populist right, in Greece and Portugal left-wing political parties emerge as the main representatives of the anti-integration camp.
The empirical evidence concerning the ‘personalization of politics' thesis is, at best, mixed. The analysis of a new data-set on the media coverage of national elections in six Western European countries serves to reinforce this overall rather sceptical conclusion. The analysis shows that, in the national elections in the six countries covered (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom [UK]), there is no general trend to increasing personalization or increasing concentration of the media coverage on a limited set of particularly visible personalities. Among the six countries, the exception to this overall assessment is the Netherlands, where we find both a trend towards increasing personalization and increasing concentration of the public attention on a limited set of personalities. Rather than an increasing level of personalization, what we generally observe are large country-specific differences in the overall degree of personalization and of the concentration of attention on the top candidates.
Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue salience from media coverage: the core sentence approach and political claims analysis. Our cross-validation shows that with regard to party positions, indicators derived from the media converge with traditionally used measurements from party manifestos, mass surveys and expert judgments, but that salience indicators measure different underlying constructs. We conclude with a discussion of specific research questions for which media data offer potential advantages over more established methods.
This article analyzes why, despite similar transformations in the dimensions structuring political space since the late 1980s, extreme right-wing populist parties have emerged in some West European countries, but not in others. Two factors may affect the fortunes of these parties. First, if electorates remain firmly entrenched in older cleavages, new parties will find it difficult to establish themselves. Second, the positions of the established actors with respect to the new cultural divide that the extreme populist right mobilizes may be crucial. This article systematizes the various explanations regarding the impact of mainstream party positions on the electoral fortunes of the extreme right, and develops two new hypotheses that differentiate between the conditions that favor the entry of the extreme right, and its subsequent success. The various hypotheses are then tested in an empirical analysis of election campaigns in France and Germany, combining data on party positions as reflected in the news media with mass-level surveys. The results show that the diverging behavior of the established parties, rather than the strength of the traditional state-market cleavage, explains the differences between these two countries. More specifically, the differing strategy of the mainstream left in the two contexts has allowed the Front National to anchor itself in the French party system, whereas similar parties have not achieved a breakthrough in Germany.
The aim of this paper is to explore the characteristics of media data when we measure party positions and issue salience. We thereby contribute in developing new methodologies to analyze political parties and in operationalizing new theoreti-cal models of political competition. Following other studies that have compared in-dicators based on different data, we seek to highlight the characteristics of media data in comparison with the more traditional manifesto-and expert-data. We will show that media-data measure similar dimensions regarding positions, but salience constructs that are different from other data. Contrary to our expectation, media data do not better reflect how ordinary citizens perceive political parties. We however have reasons to believe that media-data are a finer-grained instrument and more sen-sitive than other data to explore short-term changes, diverging positions over sub-issues and intra-party dissent.
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