Article

Intra-party heterogeneity in policy preferences and its effect on issue salience: Developing and applying a measure based on elite survey data

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Abstract

Quantitative research on party politics often has to assume that parties are unitary actors with homogeneous policy preferences simply because intra-party heterogeneity is difficult to measure. This article proposes a measure of preference heterogeneity based on surveys of party elites. We draw on Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) data from 28 elections in 21 developed democracies to quantify intra-party heterogeneity and validate this measure. The usefulness of the measure is demonstrated by studying the effects of intra-party-heterogeneity on issue salience. We find support for the hypothesis that heterogeneity regarding a policy issue tends to be negatively associated with the emphasis a party places on that issue by regressing measures of issue salience from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Manifesto Project on our CCS measure of heterogeneity. Problems of elite surveys notwithstanding, drawing on this data source seems a promising way to overcome the unitary party assumption.

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... The preferences of politicians within parties are notoriously hard to measure, but indeed heterogeneous to very different degrees (e.g. Carroll and Kubo, 2019;Steiner and Mader 2019). ...
... The main independent variables are intra-party heterogeneity, both on an economic and sociocultural dimension. They are measured using surveys of party elites, using data from the CCS (2016, 2022) and applying a technique suggested by Steiner and Mader (2019). The CCS is a collection of surveys directed at candidates running for national parliamentary elections in different countries, using a common core questionnaire. ...
... Steiner and Mader identify three questions related to the economic dimension and five questions related to the sociocultural dimension. They created additive indices for both dimensions and rescaled them between 0 and 1. Intra-party heterogeneity on both dimensions was then operationalized as the standard deviations of the respective indices within each party, standardized to range from 0 to 1. Steiner and Mader (2019) only used the first wave of the CCS (2016) to calculate their measure, I also used data from the second wave (2022) in the analyses. As one of the questions related to the sociocultural dimension was not included in the questionnaires of the second wave, 8 I did not include it for the construction of the measure for any election to increase internal consistency. ...
Article
Do voters correctly perceive left-right positions of political parties? This question received considerable attention in the literature in the past decades. Previous research has shown that most voters have somewhat 'correct' perceptions of where parties are located on a left-right dimension, but that both individual and party level factors influence how much those perceptions deviate from the real positions. This paper adds to this literature, relaxing the unitary actor assumption and introducing heterogeneity to the analysis. Using data from elite surveys to measure intraparty preference heterogeneity on two dimensions, I demonstrate that voters' misperceptions of party positions strongly increase the more heterogeneous the positions of party elites are on the economic dimension, but not on the sociocultural dimension, and that the effect size depends on how salient this dimension is for the party. The findings have implications for future research on mass-elite linkages, representation, as well as voting behavior.
... Preference homogeneity within parties is relevant for various outcomes, including which issues parties put on the agenda (Steenbergen and Scott 2004;Steiner and Mader 2019) and how they behave in coalition governments (Laver and Shepsle 1990;Bäck et al. 2016). Given these important consequences, studying intra-party homogeneity is an important area of research. ...
... Given these important consequences, studying intra-party homogeneity is an important area of research. While recent studies have shown that there is variation in homogeneity between parties as well as variation within parties across issues (Carroll and Kubo 2019;Steiner and Mader 2019), we know little about the drivers of this homogeneity. Why are some parties more homogenous than others? ...
... MP candidates constitute a core group among the broader party leadership (Katz and Mair 1993;Norris 1995), who have a large influence on intra-party decision and a high public visibility. Given previous findings about the substantively important consequences of preference homogeneity within this group (Steenbergen and Scott 2004;Steiner and Mader 2019), it is important to understand the sources of variation in homogeneity in this particular group. ...
Article
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This paper studies the relation between party institutionalization and intra-party preference homogeneity in democracies. In weakly institutionalized parties, it cannot be taken for granted that party actors have similar policy views because they lack the capability or motivation to coordinate agreement and to recruit personnel in line with this agreement. This should matter most when other safeguards against preference heterogeneity are missing. Empirically, we explore the association between institutionalization and intra-party preference homogeneity at the level of candidates to the national legislature based on survey data. In a single-country study, we first look at the case of Germany in 2013 and 2017, contrasting the young and weakly institutionalized Alternative for Germany (AfD) with the older, established parties. In a second step, we study the link between party institutionalization and preference homogeneity in a cross-country analysis of 19 established democracies. We find that parties with high value infusion—parties whose candidates are committed to the party—are generally more homogenous in their policy preferences. Moreover, value infusion is more consequential when the issues in question are not constitutive for the party and when candidates are selected in a decentralized way. Similarly, routinization of internal party behavior—the second dimension of institutionalization that we account for—seems to contribute to preference homogeneity only when parties are less policy oriented and have decentralized candidate selection procedures.
... Before we turn to the data and our findings, one common concern with survey-based research is that answers provided by politicians in a fully anonymous survey need not always coincide with what they would do in a publicly observable setting. However, previous work strongly suggests that politicians' (private) responses to surveys do reveal important information about their likely behaviour in public Houlberg & Holm-Pedersen, 2014;Saiegh, 2009;Serritzlew et al., 2008;Steiner & Mader 2019). Moreover, experimental variation across multiple treatments is beneficial in this respect. ...
... Finally, the dependent variable describes intended rather than actual allocation of blame and credit. While politicians' (private) responses to surveys are informative about their likely real-world behaviour Houlberg & Holm-Pedersen, 2014;Saiegh, 2009;Serritzlew et al., 2008;Steiner & Mader 2019), it would be important to complement our research with observation studies of the actual behaviour of elected politicians. This would strengthen our findings even further. ...
Article
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How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office‐holders. We study this issue using a between‐subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway ( N = 1073). We find that local politicians attribute responsibility for outcomes in primary education predominantly to school personnel (regardless of whether performance is good or bad) and do not engage in local party‐political blame games. However, we show that local politicians are keen to attribute responsibility for poor outcomes to higher levels of government, especially when these are unaligned with the party of the respondent. These findings suggest that vertical partisan blame‐shifting prevails over horizontal partisan blame games in settings with a political consensus culture.
... Internally divided parties, in contrast, downplay an issue when faced with internal dissent of their support base (ibid.) or of the party (Steiner & Mader, 2019) to conceal their internal division and blur their position. This logic can also be applied to the competitive situation in morality politics when a party is internally divided (Euchner, 2019c). ...
Article
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This article analyses parliamentary debates on marriage equality in Germany to understand what factors shape how parties deal with morality politics argumentatively. I argue that the internal divisions of parties and their coalition parties are crucial for the argumentation strategies used in parliamentary debates on morally charged wedge issues. Internally divided parties and parties that must be loyal to coalition partners confronted with internal divisions are likely to employ a discursive avoidance strategy to mitigate the potential for intra‐party and intra‐coalition polarization. To test this empirically, I examine the speeches of the German Bundestag on the Life Partnership Act in 2000 and Marriage for All in 2016 and 2017. The qualitative content analysis confirms my argument: The internally divided CDU and its coalition partners applied avoidance strategies by framing the issue primarily around constitutional principles and using procedural arguments, rather than framing the discourse as an issue of morality politics. Zusammenfassung Der Artikel analysiert parlamentarische Debatten zur Anerkennung gleichgeschlechtlicher Partnerschaften und Ehen in Deutschland, um zu verstehen, welche Faktoren die Argumentationen von Parteien im Wettbewerb um Moralpolitik beeinflussen. Ich argumentiere, dass die interne Spaltung von Parteien und ihrer Koalitionsparteien entscheidend für die Argumentationsstrategien ist, die in parlamentarischen Debatten über moralisch aufgeladene „wedge issues “verwendet werden. Intern gespaltene Parteien und Parteien, die loyal zu Koalitionspartnern sein müssen, die mit internen Spaltungen konfrontiert sind, verwenden eine diskursive Vermeidungsstrategie, um das Potenzial für eine innerparteiliche und koalitionsinterne Polarisierung abzuschwächen. Das Argument wird anhand einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse von Reden von Abgeordneten des Deutschen Bundestages zum Lebenspartnerschaftsgesetz im Jahr 2000 und zur Ehe für Alle im Jahr 2016/2017 bestätigt: Die innerparteilich zerstrittene CDU und ihre Koalitionspartner wendeten Vermeidungsstrategien an, indem sie das Thema in erster Linie in Zusammenhang mit verfassungsrechtlichen Grundsätzen thematisieren und prozedurale Argumente verwendeten, anstatt den Diskurs als eine moralpolitische Frage zu gestalten. Résumé Cet article analyse les débats parlementaires afin de comprendre les facteurs qui façonnent la manière dont les partis traitent la politique morale sur le plan argumentatif. Je soutiens que les divisions au sein des partis et entre les partis d'une coalition représentent un facteur décisif dans les stratégies d'argumentation utilisées dans les débats parlementaires sur les questions morales portant à controverse (« wedge issues »). Les partis divisés en interne et les partis devant rester loyaux envers leurs partenaires de coalition, eux‐mêmes confrontés à des divisions internes, sont susceptibles d'employer une stratégie discursive d'évitement pour atténuer le potentiel de polarisation intra‐parti et intra‐coalition. Pour tester cela empiriquement, j'examine les discours du Bundestag allemand sur la loi relative au partenariat de vie enregistré en 2000 et celle instituant le mariage pour tous en 2016/17. L'analyse qualitative de ces textes confirme mon argument: La CDU, divisée en interne, et ses partenaires de coalition ont appliqué des stratégies d'évitement en abordant la question principalement autour des principes constitutionnels et en utilisant des arguments procéduraux, plutôt que de cadrer le discours comme une question de politique morale.
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
Chapter
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A comparison of French and German health policy between 1990 and 2020 reveals the institutions under which programmatic action occurs. Expert interviews allow for an in-depth analysis of which institutions and processes are necessary for programmatic action to take place. In presenting the results of these expert interviews, this chapter shows how different systems of elite recruitment and policy advice are relevant to programmatic action by at the same time stressing that decentralized and corporatist structures are less directly related to programmatic action.
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
Chapter
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The Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a theoretical lens on policy processes developed at the intersection of policy process research, public administration, elite sociology, and social psychology. This chapter is particularly devoted to outlining the foundations of the PAF and putting them in context with other existing theories of the policy process. There are two main bases of PAF assumptions: Firstly, the role of bureaucracy in areas close to the state in formulating policy and the related desire for increased authority gained through advancement in individual careers. Secondly, social psychological perspectives on social identities of groups formed on the basis of shared characteristics are adopted by the PAF to outline the role of shared biographies and resulting policy programs, which are identity-forming, in policy processes and policy change. The particular focus of this study is on the institutional conditions under which such actors form programmatic groups and use their policy programs to shape the policy process over time.
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
Chapter
Full-text available
In order to shed light on this missing link between programmatic action and political institutions, this chapter reviews how institutions are currently discussed in policy process research in order to derive hypotheses that may explain under which institutional conditions programmatic action should or should not take place. The goal of this overview of the state of the art is twofold. On the one hand, it serves to assess the contribution of the PAF to existing theories of the policy process and the understanding of institutions in it. In doing so, it becomes clear why a new theoretical lens is needed and where and why the PAF is able to fill gaps left by others. On the other hand, the established approaches to explaining policy change and stability with respect to policy processes contain assumptions and hypotheses about the role of institutions that can be integrated into the PAF and help sharpen the analytical power of a look at the institutional conditions for programmatic action. They do this by formulating mechanisms between theoretical concepts that can also be adapted, or at least assumed to be relevant, to the formation of programmatic groups and the success of the group and its program. At the very least, they lay the groundwork for the question that asks about the influence of institutional settings familiar in comparative politics on policy change.
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
Chapter
Full-text available
Which institutions are necessary for programmatic action to take place? This chapter summarizes the “institutions of programmatic action”, which are the institutionalization of bureaucratic recruitment systems and scientific impulses through policy advice, and argues that the political institutions of federalism and corporatism are not directly related to the occurrence of programmatic action. At the same time, institutional changes may present both a challenge and an opportunity for programmatic groups.
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
Chapter
Full-text available
Taking a look at the history of health policy in Germany from 1990 to 2020, this chapter outlines the existence of programmatic action and identifies the programmatic actors relevant to the changes in health policy. The empirical study is based on a discourse network analysis, an in-depth analysis of the biographical trajectories of individuals, as well as a systematic connection of the programmatic content to the individual programmatic actors. Thereby, this chapter provides an explanation for 20 years of health policy developments in Germany. However, it also notes that programmatic action in German health policy has ended in the 2010s, and it provides explanations for why this is the case.
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
Chapter
Full-text available
The political systems of France and Germany and their respective organization of health care present important preconditions for the potential formation and success of programmatic groups and for the success of policy programs. This chapter reviews the health policy institutions in France and Germany in order to identify the positions in which programmatic actors can be found, which positions help them to implement their policy program, and which positions should be occupied for programmatic actors to achieve their goal of increased authority.
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
... Moreover, it can be argued that the degree of cohesion within the veto players is higher, at least as far as the parties are concerned. This is not because there are no intra-party conflicts in Germany, as a number of studies confirm (Debus & Bräuninger, 2008;Marx & Schumacher, 2013;Seeleib-Kaiser, 2010;Steiner & Mader, 2017), but because legislative processes in Germany are dominated by the parliamentary parties of the governing coalition, and MPs are rarely freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with parliamentary party policy. Even then, party membership exerts a significant influence on individual preferences (Engler & Dümig, 2017). ...
Chapter
Full-text available
Taking a look at the history of health policy in France from 1990 to 2020, this chapter outlines the existence of programmatic action and identifies the programmatic actors relevant to the changes in health policy. The empirical study is based on a discourse network analysis, an in-depth analysis of the biographical trajectories of individuals, as well as a systematic connection of the programmatic content to the individual programmatic actors. Thereby, this chapter provides an explanation for 30 years of health policy developments in France.
... One way to do so is the use of elite surveys. Carroll and Kubo (2019) present an internationally comparable measurement of intra-party heterogeneity while Steiner and Mader (2019) show the effect of this heterogeneity on issue salience. Jankowski et al. (2019) demonstrate the validity of these methods to measure changes over time. ...
Article
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Intra-party politics has long been neglected due to lacking data sources. While we have a good understanding of the dynamics of ideological competition between parties, we know less about how individuals or groups inside parties influence policy, leadership selection and coalition bargaining. These questions can only be answered if we can place individual politicians and sub-party groups like factions on the same dimensions as in inter-party competition. This task has been notoriously difficult, as most existing measures either work on the party level, or are in other ways determined by the party agenda. Social media is a new data source that allows analyzing positions of individual politicians in party-centered systems, as it is subject to limited party control. I apply canonical correspondence analysis to account for hierarchical data structures and estimate multidimensional positions of the Twitter accounts of 498 Members of the German Bundestag based on more than 800,000 tweets since 2017. To test the effect of intra-party actors on their relative ideological placement, I coded the faction membership of 247 Twitter users in the Bundestag. I show that Twitter text reproduces party positions and dimensions. Members of factions are more likely to represent their faction’s positions, both on the cultural and the economic dimension.
... Scholars started to investigate internal divisions from many different perspectives, analysing splits in parliamentary roll call votes (Kam, 2009), party switching and parliamentary defections (Heller and Mershon, 2009a), party fissions (Ibenskas, 2019), and disagreement expressed at party conferences (Ceron and Greene, 2019;Greene and Haber, 2015) or in parliamentary speeches (Bäck et al., 2016). Recent studies used political elite surveys as additional sources of data on intra-party disagreement (Carroll and Kubo, 2019;Close et al., 2019;Schumacher and Elmelund-Praestekaer, 2018;Steiner and Mader, 2019). ...
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What are the effects of party defections on the attitudes of politicians who remain loyal to the party? We answer by combining multiple sources of data into a comprehensive novel data set on parliamentary party switching, to estimate how this affects the perceived distance between a politician and his party. Focusing on the theory of cognitive dissonance and the black sheep effect, we hypothesize that politicians perceive themselves closer to their parties when those parties recently suffered defections. The effect should be greater among incumbent politicians as they directly experience divisions, but also among officials dissatisfied with the leadership as their dissonance should be stronger. Statistical analyses of data from two elite surveys, on a sample of 13,256 politicians belonging to 92 parties that ran in 28 elections held between 2005 and 2015 in 14 countries, provide support for our hypotheses and shed light on the consequences of intra-party defections.
... In light of this, beside party congress speeches and documents, other sources of data can be profitably used to analyze intra-party politics. Among them, parliamentary speeches or elite and candidate surveys (Steiner & Mader 2017). ...
Book
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... However, they have leeway in how they communicate these positions and therefore their ideological positions matter, particularly in cases in which parties remain ambiguous or are internally divided (Eder et al. 2017). Moreover, candidate surveys allow for the analysis of intraparty heterogeneity, which is quite challenging or impossible to obtain by other standard measures of party positions (Steiner and Mader 2017). 2 Our methodological approach expands on previous research that uses candidate survey data to analyse the ideological positions of parties. ...
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Ordered rating scales are one of the most frequently used question formats in large-scale surveys. Analysts of the responses to such questions often find themselves in need of describing the degree of agreement (concentration, consensus) of the answers to such questions. For that purpose they commonly use standard deviations of the response distributions, or measures based on these (such as the coefficient of consensus defined by Granberg and Holmberg, 1988), or the coefficient of variability, etc. This paper demonstrates that such measures are inappropriate for this purpose because they misrepresent what they are supposed to measure: the `peakedness' of a distribution. As an alternative a measure of agreement A is proposed. This measure is a weighted average of the degree of agreement that exists in the simple component parts – layers – into which any frequency distribution can be disaggregated, and for which agreement can be expressed in a straightforward and unequivocal way.
Book
This book is probably the most important source of evidence published up to now on the consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe. It provides estimates of party positions, voter preferences and government policy from election programmes collected systematically for 51 countries from 1990 onwards. Time-series are presented in the text. This also reports party life histories (essential to over time analyses) and provides updated and newly validated vote statistics. All this information and much more is available on the devoted website described in the book. The final chapter gives instructions on how to access the data on your own computer. For comparative purposes, similar estimates of policy and preferences are given for CEE, OECD and EU countries. These estimates update the prize-winning data set covered in Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1998 - also published by OUP. A must-buy for all commentators, students and analysts of democracy, in Eastern Europe and the world.
Book
This book explains the contrasting strategies and their electoral fortunes of social democratic parties in the major European democracies in the 1970s and 1980s. Going beyond approaches that focus on the influence of class structure and political economic institutions, The Transformation of European Social Democracy analyses the party's competitive situation in the electoral arena, the constraints and opportunities of party organisation, and the role of ideological legacies to explain the strategic choices social democratic parties have made and the electoral results they have achieved. Far from being doomed to decline, social democracy's success depends on its ability to transform its political message and to construct new electoral coalitions.
Book
Saalfeld and Strøm (Chapter 18) show that legislative parties are not only virtually ubiquitous, but also highly institutionalized, typically having well-developed structures of leadership as well as specialization. The authors review various explanations of political parties, including functional theories as well as the explanations based on the incentives of individual legislators. They also discuss challenges to such theories like the influential work of Keith Krehbiel on U.S. Congressional parties. Saalfeld and Strøm argue that it is meaningful to differentiate between various degrees of partyness among parties, and even among coalitions of parties, and review the institutional sources of variations in partyness, including the agenda control available to party leaders and the rewards and sanctions they control.
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Parties’ parliamentary delegations contain a multitude of interests. While scholars suspect that this variation affects party behavior, most work on parties’ policy statements treats parties as unitary actors. This reflects the absence of strong expectations concerning when (and how) the parliamentary caucus matters for platform construction, as well as the difficulties inherent in testing such claims. Drawing on the literature on women’s descriptive representation, we argue that the makeup of the parliamentary party likely has important consequences for issue entrepreneurship, the scope of issues represented on the manifesto, and even the left-right position of election platforms. With the most comprehensive party-level study of women’s representation ever conducted, we test our three diversity hypotheses using data on the gender makeup of parties’ parliamentary delegations and the content of their manifestos for 110 parties in 20 democracies between 1952 and 2011. We show that as the percentage of women in the parliamentary party increases, parties address a greater diversity of issues in their election campaigns. Women’s presence is also associated with more left-leaning manifestos, even when controlling for parties’ prior ideological positions. Together, these findings illustrate a previously overlooked consequence of descriptive representation and provide a framework for understanding when and why the parliamentary party influences manifesto formation. They show that diversity—or lack thereof—has important consequences for parties’ policy statements, and thus the overall quality of representation.
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The ongoing process of integration in Europe has fundamentally altered the political environment in which the political parties of the EU member states find themselves. European integration has produced new political issues, which cannot always be easily accommodated into existing cleavage structures, as the preceding chapters reveal. It has also changed the political opportunity structure – parties may play these new issues up or they may play them down. In this chapter, we analyze why some national political parties have stressed European integration, while others have refrained from doing so. An analysis of the salience of European integration at the party level is important for several reasons. First, it speaks directly to the topic of contestation. A prerequisite for contestation is that political actors are willing to debate an issue – there is a willingness to give the issue a modicum of salience. To what extent do political parties show such willingness? Second, salience is also critical for understanding representation in the EU. Van der Eijk and Franklin (1996; this volume; see also Reif and Schmitt 1980) have observed that European elections are rarely about the scope and nature of integration, even though at the level of the electorate a contestation potential exists. This may be a contributing factor to the so-called democratic deficit of the EU. The lack of European content in European elections may be due to an unwillingness or inability of parties to raise integration above a critical salience threshold.
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Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a new theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set of strategies than posited by standard spatial models. Combining statistical analyzes with in-depth case studies from Western Europe, the book explores how and why established parties undermine niche parties or turn them into weapons against their mainstream party opponents. This study of competition between unequals thus provides broader insights into the nature and outcome of competition between political equals.
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Theory: This paper develops and applies an issue ownership theory of voting that emphasizes the role of campaigns in setting the criteria for voters to choose between candidates. It expects candidates to emphasize issues on which they are advantaged and their opponents are less well regarded. It explains the structural factors and party system variables which lead candidates to differentially emphasize issues. It invokes theories of priming and framing to explain the electorate's response. Hypotheses: Issue emphases are specific to candidates; voters support candidates with a party and performance based reputation for greater competence on handling the issues about which the voter is concerned. Aggregate election outcomes and individual votes follow the problem agenda. Method: Content analysis of news reports, open-ended voter reports of important problems, and the vote are analyzed with graphic displays and logistic regression analysis for presidential elections between 1960 and 1992. Results: Candidates do have distinctive patterns of problem emphases in their campaigns; election outcomes do follow the problem concerns of voters; the individual vote is significantly influenced by these problem concerns above and beyond the effects of the standard predictors.
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This paper analyzes how factional conflict and intra-party organization affect a party’s likelihood of being involved in a ruling coalition. We focus on Italian parties (between 1946 and 2013) estimating their internal heterogeneity through quantitative text analysis of policy documents presented by factions during party congresses. The impact of inter-factional conflict has been investigated in interaction with intra-party rules showing that when the party leader is autonomous and can rely on powerful whipping resources to impose discipline, the party will credibly sticks to the coalition agreement, thereby reducing the negative effect of factional heterogeneity in coalition bargaining.
Article
Spatial models are ubiquitous within political science. Whenever we confront spatial models with data, we need valid and reliable ways to measure policy positions in political space. I first review a range of general issues that must be resolved before thinking about how to measure policy positions, including cognitive metrics, a priori and a posteriori scale interpretation, dimensionality, common spaces, and comparability across settings. I then briefly review different types of data we can use to do this and measurement techniques associated with each type, focusing on headline issues with each type of data and pointing to comprehensive surveys of relevant literatures-including expert, elite, and mass surveys; text analysis; and legislative voting behavior.
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The study of party unity and its determinants is conceptually confusing, with terms such as 'party discipline' and 'party cohesion' used to denote both dependent and independent variables. Moreover, while the literature recognizes both anticipated sanctions and homogeneity of preferences as pathways to party unity, it ignores possibilities such as party loyalty and the division of labour within parliamentary parties. The article examines these different pathways to party unity on the basis of five waves of interviews with nearly all members of the Lower House of the Dutch parliament. The article finds least evidence for sanctions as a major determinant of party unity, with the possible exception of parties in the governing coalition. Homogeneity, loyalty and division of labour all seem to play an important role. Party unity might seem over determined, but the more likely explanation offered is that it is a case of 'different horses for different courses'.
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How do parties decide which issues to emphasize during electoral competition? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how parties of the left and of the right respond to economic inequality. Increasing inequality shifts the proportion of the population falling into lower socioeconomic categories, thereby increasing the size of the electoral constituency that is receptive toward leftist parties' redistributive economic appeals. In the face of rising inequality, then, leftist parties will emphasize economic issues in their manifestos. By contrast, the nonredistributive economic policies often espoused by rightist parties will not appeal to this burgeoning constituency. Rather, we argue, rightist parties will opt to emphasize values-based issues, especially in those cases where “social demand” in the electorate for values-based representation is high. We find support for these relationships with hierarchical regression models that draw from data across hundreds of parties in a diverse set of the world's democracies.
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Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of parties' competencies in response to parties' experiences in government. We add that parties' evaluations depend on their success in fostering a cohesive image by managing diverse intra-party interests. We predict that voters' impressions of parties' internal discord negatively affect their assessments of parties' policy competencies. Furthermore, voters' choice of parties will also depend on perceptions of the parties' coherence and competence. Using individual-level analysis of party evaluations in Germany, we test predictions from our theory using a new survey that contains questions on parties' policy coherence and issue competence. The results hold important implications for the study of intra-party politics, issue competition and vote choice.
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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.
Article
Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of parties’ competencies in response to parties’ experiences in government. We add that parties’ evaluations depend on their success in fostering a cohesive image by managing diverse intra-party interests. We predict that voters’ impressions of parties’ internal discord negatively affect their assessments of parties’ policy competencies. Furthermore, voters’ choice of parties will also depend on perceptions of the parties’ coherence and competence. Using individual-level analysis of party evaluations in Germany, we test predictions from our theory using a new survey that contains questions on parties’ policy coherence and issue competence. The results hold important implications for the study of intra-party politics, issue competition and vote choice. Key Words: Public Opinion, Issue Competence, Issue Ownership, Party Politics, Electoral Behaviour
Book
Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America. © Herbert Kitschelt, Kirk A. Hawkins, Juan Pablo Luna, Guillermo Rosas, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister 2010.
Article
Our current knowledge of the causes of party unity rests heavily on the analysis of average unity scores of party groups from different countries. This study design invites two related problems: By aggregating unity scores we miss valuable variance at the level of disaggregated votes, and by comparing these aggregate scores across time and countries we might confound institutional effects with an unobserved case-specific selection bias of roll-call votes. In taking advantage of the laboratory-like conditions of the 16 sub-national parliaments of Germany and shifting the level of analysis to party unity in every single vote this article addresses both problems. Analysing 8607 unity scores, it is shown that the voting context is an important moderator of institutional effects on party unity. Specifically, it is shown that government status boosts party unity particularly within legislative important votes. Furthermore, the unity-boosting effect of slim majorities is only present for government parties and particularly strong when legislative consequential decisions are taken. Beyond that I also show that roll-call vote request, increasing ideological distances and norms of party loyalty increase party unity.
Article
Explaining ideological conflict has always been a classic theme of studies of party organizations. The aim of this paper is to re-examine May's law, based on rational choice theory, which suggests that due to differential incentives sub-leaders are likely to prove the most extreme stratum in party organizations, while non-leaders are the most moderate, and top leaders are located equidistant between these groups. The study, based on large-scale surveys of politicians, local constituency officers, party members and voters in the 1992 British general election, throws considerable doubt on this proposition.
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Across postcommunist states, studies of electoral competition reveal variation in the capacity of political parties to compete on the basis of clearly articulated issue-based programs. Notably, the development of programmatic party competition in the Russian Federation is lagging behind other postcommunist states. Over time it is likely that democratic institutions shape the learning process that enable politicians to adjust strategies of party competition, but learning is not likely to occur at the same pace across all countries. The authors explain the observed cross-national variation in party system development as a function of the aspiring political elites'capabilities to solve social choice problems through party formation against the backdrop of past experiences with collective mobilization under and before communist rule. The authors test this model using survey data of middle-level party elites in five countries and find that legacies decisively affect elite strategies in the initial rounds of democratic party competition.
Article
In a broad range of research in comparative politics, political parties are conceptualised as unitary actors with consistent preferences. We depart from this sometimes accurate, at other times overly strong assumption by studying patterns of intra-party heterogeneity of preferences within parliamentary parties in the German Bundestag from 2002–05. For this purpose, we use the Wordscores method, a form of computational text analysis, to estimate policy positions of 453 individual legislators based on plenary speeches. We then study the link between intra-party faction membership and expressed policy positions. We find that there is a limited, but consistent effect of intra-party factionalism in the German Bundestag. According to random effects ANOVA, faction membership determines about 3 per cent of the variance of positions on economic policy in the present study.
Article
Election manifestos are important documents, but very little is known about the way parties create their manifestos and how they use them. This is unfortunate, because such knowledge can inform both the academic study of party politics and political practice. This article presents original results from interviews with actors who played a key role in creating the 2007 national election manifesto for the major Irish parties. It describes the sequence of actions in developing the manifesto, and how those involved in the preparation perceive its functions. The results suggest that preparation processes are similar to those found a decade ago, but a trend towards giving party activists a larger say seems to be emerging. This finding is at odds with the prediction of the cartel party model that party leaders seek to reduce the influence of activists. Another finding is that manifestos are not only used to address voters, but also are tools for intra-party coordination, for communication with interest groups, and are especially important in the government formation process. Students of party competition should take this multi-purpose nature of the documents and variation in preparation modes into account. Finally, if there is a lack of policy debate in Irish election campaigns, the reason does not lie in a lack of policy material on the side of the parties.
Article
This article looks at the personalization of politics, starting with a careful examination of the evidence that leaders are becoming more important. The role of electronic media in personalizing politics and politicians is examined, along with institutions and political leadership. The concept 'political priming' is introduced, which is the process where leaders are evaluated by voters based on the leader's performance on issues considered important to the voters. The consequences of the personalization of politics and the decline of electoral participation and parties are discussed in the last portion of the article.
Article
Parties have an incentive to take up extreme positions in order to achieve policy differentiation and issue ownership, and it would make sense for a party to stress these positions as well. These incentives are not the same for all issues and all parties but may be modified by other strategic conditions: party size, party system size, positional distinctiveness and systemic salience. Using manifesto-based measures of salience and expert assessments of party positions, the findings in this article are that parties emphasise extreme positions if, first, they are relatively small in terms of vote share; second, the extreme position is distinctive from those of other parties; and third, other parties fail to emphasise the issue. These findings have consequences for our understanding of party strategies, party competition and the radicalisation of political debates.
Article
Veto player approaches have come to occupy a central role in comparative politics. This article critically reviews the literature, focussing especially on veto player explanations of policy outputs and outcomes. The review highlights three problems empirical veto player studies have to face: 1) identifying the relevant veto players, 2) establishing equivalence between veto players, and 3) specifying (theoretically or empirically) veto players' policy preferences. The article concludes that empirical veto player analyses advance our understanding of political institutions and their effects, but that they should deal more systematically with the three above mentioned problems.
Comparative Candidates Survey Module I-2005-2013 [Dataset-cumulative file], Version 3.1. Distributed by FORS
CCS (2016) Comparative Candidates Survey Module I-2005-2013 [Dataset-cumulative file], Version 3.1. Distributed by FORS, Lausanne, 2016.
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