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Abstract
This book uniquely enriches and empowers its readers. It enriches them by giving them the most detailed and extensive data available on the policies and preferences of key democratic actors-parties, governments, and electors in 25 democracies over the post-war period. Estimates are provided for every election and most coalitions of the post-war period and derive from the programmes, manifestos, and platforms of parties and governments themselves. Thus, they form a uniquely authoritative source, recognized as such and provided through the labour of a team of international scholars over 25 years. The book empowers readers by providing these estimates on the website http://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/MPP1. The printed text provides documentation and suggested uses for data, along with much other background information. The changing ideologies and concerns of parties trace general social developments over the post-war period, as well as directly affecting economic policy making. Indispensable for any serious discussion of democratic politics, the book provides necessary information for political scientists, policy analysts, comparativists, sociologists, and economists. A must for every social science library-private as well as academic or public.
... Saliency theory relies on several assumptions. Firstly, parties selectively emphasise policy goals that are favourable to them (Budge, 1982(Budge, , 2001Budge & Farlie, 1983). 'Selective emphasis' rather than 'direct confrontation' is thus considered the most important party strategy in electoral competition (Budge & Farlie, 1983). ...
... The reason for this is that it is assumed voters prefer one course of action on most issues (Budge, 2001:82), also leading parties to converge towards the same position on many issues. Secondly, the theory mostly applies to valence issues, with selective emphasis being the only tool whereby parties can highlight their policy differences (Budge, 2001). Thirdly, voters reward parties based on their perceived competence in certain policy areas when they are salient (Budge, 1982). ...
In the aftermath of the Euro crisis, EU issues have increasingly affected electoral behaviour, explaining a sizable shift in votes from the Europhile to Eurosceptic parties. This paper advances the argument that EU issue voting is not entirely encompassed in a divisive (pro‐/anti‐) EU dimension, testing the hypothesis that a EU valence voting is currently conditioning electoral behaviour. In particular, we posit that voters support parties evaluating their credibility in achieving not only EU positional goals (‘leave/remain’ in the EU), but also EU valence ones (i.e., making the country count more in Europe). Furthermore, we assess which parties – pro‐/anti‐EU – are more likely to be supported on the basis of this valence issue. Based on survey data from France (2017) and Italy (2018), we found that the EU valence issue is an important voting predictor, with pro‐EU parties mainly benefitting from it.
... Within this space, parties take distinct positions. Budge (2001) has characterized positional theory as a "confrontational theory of party competition", since parties are assumed to talk always confrontationally on the same issues. In the original version by Downs (1957), the political space was defined by economic concerns of free-market vs. state-oriented economy. ...
... It follows a strict salience-based approach, coding so called quasisentences. A quasi-sentence is the smallest unit of issue emphasis(Budge 2001). Each quasisentence is allocated to one of 57 pre-defined categories belonging to seven main policy dimensions. ...
Analyzing the relationships between political parties and voters is one of the central topics of political science. Parties are expected either to be responsive to the demands of their voters or are presumed to have the power to influence voting decisions by structuring the political discourse and thereby competition regarding political issues. These two aspects are covered in the literature by research on the way parties present themselves and by electoral research, respectively. Focusing on the latter, this state-of-the-art article reviews how recent publications have analyzed the impact of party competition (macro level) on vote choice (individual level). It does so by introducing the most prominent theories of voting and party competition, summarizing the most recent results and pointing to potential problems for international comparisons such as methodological choices and different approaches to the measurement of party positions.
... Die parteiinternen Normen und Werte erlauben es nicht, beliebige Positionen einzunehmen. Ein ähnliches Argument liegt der Salienztheorie und der Idee des Issue-Ownership zu Grunde (Budge und Farlie 1983;Petrocik 1996;Budge 2001); Mittel und Ressourcen zur Konkurrenz sind begrenzt. Sie werden benötigt, um vorgenommene inhaltliche Positionsverschiebungen einer Partei auch innerhalb der Wählerschaft bekannt zu machen. ...
... Es setzen sich die glaubwürdigeren Politikangebote durch, so das Diktum der Salienztheorie. Salienz bedeutet hierbei Hervorhebung: Parteien heben im Wahlkampf die Themen und Problemlösungsvorschläge hervor, von denen sie sich die meisten Wählerstimmen versprechen (Budge 2001). Erfolgreiche Politikinnovationen in der Vergangenheit versprechen dabei besondere Glaubwürdigkeit in dem spezifischen Politikfeld in der Gegenwart (Robertson 1976, S. 67 (Lowi 1963, S. 582). ...
Welche Funktionen hat eine Parteiendemokratie? Wovon hängt die Qualität ihrer Funktionsweise ab? Diesen grundlegenden widmet sich das vorliegende Kapitel. Hierzu werden zunächst die Konzepte Parteienwettbewerb und Parteiendemokratie definiert. Anschließend werden die zentralen Mechanismen zur Herstellung einer funktionierenden Parteidemokratie erörtert. Entscheidend ist zum einen die Verfügbarkeit institutioneller Kanäle zur Ausübung von Opposition. Zum anderen hängt die Qualität an der tatsächlichen Partizipation der Bürger eines politischen Systems. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Zusammenfassung der wesentlichen theoretischen Befunde und dem Hinweis auf die normative Funktion der Parteiendemokratie: Parteiendemokratien sind autoritären Systemen durch Innovationsleistung und Integrationsleistung überlegen und stabilisieren somit ein Staatswesen. Voraussetzung dafür ist jedoch ein hinreichen des Ausmaß an Partizipation. Die zeitgenössische Kritik an der Parteiendemokratie erscheint weniger als Phänomen der Kritik am grundlegenden Konzept, sondern dass die Realität nicht mit ihren Ideal übereinstimmt.
... Our sources of analysis are official manifestos and thematic documents released by the five parties. Manifestos qualify as one of the most authoritative sources to infer the ideological and policy positions of political parties (Budge 2001). Unlike other sources (e.g. ...
... On the other hand, each party faces incentives to move policy in the direction that will appeal to their party members and voters. Thus, the ideological diversity within a cabinet's coalition matters (Huber and Inglehart 1995;Budge 2001) not only to explain such issues as the duration of the cabinet formation process (Carmignani 2001) or a premature termination , but also the birth rate of new national rules. If cabinet heterogeneity is not managed properly, this may in turn slow down decision processes. ...
... Because it is unattractive to postulate tax increases, social democratic or socialist parties are beware of using such words and their connotations. This approach and the theory behind is not far away from saliency theory and the coding scheme of the MRG and CMP (Robertson, 1976;Budge, 2001), but in contrast does enable us to focus on and analyse both the policy positions and issue saliencies of political parties. ...
... Furthermore, we consider both the saliency with which parties address certain issues and the positions (pro or contra) they take. While extensive research based on party manifestos has shown that parties tend to avoid direct confrontation and that they differ from each other mainly through the selective emphasis of their priorities (see Budge 2001 for a review), we also know that new issues usually do not have a valence character and that direct confrontation (i.e., parties advocating diverging positions on political issues) is much more pronounced in the media and during electoral campaigns than in party programmes (Budge & Farlie 1983: 281). The voters, too, see the parties mainly in confrontational terms.Furthermore,if we want to relate the parties' preferences to those of the voters, we need to measure them in a comparable way, and, in most election studies, the voters' issue preferences are assessed in terms of position or direction rather than in terms of their salience (Pellikaan et al. 2003). ...
This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
... However, its main aim is also to offer a comprehensive framework capturing party positions on all policy dimensions. The coding scheme of the CMP project lacks sufficient granularity to capture the diverse positions in a particular area, such as immigration and integration policy (Budge, 2001;Petry and Landry, 2001;Protsyk and Garaz, 2011). ...
This article estimates policy positions of mainstream parties and radical right parties in seven countries in Western Europe over the past two decades. The assumption that mainstream parties have moved rightwards under pressure from the electoral success of radical right parties is assessed in close-up. A fine-grained analysis has been used to measure party distances in this specific policy field. Moreover, the new dataset is sufficiently differentiated to enable the identification of specific programmatic strategies followed by mainstream parties. The article concludes that the impact of radical right parties on mainstream policy agendas tends to be overestimated.
... Theories of party and voter behavior have routinely drawn on these assumptions (Budge & Farlie 1983;Petrocik 1996;Budge 2001;Van der Brug 2004;Dolezal et al. 2014). They are strongly supported by the finding that multiparty governments distribute ministerial portfolios according to the issue priorities that can be ascribed to specific party families (Budge & Keman 1990;Bäck et al. 2011). ...
The ideological orientation of parties in government has not been prominently featured in explaining the
rise of regulatory agencies. This paper argues that theories based on political uncertainty and credible commitment can yield meaningful predictions regarding the relationship between government preferences and the establishment of regulatory agencies, when ideological orientation is linked with notions of party competence and issue ownership. The empirical section tests three such hypotheses with data on the establishment of 110 regulatory agencies in 20 European democracies between 1980 and 2009, thus providing one of the most comprehensive cross-national analyses of agency creation to date. The results show that ideologically extreme cabinets are more likely to establish regulatory agencies and right-wing governments create more agencies in the economic than in the social domain. These findings partly qualify the view on the scarce relevance of government preferences in explaining the rise of the agency model in regulation and that the emulation mechanism of the diffusion process is the dominant force beyond agencification.
... Most expert, elite and mass surveys ask respondents to place parties directly on interval scales, which represent the latent dimensions of interest. Moreover, the assumption that political actors are able to take explicit in favour, against or neutral positions on political issues sets the Likert scaling approach apart from the approaches such as the Comparative Manifestos Project (Budge, 2001) and Wordscores (Laver et al, 2003), which attempt to estimate positions on the basis of the relative occurrence of certain type of words or quasi-sentences in political text. It should be rather evident that the relative emphasis political parties place on certain words or quasi-sentences associated with particular issues may or may not reveal their positions on these issues (Laver, 2001). ...
The past few years have seen the advent and proliferation of Voting Advice (or Aid) Applications (VAAs), which offer voting advice on the basis of calculating the ideological congruence between citizens and political actors. Although VAA data have often been used to test many empirical questions regarding voting behaviour and political participation, we know little about the approaches used by VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. This article presents the most common aspects of the VAA approach and examines some methodological issues regarding the phrasing of statements, the format of response scales, the reliability of coding statements into response scales and the reliability and validity of scaling items into dimensions. The article argues that VAAs have a lot of potential but there is also much space for methodological improvements, and therefore concludes with some recommendations for designing VAAs.
... Political parties differ not only in terms of the positions they take on specific issues, but also in the importance they ascribe to certain policies (Baumgartner et al. 2006;Green-Pedersen 2007). In fact, a whole line of research has been developed around the idea that parties compete not by taking diverging positions in the policy space but by emphasising different policy areas (Budge 566 K. Schermann and L. Ennser-Jedenastik 2001;Budge andFarlie 1983a, 1983b). Our next hypothesis is thus a very simple transfer of this saliency logic to the level of policy pledges: the more important a specific policy proposal to a party, the more likely it is to be implemented. ...
While much has been said about the formation and termination of coalitions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the policy output of multiparty governments. The present study attempts to narrow this research gap by analyzing policy making in three Austrian coalition governments between 1999 and 2008. Drawing on the party mandate literature, we conduct a quantitative text analysis of election manifestos that yields a dataset containing over 1,100 pledges. The fulfillment of these pledges is taken as the dependent variable in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate that institutional determinants (adoption in the coalition agreement, ministerial control, and policy status quo) significantly influence the chances of pledge fulfillment and thus, present a powerful predictor of coalition policy output. By contrast, factors related to parties’ preferences (consensus between parties, policy distance, pledge saliency, and majority support in parliament) do not have an impact.
... On the other hand, each party faces incentives to move policy in the direction that will appeal to their party members and voters. Thus, the ideological diversity within a cabinet's coalition matters (Budge 2001;Huber and Inglehart 1995) not only to explain such issues as the duration of the cabinet formation process (Carmignani 2001) or a premature termination (Warwick 1992) but also the birth rate of new national rules. If cabinet heterogeneity is not managed properly, this may in turn slow down decision processes. ...
To date, quantitative assessments of the evolution of national rules have only rarely been conducted, leaving many questions ill-understood and unaddressed, particularly as to the features of rule stock evolution patterns. Can such patterns be traced, and if so, can the underlying causal mechanisms be identified? This article will address these questions. The premise is that forces endogenous to the rule system, inherent to any population of national rules, together with the demographic characteristics of rule makers, and the institutional features of the rule-making bodies jointly determine the birth rates of national rules. Given this key assumption, we offer a three-fold contribution. First, we develop a theoretical framework that integrates ecological with demographic and institutional theories of the evolution of law. Second, we describe longitudinal quantitative data concerning rule (birth) events within the domain of postwar Dutch higher education legislation. Third, we apply negative binomial regression techniques in order to estimate a comprehensive theory-driven model specification of the underlying drivers of national rule birth.
Scholars link the electoral success of right-wing populist parties to a programmatic crisis of representation for mainstream parties, which arguably do not put their voters’ most important issues on the agenda. We have little knowledge about whether these two assumptions hold: To what extent is there a low agenda-responsiveness of mainstream parties, and in how far is their agenda-responsiveness related to the electoral success of right-wing populist parties in Europe? We conceptualize the programmatic crisis of representation as a lack of mainstream party agenda-responsiveness due to dwindling linkage, changing lines of political conflict, and the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. We develop a novel measure of issue-based agenda-responsiveness comparing voters’ most important problems with salient issues in party manifestos. For 109 elections in 26 member states of the European Union (EU) from 2004 to 2019, we find no lack of issue-based agenda-responsiveness between mainstream parties and average citizens, but a lower degree of responsiveness towards the so-called ‘losers of globalization’, especially compared to ‘winners of globalization’. This lower responsiveness, however, is not systematically related to the electoral success of right-wing populist parties whose mobilization contexts are arguably more complex.
Political parties are crucial in crafting effective national climate policies in democratic states. At the same time, there is a practical and academic debate of whether political parties matter for policy output. This article speaks to this debate by investigating the link between what parties say and what parties do with respect to environmental issues. More concretely, it analyzes whether there is a connection between the degree of environmentalism expressed in parties’ electoral manifestos and national environmental policy output. Theoretically, the article draws on existing research on program-to-policy linkages in general and for environmental issues specifically to argue that saliency of environmentalism in party manifestos shapes more stringent environmental policies. This argument is empirically tested by combining data on policy stringency with data on manifesto contents for 28 countries for the period 1990–2015. The findings corroborate the main hypothesis, which has implications for understanding the overall potential for political parties to structure national environmental politics. The article concludes by sketching broader implications for research on parties’ ability to shape national environmental policy across political systems, and across partisan ideologies.
Despite a growing literature on niche parties, little is known about whether and how these parties are responsive to policy competition. Drawing upon data on regionalist parties’ programmatic strategies across Western Europe from 1971 to 2009, I find that these niche parties are more ideologically flexible than previously posited when facing governmental policy appeasement. While they do not shift to a more extreme issue position following increases in a region's decentralization level, regionalist parties do broaden their issue agenda. Issue diversification, however, is limited to those parties whose goals are being met; dissatisfied secessionist parties do not expand their issue emphases after decentralization reforms short of independence. Supported by emerging evidence of similar agenda diversification among appeased green and radical right parties, these analyses further our understanding of niche parties as strategic actors and offer new explanations for variation in the effectiveness of mainstream party tactics towards them. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
This article adopts an inductive approach to the study of party positions in the Italian Parliament during the centre-left governments of Enrico Letta (2013–2014) and Matteo Renzi (2014–2016), as they emerge from the investiture vote. This is a unique moment in the relationship between Parliament and Government because the parliamentary groups debate the Government’s programme before delivering their first confidence vote. The research aim is to assess the alignment of the Italian parties in Parliament following the decline of the traditional left-right cleavage and the rise of populism. A content analysis of the texts of the speeches delivered during the parliamentary debate before the confidence votes confirming the investiture of the Letta and Renzi governments provides a survey of the political themes addressed by the latter and by the main Italian parliamentary groups. The findings highlight the multidimensional character of the competition space and show how party alignment is affected by the interplay between the supranational dimension (European integration) and the state’s capacity to provide services and guarantee citizens’ rights. It is argued that the emergence of new parties has favoured the re-establishment of a multi-polar pattern of competition, but without clear ideological connotations, in contrast with the situation of the earlier post-war period.
Quite a number of authors have explored the relationship between coalition agreements and governmental policies. While some studied the emphasis of policy issues within these documents, others looked at specific policy pledges made in those manifestos or in government agreements. Both streams of research found coalition agreements to determine the ensuing policies of the government. However, little work has been done on the link between both types of research. This study aims at bridging that gap using Belgian data from 1992-2007. The goal is to examine whether parties tend to be more specific when dealing with those issues they emphasize more in their programs and assess whether specific proposals perform better at explaining ensuing policies than policy emphasis (using the entire program). To do so, we analyze which type of information in party manifestos best predicts attention in the Belgian government agreements and ministerial councils.
Der Beitrag analysiert die EU-bezogene Printmedienberichterstattung im Bundestagswahlkampf 2013 und dem Europawahlkampf 2014. Zwischen allgemeinen Aussagen zur EU, policy-spezifischen und konstitutiven Fragen differenzierend untersucht er, welche Akteure welche dieser Fragen in welchem Wahlkampf adressierten. Ferner prüft er, ob die Parteien in beiden Wahlkämpfen unterscheidbare Positionen zu EU-Fragen kommunizierten. Die vergleichende Analyse zeigt, dass beide Wahlkämpfe hinsichtlich der relativen Bedeutung der drei Typen von Europathemen große Ähnlichkeit aufweisen. Sie zeigt ferner, dass die Herausforderer-Parteien in beiden Wahlkämpfen – anders als angenommen – nicht durch besondere Betonung konstitutiver Fragen auffielen. Schließlich zeigt die Analyse, dass sich in beiden Wahlkämpfen nur für wenige Themen unterscheidbare Parteipositionen identifizieren ließen.
This article examines the shifting territorial goals of two of the most electorally successful and politically relevant nationalist parties in Spain: the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and Convergència i Unió (CiU). Whilst both parties have often co-operated to challenge the authority of the Spanish state, their territorial goals have varied over time and from party to party. We map these changes and identify key drivers of territorial preferences; these include party ideology, the impact of the financial crisis, the territorial structure of the state, party competition, public opinion, government versus opposition, the impact of multi-level politics and the particularities of party organisation. These factors interact to shape what nationalist parties say and do on core territorial issues, and contribute to their oscillation between territorial accommodation and secession. However, the way in which these factors play out is highly context-specific, and this accounts for the different territorial
preferences of the PNV and CiU. These findings advance our understanding of persistent territorial tensions in Spain, and provide broader theoretical insights into the internal and
external dynamics that determine the territorial positioning of stateless nationalist and regionalist parties in plurinational states.
Wie beeinflusst die Wettbewerbskonstellation zwischen Regierungskoalition und Opposition die ideologische Polarisierung im Parteiensystem? Wie wirken sich große Koalitionen, wie aktuell in Deutschland, theoretisch auf die Mechanik von Parteiensystemen aus? Zur Beantwortung dieser Forschungsfragen nehmen wir zunächst eine mikrofundierte Aktualisierung der Theorie Sartoris (1976) vor. Darauf aufbauend analysieren wir in einer quantitativen Large-N Studie auf Basis der Manifesto-Daten die Wirkungen unterschiedlicher Regierungs-Oppositionskonstellationen. Wir zeigen sowohl theoretisch als auch empirisch, dass nicht die rechnerische Größe einer Koalition entscheidend für eine zunehmende ideologische Polarisierung ist. Ihre schädliche Wirkung entfaltet sie aufgrund ihrer ideologischen Zentrumslage.
Das Laizitätsprinzip hat sich in Frankreich in den letzten Jahren zu einem zentralen Konfliktthema im politischen Wettbewerb entwickelt. In diesem Kapitel werden diese Politisierungsprozesse einer eingehenden Analyse unterzogen. Auf der Grundlage einer allgemeinen theoretischen Diskussion über die Reaktionsstrategien politischer Akteure zu religionspolitischen Konflikten werden die Positionen französischer Parteien zur Laizität untersucht. Die Analyse konzentriert sich auf die Laizitätskonzeptionen der drei gegenwärtig relevantesten Parteien in der politischen Landschaft Frankreichs: der Sozialisten, der postgaullistischen Republikaner und des Front National. Dabei stehen sowohl die historischen Entwicklungen in vergleichender Perspektive als auch die aktuellsten Politisierungsprozesse nach den terroristischen Anschlägen von 2015 im Vordergrund.
This chapter analyzes party positions on higher education policies, particularly tuition fees and subsidies. The literature thus far has largely neglected to study party positions on (higher) education empirically, mainly due to a lack of comparative data. Against this background, I exploit expert survey data on party preferences towards higher education across Europe (Rohrschneider and Whitefield. The strain of representation: How parties represent diverse voters in Western and Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) as well as a dataset on party positions in Great Britain over 40 years utilizing party manifestos. The chapter finds, firstly, that parties do hold distinct positions on and do care about higher education finance. Secondly, parties’ higher education policy positions vary by ideology as expected by the Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory. Thirdly, confirming this theory, positive feedback-effects alter party positions on higher education finance.
In diesem Kapitel wird die Kommunikation der Parteien im Wahlkampf anhand von Pressemitteilungen analysiert. Zunächst wird untersucht, welche Themen von Parteien im Wahlkampf kommuniziert werden. Danach wird am Beispiel von Bündnis 90/Die Grünen die Wirkung der Themenkommunikation auf das Wahlverhalten erforscht. Dazu werden sowohl Umfrage- als auch Prognosemarktdaten herangezogen. Die empirische Analyse findet dabei keine Hinweise darauf, dass Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, wie vielfach behauptet, aufgrund falscher Themensetzung das als enttäuschend wahrgenommene Wahlergebnis erzielten.
Wahlen sind das institutionelle Zentrum demokratischer Systeme. Jede noch so minimalistische Demokratiedefinition kommt am Wahlvorgang nicht vorbei. Das gilt auch für die Demokratiedefinition mittlerer Reichweite, wie sie das Embedded-democracy-Konzept beinhaltet, das diesem Beitrag zugrunde liegt. Das Wahlregime hat eine Repräsentationsfunktion, soll Zurechenbarkeit und Verantwortlichkeit (accountability) produzieren und Responsivität sichern. Während die demokratische Zurechenbarkeit vor allem darin besteht, dass (Regierungs-) Parteien ihre Entscheidungen transparent machen und dadurch den Wählern die Möglichkeit geben, sie bei der nächsten Wahl mit dem Wahlzettel positiv oder negativ für ihre Handlungen zu sanktionieren, bezieht sich die Responsivität auf die Frage, inwieweit einzelne Parteien oder auch das Parteiensystem als Ganzes auf Bedürfnisse und Interessen der Wähler programmatisch und durch ihr (Regierungs-) Handeln eingehen (Kriesi 2013, S. 613).
Research on the link between tourism and politics still remains relatively underdeveloped and more so when one considers the link between this phenomenon and the study of elections or psephology. This is despite the importance of elections to the democratic process and to considerations of the distribution of scarce resources particularly in countries heavily dependent on tourism. This chapter seeks to address this lacuna in scholarship through a theoretical explication of the nature of political issues and voter response. Applied to the development of a possible research agenda, this would aid in exploring the salience of tourism within electoral agendas from a relational perspective.
Von einer zunehmenden Personalisierung des Wahlkampfes wurde schon bei vorherigen Wahlen vielfach gesprochen (Moke et al. 2002: 159; Brettschneider 2002b: 16; Farrell 2000: 94; Holtz-Bacha 2002: 48–49), sie hat aber zweifellos mit der Bundestagswahl 2002 einen neuen Höhepunkt erreicht. Zusätzlich zu den üblichen Fernsehinterviews mit dem Kanzler bzw. mit dessen Herausforderer, fanden in Deutschland erstmals sog. TV-Duelle statt: Gerhard Schröder und Edmund Stoiber, die Spitzenkandidaten der beiden großen Parteien, trafen in zwei Fernsehdebatten aufeinander. Diesen waren zwei Print-Duelle vorausgegangen; politisch Interessierte konnten Kanzler und Herausforderer also insgesamt viermal unmittelbar miteinander vergleichen (siehe Tabelle 1).
Several studies report an ideological convergence of the main parties in the European countries. In Portugal, analyses of PS and PSD frequently consider them to be identical or extremely similar parties. This article is an attempt to test these ideas looking at the positions in left-right scale from 1990 to 2010. We use secondary data with the evaluations of specialists, citizens and election programmes. The results indicate that PS and PSD tend to be closer than what has been observed in other European countries, but there isn’t an approach. However it is possible to conclude that there is a common evolution to the right.
Die SPD präsentierte sich im Bundestagswahlkampf 2005 als Garant einer auf sozialen Ausgleich bedachten politischen Kraft, während CDU/CSU ein deutlich liberales Profil in sozioökonomischen Themen zeigte. Dieses Bild wurde insbesondere durch die auf den Vergleich der Steuerkonzepte von Union und SPD ausgelegte Anzeigenkampagne der Sozialdemokraten und durch die Nominierung von Paul Kirchhof als Finanzminister seitens der CDU/CSU verstärkt. Im Folgenden soll anhand einer empirischen Analyse der Wahlprogramme erstens überprüft werden, ob die Parteien zu den Bundestagswahlen 2005 ein solches programmatisches Verhalten an den Tag legten. Es wird dabei unterschieden zwischen der Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik einerseits und gesellschaftspolitischen Fragen andererseits als die den deutschen Parteienwettbewerb maßgeblich prägenden Konfliktdimensionen (Lipset/Rokkan 1967; Pappi 1973, 1977, 1984). In einem zweiten Schritt wird die Analyse auf die Ebene der Bundesländer und die dortigen Landtagswahlen im Zeitraum zwischen 1998 und 2006 erweitert. Es wird dabei der Frage nachgegangen, ob die programmatische Haltung der Parteien zu den Bundestagswahlen 2002 und 2005 den Positionen der entsprechenden Landesparteien folgt oder ob die Parteien auf Bundes- und Landesebene hinsichtlich ihrer inhaltlichen Vorstellungen unabhängig voneinander agieren. Die Grundlage für die empirische Überprüfung stellt ein Datensatz dar, welcher die mit Hilfe der Wordscore-Technik (Laver u.a. 2003; Giannetti/Laver 2005; Pappi/Shikano 2005: 515) extrahierten politikfeldspezifischen Positionen der Bundes- und Landesparteien enthält.
Party competition is a constitutive component of modern democracies. While indispensable, the division of parliament into competing political parties at the same time creates challenges for these parties. Specifically, the challenges are providing stable government, arriving at government decisions, and making these decisions part and parcel of a coherent and effective government policy. The literature has identified a myriad of mechanisms that government parties devise to master these challenges. For instance, single-party majority governments can use powerful explicit remedies of internal coordination such as electoral manifestos and strong leaders who unite the number one positions of the party (party leader) and government (Prime Minister). Single-party minority governments, in turn, may either exploit their pivotal position in the legislature or resort to parliamentary support arrangements. Finally, coalition governments often rely on political institutions as coordination mechanisms or conceive tailor-made means and mechanisms of coalition governance. The literature has identified these mechanisms, outlined how they function, and tried to define the conditions that make the resorting to these mechanisms more likely. Measures of the actual effects of such mechanisms and their optimal configuration constitute the research front. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013. All rights are reserved.
Parties need to adapt their policy platforms in order to win elections, yet this is not without risk. Policy shifts can reduce credibility and foster intra-party conflicts. As a result, parties tend to proceed with caution when programmatic changes are made. In this article two risk reduction methods are formulated as hypotheses and investigated. First, we claim that parties will prefer making changes to the amount of attention issues get in a manifesto than to the positions they defend. Second, we argue that the amount of change is related to the ideological and electoral importance of the issue. In other words, we assume that parties are less likely to make positional changes on issues they own because this can possibly bring about loss in credibility and contradicts with the fact that politicians and party members are policy driven. These hypotheses are examined with new data gathered through the content analysis of the party manifestos of the Belgian Liberal party and the social-democratic party for elections held between 1961 and 2010. The article concludes that parties make smaller positional changes as opposed to changes in the issues they emphasize. Only weak evidence was found for the fact that the positional flexibility toward an issue correlates with the ideological and electoral importance of an issue.
This research note extends the confrontational approach to estimating party policy positions by providing a way to estimate uncertainty associated with the measurements. The confrontational approach is a flexible method of determining party policy positions, which is ideally suited to measure parties’ positions on issues that are specific to a country or period in time. We introduce a method of estimating the uncertainty of confrontational estimates by restating the approach as a special case of an item response theory, opening up the possibility of using the confrontational approach not only as a descriptive tool but also as a means of testing hypotheses on party policy preferences. We illustrate our model using analysis of the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election and the 2009 European elections.
Parliamentarians and their party groups can employ many different instruments to communicate policy statements to their electorate (debates in plenary, presentations of committee reports, oral questions, written questions, and interpellations). Therefore, the design of these instruments should be analysed in one common framework. This paper seeks to provide a first step towards this goal by mapping and explaining the centralisation of parliamentary policy statements in all western European countries with a parliamentary system. It is argued that, on a theoretical level, there are two different causes for a stronger or weaker centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements: the electoral connection and efficiency. Empirically, it is shown that there are striking differences in centralisation both within and between countries which are worth exploring further. Moreover, the results of the statistical models suggest that the electoral connection is the driving factor behind the centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements.
Si l'attitude face à l'intégration européenne est une ligne de fracture ancienne au sein des partis de droite, les transformations récentes du système partisan français, surtout à droite, mènent à réévaluer le poids de cet enjeu dans la structuration de la compétition politique. Suivant les données de sondages d'experts récents et les résultats d'une analyse systématique des programmes des partis, l'enjeu européen n'apparaît pas toutefois aujourd'hui constituer une dimension autonome de l'espace politique français tant la position sur cet enjeu entretient une relation forte, mais de type quadratique, avec les positions traditionnelles sur l'axe gauche – droite. Ainsi, si cet enjeu a contribué à l'émergence de nouveaux partis, notamment autour de l'idée souverainiste, l'hypothèse d'un réalignement du système partisan français en fonction de l'attitude face à l'intégration européenne ne connaît aujourd'hui aucune confirmation empirique.
To what extent and in what way does European integration fuel state restructuring? This is a long-standing but still not a fully answered question. While the theoretical literature suggests a positive link between the two, previous empirical studies have reached contrasting conclusions. The article offers an alternative testing of the proposition, centred on the role of party strategies as a causal mechanism, analysed across space and time. On the cross-sectional axis, it focusses on parties in Flanders and Wallonia (Belgium), Lombardy and Sicily (Italy), Catalonia and Andalusia (Spain), and Scotland and Wales (United Kingdom). On the cross-temporal axis, it focuses on four critical junctures connecting integration and state restructuring. It analyses the degree to which 'Europe' has been strategically used in connection to state restructuring and which conditions have been necessary and/or sufficient to that outcome. The analysis has been conducted on the basis of a Qualitative Comparative Analysis methodology. Five main results emerge: (1) overall, parties have generally exploited 'Europe' in connection with state restructuring to a limited extent only but in a few cases exploitation has been very intense and intimately linked to strategic turning points; (2) 'Europe' has overwhelmingly been used to support state restructuring; (3) the most intense use has been made by regional parties with a secessionist position and positive attitude to the EU; (4) ` use of Europe' is a product of a complex conjunctural effect of several conditions; (5) it has increased over time but is not a linear product of integration, a sharp drop can be observed between the two most recent time points. These findings show that European integration can indeed exercise causal influence upon state restructuring via party strategies but that this is highly contingent on the complex interaction of multiple factors.
The large theoretical and empirical body of research on different rational choice concepts has provided a wide array of material for both critics and adherents of this approach. However, the ability rational choice theories offer to incorporate assumptions developed in different research areas in unitary logical concepts has been seldom highlighted. In order to demonstrate this ability, I have developed a model of the emergence of the political agenda, called the Issue Management Model, which tries to extend the Economic Theory of Democracy to the requirements of the modern media democracy and to connect its main assumptions with some concepts of shaping the political agenda from political psychology and media communication. The article pursues three objectives: first, it demonstrates the ability of the rational choice theories to link their key assumptions to empirical results of studies in different academic disciplines. Second, it discusses the extent to which the Economic Theory of Democracy can be aligned with the requirements of modern democracy. Last, it attempts to bring together several concepts of the emergence of the political agenda. The intention of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the formation of political agenda or, strictly speaking, of the construction of party strategies aimed at surviving in office.
Die Wahlprogramme der Parteien stellen Politikangebote an die Wähler dar. Es sind die Policypakete, zwischen denen die Bürger alle vier Jahre entscheiden können. In diesem Beitrag beantworten wir die Frage, inwieweit man aus den Wahlprogrammen Information über die ideologischen Richtungen he-rauslesen kann, die von den einzelnen Parteien vertreten werden. Hierfür treffen wir eine wichtige Vorentscheidung: Wir analysieren die Parteipositionen für den Bereich der Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Finanzpolitik getrennt vom Bereich der Innen-, Rechts- und Gesellschaftspolitik. Wir erwarten nämlich für das deutsche Parteiensystem eine zweidimensionale Konfliktstruktur, die Laver/Hunt als Benelux-Konstellation bezeichnen. Der untersuchte Zeitraum reicht von 1980 bis 2002, in dem zwei Regie-rungswechsel und zwei Eintritte neuer Parteien ins Parteiensystem stattfanden. Unsere empirische Analyse, die die Faktorenanalyse auf die Daten aus dem Comparative-Manifesto-Projekt anwendet, weist für beide Politikfelder zwei latente Dimensionen nach. Der erste Faktor erfasst die zeitspezifi-schen Gemeinsamkeiten der Wahlprogramme und der zweite Faktor erfasst die ideologischen Unter-schiede der Parteien.
Immigration and integration issues have become increasingly important in West European politics, partly as a consequence of the rise of anti-immigration parties. This article investigates how immigration and integration issues have become politicised in the Netherlands since the beginning of the 1990s, what role anti-immigration parties have played in this process and the extent to which party positions on these issues are structured by a left-right dimension. It examines changes in debates about immigration and integration issues by means of a content analysis of party programmes, measuring changes in frames, positions and salience. It concludes that (1) immigration and integration issues have been given more attention by parties since the early 1990s, (2) parties have replaced their discourse of socio-economic integration by a discourse of cultural integration and (3) parties have adopted a monoculturalist instead of a multiculturalist position in the immigration and integration debate. However, despite these changes to the immigration and integration debate, it remains structured by a left–right divide, with left-wing parties being in favour of more lenient, multiculturalist policies and right-wing parties being in favour of more restrictive, monoculturalist policies. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that many of the changes were already set in motion by mainstream parties prior to the successful electoral breakthrough of anti-immigration parties.
The literature on the partisan foundations of education policies leads to ambiguous expectations with regard to the predominant cleavage structures in party competition on this topic. There is disagreement as to whether leftist or rightist parties are responsible for increasing spending on education, while others claim that educational expansion has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over the topic of educational expansion, relying on data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. It identifies political parties as issue-owners' and issue-ignorers', respectively, and finds considerable variation with regard to cleavage structures of party competition between countries and across time. One tentative conclusion from the analysis is that policy legacies play an important role in shaping cleavage structures.
The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data are the most popular source for parties' positions on the left–right and other ideological and policy dimensions. Over the past few years, several researchers have identified various methodological problems in the CMP data, but third-party users rarely acknowledge them. This article classifies the problems associated with the CMP into four areas: (1) theoretical underpinnings of the coding scheme; (2) document selection; (3) coding reliability; and (4) scaling. The article reviews each area systematically and concludes with a set of recommendations regarding the use of the CMP data.
George Tsebelis’ veto players approach has become a prominent theory to analyze various research questions in political science. Studies that apply veto player theory deal with the impact of institutions and partisan preferences of legislative activity and policy outcomes. It is used to measure the degree of policy change and, thus, reform capacity in national and international political systems. This volume contains the analysis of leading scholars in the field on these topics and more recent developments regarding theoretical and empirical progress in the area of political reform-making. The contributions come from research areas of political science where veto player theory plays a significant role, including, positive political theory, legislative behavior and legislative decision-making in national and supra-national political systems, policy making and government formation. The contributors to this book add to the current scholarly and public debate on the role of veto players, making it of interest to scholars in political science and policy studies as well as policymakers worldwide.
Zusammenfassung??Das auf der Salienztheorie aufbauende Konzept des Issue-Ownerships (Budge/Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996) geht davon aus, dass Parteien in bestimmten Themen ?ber einen spezifischen W?hlerr?ckhalt verf?gen. F?r Mehrparteiensysteme haben Narud und Valen (2001) dar?ber hinaus gezeigt, dass Parteien f?r den Wahlerfolg mit dem richtigen Issue-Marketing agieren m?ssen. An diesen Marketing-Gedanken kn?pft der Artikel unter R?ckgriff auf das aus der Mikro?konomie stammende Gutenberg-Modell (1984) an. Es wird das Bild eines oligopolistischen Issue-Marktes entworfen, in dem Parteien ?ber die Gestaltung ihrer Programmatik kurzfristig W?hlerstimmen gewinnen k?nnen. Eine zu starke Vernachl?ssigung ihrer historisch erworbenen Kernthemen f?hrt zu Verlusten, sofern kein neues Kernthema erfolgreich besetzt werden kann. Die entwickelten Hypothesen werden mit Hilfe des CMP-Wahlprogrammdatensatzes (Budge et al. 2001) in einer Panelregression f?r Deutschland, D?nemark, ?sterreich und die Niederlande ?berpr?ft. Dabei kann insbesondere f?r sozialdemokratische Parteien der unterstellte Zusammenhang zwischen Programmatik und W?hlerzuspruch best?tigt werden.
This study asks how and to what extent political parties in six West European countries - Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK - have addressed the process of European integration in national election campaigns since the 1970s. Based on a content analysis of newspaper data, the results show that Eurosceptic mobilization in national election campaigns has become most pronounced in countries where the public have always been rather apprehensive about European integration. In line with the ‘new cleavage’ hypothesis, in Switzerland and the UK mobilization around European integration is primarily driven by conservatives and/or the new populist right. In countries where the process of European integration is politically less salient, conservatives and/or the new populist right have been less Eurosceptic and their mobilization efforts have been more limited. While providing mixed support for the ‘new cleavage’ hypothesis, the study provides scant support for the received wisdom that Euroscepticism among political parties is essentially dictated by ‘opposition politics’.
The European Parliament (EP) can act as a democratic check on the European Commission. By relaxing the assumption of the EP as a unitary actor, this article examines factors determining the behaviour of individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in parliamentary scrutiny. It tests propositions based on the costs and benefits of each voting outcome in the context of the four EP roll-call votes cast in the period from 1995 to 2002 on the EP’s decision to grant budgetary discharge to the Commission. The main findings are: (i) ideology matters in the MEPs’ attitude toward the Commission; (ii) national parties influence the MEPs’ behaviour significantly in the discharge votes; and (iii) the ties between the Commissioners and the MEPs through national partisanship influence the MEPs’ attitude to the Commission when it is under threat.
Starting from a number of deficiencies in the Comparative Manifestos Project approach to studying left-right policy scales in election programs, an additive model based on the distinction between position and valence issues is proposed. This allows analysis of the policy space in established democracies under the assumption that left and right have different meanings from country to country and over time. The model is illustrated with regard to four Western European countries with different types of party system: Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Empirical findings affirm that the procedures are workable and that the data generated are capable of yielding detailed information beyond that which previous approaches are able to deliver. In addition, preliminary tests on external validity produce reassuring results.
In an updated version of his well-known work on the radical right, Kitschelt attributes the persistent success of this type of party to a new winning formula. Where the radical right first campaigned on a neoliberal and authoritarian programme, it now presents a more centrist economic position. The article tests this idea through a reconstruction of the positions of the French Front National, the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the Dutch Lijst Pim Fortuyn, and establishes that some, but not all, radical right parties make use of the new winning formula. Moreover, innovative analysis of the positions of radical right parties in West European party systems reveals that Kitschelt's theory needs to be improved on several points, most notably when it comes to the definition of concepts and the operationalization of dimensions.
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