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Extending Party Estimates to Governments and Electors
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.
In coalition governments, parties need to agree on a common policy position. Whose preferences prevail? The proportionality hypothesis, the idea that coalition partners’ influence on policy is proportional to their share of seats, has been used widely in the literature on democratic representation, ideological congruence, and coalition politics. In my analysis of competing theories aimed at determining what influences policy compromise in multiparty governments, I reject the proportionality hypothesis. My results suggest instead that coalition partners exert equal influence on policy compromises, independent of their number of seats. More extensive analysis also provides evidence for increased party influence on policies when the party is the formateur or closer to the parliamentary median, ceteris paribus. As a by-product of my analysis, I provide a simple and better proxy for measuring a government's position when this position is not directly observable.
Much of the existing literature shows that factor mobility across industries has important political economic implications but that it is exogenous to the political process. This article argues that labor?s mobility across industries can be endogenous to changes of power relations due to partisan reasons. Based on a general equilibrium model, the prediction is that, when unions are decentralized, governments led by left-wing parties seek and obtain higher labor mobility than do governments led by rightist parties. However, as unions become more centralized, this distinction becomes less clear-cut. Time series cross-sectional analyses of OECD countries from 1960 to 1999 support this prediction and the endogenous labor mobility hypothesis.
This article examines the extent to which differences in educational attainment produce unequal political representation. The lowest educated have almost disappeared from political office-holding, and some scholars argue that, subsequently, their preferences are underrepresented. However, the substantive underrepresentation of the least educated has yet to be empirically established. Based on data of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies 1994–2010, this study finds that the preferences of least educated citizens are worse represented than the preferences of higher educated citizens, indicating that political representation is biased towards the highest educated. This unequal representation is found on moral, socio-economic and cultural issues. However, the underrepresentation of the lowest educated is not continually present. This study shows that successful right-wing populist parties enhanced the substantive representation of the least educated in certain policy areas.
In this article, we analyse the impact of intra-party procedures of candidate selection for national elections on the representativeness of parties towards their voters. With regard to candidate selection we distinguish between two dimensions: inclusion and centralization. While the first identifies the type of selectorate for candidate nominations (members, delegates or committees), the second captures the territorial unit in which the nomination is decided (local, regional or national). Based on data for 53 parties in 9 Western European countries for the period 1970 to 1990, the analysis points to the relevance of the inclusion dimension. Parties in which party elites decide the nomination of candidates show slightly higher degrees of representation than parties with more inclusive selectorates. We conduct our analysis separately for two frequently used but theoretically different concepts of representation: cross-sectional representation (at one point in time) and dynamic representation (over time). Our analysis shows that candidate-selection procedures only matter for the first concept. The empirically inconsistent results between the two concepts are due to deficiencies in the way dynamic representation is currently operationalized.
The role of members of political parties is ambiguous because it entails both benefits and costs. In order to shed light on the question of whether members are an asset or a liability for parties, I examine whether parties use their ideology on a left–right dimension as a collective incentive for the appeal to actual and potential party members. A quantitative analysis of the effects of changes in membership on partisan ideological change, covering 61 parties in 11 Western democracies from the 1950s to the early 1990s, shows that there is a weak, but statistically significant, effect. An additional analysis of two mechanisms by which membership has an effect refutes the alternative explanation that positional changes of the median member account for partisan ideological change. In total, the results indicate that members are both an asset and a liability and that parties try to keep the two in balance.
During the euro crisis policy-makers tried to re-establish credibility with austere budgets. Studies of austerity have been plagued by measurement and endogeneity problems. We provide a direct test of the effect of austerity on confidence by calculating the immediate impact of austere budgets on government bonds. We build a unique database of budget dates and conduct event studies of 223 (future) Eurozone budgets. Since austere budgets are enacted in particular circumstances, we use a treatment effects design to measure markets’ responses. Our findings are discouraging for the argument that austerity can provide a positive credibility shock. Markets do not welcome austerity. On the contrary, austere budgets are associated with substantial interest rate increases. These results underline how constrained governments are in debt crises.
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 article theorizes and analyzes two aspects of government building in the German states while paying special attention to interrelations between the federal and state level. First, we examine which factors influence the choice of the partisan composition of the next government. Secondly, we ask for the determinants of the policy positions of the newly formed coalition governments. Original empirical results show that both government formation and policy formulation in the German Länder are clearly affected by federal politics. State-level coalitions cross-cutting the federal government–opposition divide are avoided, and the strength of this effect depends on institutional context and the federal election cycle. The policy position of state-level governments is affected by the position of the respective federal government. On the economic policy dimension, all state-level governments move towards the federal government. On the social policy dimension, those state governments whose partisan composition is congruent with the federal government seem to move away from the latter.
Plurality-based elections between two major parties or candidates sometimes feature small, centrist, third parties. We modify the standard two-party spatial model of policy-seeking parties to incorporate a centrist third party, and we show that the presence of such a party—even if it has no chance of winning—motivates the major parties to propose policies that are much more divergent than without the third party. We derive explicit formulas for party locations at a three-party equilibrium and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of that equilibrium. We show that, over time, the major parties can be expected to shift their policies in the same direction relative to each other but in the opposite direction relative to the minor party. The predictions of this model are compared with estimates of party policy locations during appropriate periods in postwar Britain.
This research note introduces a new dataset, called ‘Pep-Us,’ containing positional and salience estimates of parties and governments in the European Union. The point estimates, which all come with measures of uncertainty, pertain to nine important EU policy domains as well as a European Integration and an ideological scale. The dataset is based on statistics from hand-coded European party manifestos provided by the ‘Euromanifestos’ project (Wüst and Volkens, 2003), and corrects for stochastic error using simulation (Benoit, Mikhaylov and Laver, 2009). The manifestos are scaled using a novel scaling technique for count data that employs principles from psychophysics (Lowe et al., 2010). For most European domestic parties and major European Parliament groups, the estimates range from 1979 to 2004, while for member state governments time-series between 1998 and 2007 are available. The dataset and replication material will be made freely available from a special website by November 2010.
To describe and explain legislative politics in the European Union and to assess its democratic quality we need to measure the political importance (salience) of legislative proposals. The existing literature uses several indicators to measure salience. This article compares measures of salience based on three types of data source (expert interviews, text analysis and media coverage) using a large number of legislative proposals that cover a variety of policy fields and types of proposal. Different measures of salience often do not yield similar values.
This article introduces the ‘Positions and Salience in European Union Politics’ dataset. The dataset comprises positional and salience estimates of more than 250 parties and governments in the European Union (EU). These estimates, which all come with measures of uncertainty, pertain to 10 important EU policy domains as well as a European integration and a left-right scale. The dataset exploits statistics from hand-coded European party manifestos provided by the ‘Euromanifestos’ project and uses simulation to correct stochastic error. The manifestos are scaled using a technique for count data that employs principles from psychophysics. For most European domestic parties and major European Parliament groups, the estimates range from 1979 to 2004, while for member state governments time-series between 1998 and 2007 are available. The dataset may be of use to scholars interested in European integration, Europeanization, compliance research or EU legislative decision-making.
This article analyses the dimensionality and nature of political conflict in the European Union Council of Ministers between 1998 and 2007. By comparing policy platforms of member state governments, multidimensional scaling techniques are employed to make inferences about the dimensionality of the Council's political space. The dimensions are interpreted performing 1250 multiple regression analyses. The results largely corroborate the assumption that cleavages are structured along geographically defined clusters of states. After Eastern enlargement (2004), a North-South divide was replaced by an East-West cleavage. The analysis moreover suggests that there are two stable conflict dimensions within the Council's political space. The first is an integration dimension that represents the support for deepening European Union integration and the transfer of sovereignty to a supranational level. The second is a 'policy' dimension, manifested predominantly in disputes over redistributive policies.
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