Contagious Parties van Spanje, Joost
Party politics,
09/2010, Letnik:
16, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Anti-immigration parties have experienced electoral lift-off in most Western democracies, although the consequences of their victories for real-life policy outcomes have remained largely unexplored. ...A key question is: do electoral pressures from anti-immigration parties have a ‘contagion’ impact on other parties’ immigration policy positions? In this article, I argue and empirically demonstrate that this is the case. On the basis of a comparative-empirical study of 75 parties in 11 Western European countries, I conclude that this contagion effect involves entire party systems rather than the mainstream right only. In addition, I find that opposition parties are more vulnerable to this contagion effect than parties in government. The findings of this article imply that anti-immigration parties are able to influence policy output in their political systems without entering government.
Kriesi et al. announced the birth of a new cleavage in contemporary Western Europe, one dividing the winners and losers of globalisation. Their studies in 2006 and 2008 contain analyses of party ...positions in six countries, based on the contents of editorial sections of newspapers. This article challenges the main conclusion of Kriesi et al. by demonstrating − on the basis of two expert surveys − that party positions are mainly structured by one dimension. The structure detected by Kriesi et al. in their analysis of parties is not found, except concerning voter positions. A consequence of this article's findings is that large groups of citizens are not represented by any parties, in particular those who are left‐wing on socio‐economic issues and right‐wing on cultural issues. The article in its conclusion discusses possible causes for the differences between these findings and those of Kriesi et al., and the implications of these findings for democratic representation.
Abstract
Historical classifications of journalistic traditions are the backbone of comparative explanations for political news coverage. This study assesses the validity of the dominant media systems ...framework and proposes and tests a novel framework, which states that a history of authoritarianism affects today’s coverage. To facilitate a clean cross-national comparison, we focus on the same person and measurement in 12 Western democracies, that is, the use of the pejorative terms “sexist,” “racist,” “dictator,” and equivalents to describe Donald Trump. Our manually validated automated content analysis (2016–2018; N = 27,830) shows that content varies along with countries’ media and authoritarian history: pejoration is more common in countries with a polarized pluralist media system and former authoritarian countries than elsewhere. Newspapers’ ideology does not matter, irrespective of countries’ level of political parallelism or experiences with authoritarianism. Combined, we provide new methodological and theoretical handles to further comparative communication research in Western democracies.
Conventional wisdom dictates that the more citizens lean towards either end of the ideological spectrum, the lower their support for democracy. The main model pitted against this ..."rigidity-of-the-extremes model" is the "rigidity-of-the-right model". This model assumes that rightist citizens are less supportive. This study proposes and empirically demonstrates the validity of an alternative model, which we call "the authoritarian legacy model". This model predicts that whether leftist or rightist citizens are less supportive of democracy depends on countries' experience with left- or right-authoritarianism. To evaluate its validity, we present a systematic comparative investigation of the relation between citizens' ideological and democratic beliefs, using European and World Values Survey data from 38 European countries (N = 105,495; 1994-2008). In line with this model, our analyses demonstrate that democratic support is lowest among leftist citizens in former left-authoritarian countries and among rightist citizens in former right-authoritarian countries. We find that this relation persists even among generations that grew up after authoritarian rule. These findings suggest that traditional ideological rigidity models are unsuitable for the study of citizens' democratic beliefs.
News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This study investigates explanations for cross‐national and over‐time variation in news media ...coverage of EU affairs drawing on large‐scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in the EU‐15 (1999), EU‐25 (2004) and EU‐27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament (EP) elections. The analyses focus in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to media characteristics and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during EP election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU in combination with overall more negative positions towards the EU, the more visible the news. Also, increases in EU news visibility from one election to the next and the Europeanness of the news are determined by a country's elite positions. The findings are discussed in light of the EU's alleged communication deficit.
Extant research is not very specific about when the media matter for vote choice. In this study, we test multiple theories about the influences of the media on vote choice in 21 countries. The ...European Parliamentary (EP) election campaign offers a unique research context to test these influences. We rely on a two-wave panel survey conducted in 21 European Union (EU) member states, asking both vote intentions before the campaign and reported actual votes (among 14,000 voters). We link these data to media content data of campaign coverage between the two waves in these countries (37,000 coded news items). We conclude that media evaluations of the EU affect voting for Eurosceptic parties. On average, the more positive the evaluations of the EU a voter is exposed to, the less likely she or he is to cast a vote for a Eurosceptic party. In addition, our findings indicate that in countries where political parties have markedly different views on EU issues, the more a voter is exposed to framing of the EU in terms of benefits derived from membership in these countries, the less likely she or he is to cast a Eurosceptic vote. This suggests that the outcome of the 2009 EP elections was influenced by how the media covered EU-related news during the campaign.
This study examined if and for whom prosecution of politicians for hate speech undermines support for the legal system and democracy. Three research designs were combined to investigate the case of ...Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who was convicted for hate speech against minorities in 2016. First, an experiment showed that observing a guilty verdict decreased support among ‘assimilationists’ who oppose the multicultural society. This deterioration of support was found among the entire group of assimilationists, regardless of whether they voted for Wilders. Secondly, a quasi-experiment demonstrated that assimilationists who were interviewed after Wilders' conviction indicated less support than those who were interviewed before the verdict and compared to a pre-test. Thirdly, a nine-year panel study suggested that these effects accumulate into long-term discontent. This case therefore demonstrates that hate speech prosecution can damage the democratic system it is intended to defend.
Coalition governments in established democracies incur, on average, an electoral ‘cost of governing’. This cost varies across coalition partners, and is higher for anti‐political‐establishment ...parties. This is because, if such a party participates in a coalition, it loses the purity of its message by being seen to cooperate with the political establishment. In order to demonstrate that anti‐political‐establishment parties suffer an additional cost of governing, this article builds on the work by Van der Brug et al. and refines the standard cost of governing theory by ‘bringing the party back in’. The results of the analyses, based on 594 observations concerning 51 parties in seven Western European countries, cast doubt on the conventional concept of a cost of governing that pertains to all parties equally. The findings call for a major revision of the standard cost of governing literature, while adding a significant contribution to the debate on strategies against parties that may constitute a danger to democracy.
In contemporary democracies, a political party typically needs good press to attract voters. A glum scenario for a party would be that news media systematically stigmatize it. To what extent does ...stigmatization lower its electoral support? This article examines voters’ reactions to news media coverage of the Dutch party PVV. Using a media content analysis linked to a 2014 panel survey of a sample representative of the Dutch electorate, we find that, among voters who held anti-immigrant attitudes, exposure to stigmatization lowered these voters’ perceived legitimacy of the PVV. This, in turn, decreased their propensity to vote for that party. This suggests that stigmatization can be a strong tool in the hands of those who intend to damage a party.
The success of anti-immigration parties (AIPs) in many European democracies poses a strategic problem for established actors: Immediate policy impact of AIPs can be averted by ostracizing them (i.e. ...refusing any cooperation), but this strategy may sway public opinion further in their favour. A comparative review shows large variation in the electoral trajectories of ostracized parties. We therefore propose a model of the context conditions that shape the repercussions of ostracism in public opinion. Under conditions that suggest substantial policy impact of an AIP were it to join a coalition government, ostracism should decrease the party’s electoral support. Vice versa, if context suggests strong “signaling” potential of an AIP if in opposition, ostracism should increase its support. To avoid apparent endogeneity of political context and party competition, the model is tested with a survey-embedded experiment on a representative sample from the Netherlands. Results confirm that ostracism is a double-edged strategy.
PDF
