Parties often tailor their campaign message differently to different groups of voters with the goal of appealing to a broader electorate with diverse preferences and thereby winning their votes. I ...argue that the strategy helps a party win votes if it can convince diverse groups of voters that the party is ideologically closer to their preferred positions. Using election data from nine Western European democracies, I first show that parties gain votes when they appeal broadly. Analysis of individual-level survey data suggests that voters perceive broadly appealing parties as ideologically closer to their own positions, a finding that identifies a plausible mechanism behind the aggregate positive effect of this strategy on party election performance. These findings not only help explain the behavior of some European parties, but they may also offer a potential recipe for electoral success in multiparty democracies.
Recent studies analyze how citizens update their perceptions of parties' left-right positions in response to new political information. We extend this research to consider the issue of European ...integration, and we report theoretical and empirical analyses that citizens do not update their perceptions of parties' positions in response to election manifestos, but that citizens' perceptions of parties' positions do track political experts' perceptions of these positions, and, moreover, that it is party supporters who disproportionately perceive their preferred party's policy shifts. Given that experts plausibly consider a wide range of information, these findings imply that citizens weigh the wider informational environment when assessing parties' positions. We also present evidence that citizens' perceptions of party position shifts matter, in that they drive partisan sorting in the mass public.
Parties spend parts of their campaigns criticizing other parties’ performance and characteristics, such as honesty, integrity, and unity. These attacks aim to negatively affect the target parties’ ...electoral performance. But do they work? While attacks are informative, we argue that how voters react to negative campaigning depends on their partisanship. While the target’s copartisans are more likely to get mobilized in favor of their party, the attacker’s copartisans are expected to punish the target due to their respective partisan motivations. We expect null effects for attacks for partisans of third parties as well as nonpartisans. Combining a new dataset on campaign rhetoric with survey data from eight European countries, we show support for most but not all of our expectations. These results have important implications for the electoral campaigns literature.
Although extensive research analyzes the factors that motivate European parties to shift their policy positions, there is little cross-national research that analyzes how voters respond to parties' ...policy shifts. We report pooled, time-series analyses of election survey data from several European polities, which suggest that voters do not systematically adjust their perceptions of parties' positions in response to shifts in parties' policy statements during election campaigns. We also find no evidence that voters adjust their Left-Right positions or their partisan loyalties in response to shifts in parties' campaign-based policy statements. By contrast, we find that voters do respond to their subjective perceptions of the parties' positions. Our findings have important implications for party policy strategies and for political representation.
We combine two dominant approaches to studying how issues influence elections: one that emphasizes parties’ issue positions, and the other parties’ issue ownership. Research from the latter approach ...shows that voters ascribe greater economic competence to right-wing parties. Based on this finding, we argue that parties enhance their economic issue ownership when voters perceive them shifting to the right. In the following step, we show that perceived rightward shifts of parties also lead to subsequent increases in electoral support. We analyze economic ownership survey data and election outcomes in 15 democracies over the period 1986–2015 that supports the expectations that parties’ perceived rightward shifts result in increases in economic ownership and subsequent vote shares. We also show that the right-shift vote gains are strongest during recessions when voters prioritize parties’ economic competence.
We argue that governing status affects how voters react to extreme versus moderate policy positions. Being in government forces parties to compromise and to accept ideologically unappealing choices ...as the best among available alternatives. Steady exposure to government parties in this role and frequent policy compromise by governing parties lead voters to discount the positions of parties when they are in government. Hence, government parties do better in elections when they offset this discounting by taking relatively extreme positions. The relative absence of this discounting dynamic for opposition parties, on the other hand, means that they perform better by taking more moderate positions, as the standard Downsian model would predict. We present evidence from national elections in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, 1971—2005, to support this claim.
Political parties in established democracies face a trade-off between changing their policy positions in pursuit of votes and adhering to their previous positions in order to reduce risks related to ...change. To reconcile this trade-off, parties seek information about public opinion. Past election performance is one such source of information. To date however, there is no consistent result on whether past elections affect party positioning. I highlight two factors that previous analysts have not considered: whether past election results affect the magnitude of parties’ policy shifts in the current election, and how the time elapsed since the last election moderates the relationship between past election results and party policy change. My analyses of 23 established democracies generate two conclusions with important implications for understanding party behavior and political representation: parties tend to shift their policies more when they have lost votes in the previous election than when they have gained votes; and the effect of past election results dissipates with the passage of time.
No‐confidence motions (NCMs) are attempts by opposition parties to publicise the government's failings in a salient policy arena, and previous research has shown that they often negatively affect ...citizens' evaluations of governing parties' competence and damage their electoral prospects. Yet currently there is a lack of understanding of how opposition parties respond ideologically to these NCMs. It is argued in this article that opposition parties should distance themselves from the government challenged by NCMs to show that they are different from the incompetent government and to compete for the votes that the government is likely to lose. Using a sample of 19 advanced democracies from 1970–2007, empirical evidence is presented that NCMs encourage political parties to move their positions away from the government's position, especially in the presence of reinforcing negative signals about government performance. These results have important implications for our understanding of opposition party policy change, for the economic voting literature, and for the spatial and valence models of party competition.
Do voters understand party positions? A growing literature is interested in answering this question but has limited its focus to parties’ own policy messages. In real life, parties are engaged in ...constant exchange with their rivals about their policy positions, which creates possibilities for partisan rivals to misconstrue each other’s policy messages. Using experimental (N=9,562) and large-scale cross-national data, we show that such message distortion by rival parties significantly moves voters’ perceptions away from where the party locates itself and toward the distorted position. Furthermore, contrary to expectations from the literature on partisan motivated reasoning, this effect holds for all voters, regardless of whether they support the rival party, the focal party, or neither. These findings have important implications for our understanding of voter perceptions, partisan bias, and party strategies.
Agree or disagree Somer-Topcu, Zeynep
Party politics,
01/2017, Volume:
23, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Political party leaders are among the most influential actors in parliamentary democracies, and a change in party leadership is an important event for a party organization. Yet, we do not know how ...these leadership changes affect voter perceptions about party policy positions. On the one hand, we may expect party leadership changes to renew attention to the party, educate voters about its policy positions, and hence reduce disagreement among voters about party positions. On the other hand, rival parties may use a leadership change as an opportunity to defame the party, its leadership, and policies, and hence, increase voter confusion about the party’s policies. Using data from seven Western European democracies, I show that leadership changes help parties reduce voter disagreement about party policy positions. This effect is stronger if the new leader shifts the party’s policy positions.
