Which parties use simple language in their campaign messages, and do simple campaign messages resonate with voters’ information about parties? This study introduces a novel link between the language applied during election campaigns and citizens’ ability to position parties in the ideological space. To this end, how complexity of campaign messages varies across parties as well as how it affects voters’ knowledge about party positions is investigated. Theoretically, it is suggested that populist parties are more likely to simplify their campaign messages to demarcate themselves from mainstream competitors. In turn, voters should perceive and process simpler campaign messages better and, therefore, have more knowledge about the position of parties that communicate simpler campaign messages. The article presents and validates a measure of complexity and uses it to assess the language of manifestos in Austria and Germany in the period 1945–2013. It shows that political parties, in general, use barely comprehensible language to communicate their policy positions. However, differences between parties exist and support is found for the conjecture about populist parties as they employ significantly less complex language in their manifestos. Second, evidence is found that individuals are better able to place parties in the ideological space if parties use less complex campaign messages. The findings lead to greater understanding of mass‐elite linkages during election campaigns and have important consequences for the future analysis of manifesto data.

Do voters polarize ideologically when radical views gain political legitimacy, or does the rise of radical voices merely reflect societal conflict? We argue that elite polarization as signaled by radical parties' first entrance into parliament leads to voter divergence. Immediately after the election, legitimization and backlash effects mean that voters on both ideological sides move toward the extremes. In the longer term, this polarization is solidified because of radical parties' parliamentary presence. A panel study of Dutch voters shows that the 2002 parliamentary entrance of a radical-right party indeed led to immediate ideological polarization across the political spectrum. Estimating time-series cross-sectional models on Eurobarometer data from 17 countries shows an additional long-term impact of radical-right party entry on polarization. The presence of radical voices on the right has polarizing effects, illustrating how such institutional recognition and legitimization can have a far-reaching impact on society.

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While Stata's computational capabilities have intensively increased over the last decade, the quality of its default graphic schemes is still a matter of debate among users. Some of the arguments speaking against Stata's default graphic design are subject to individual taste but others are not, for example, horizontal labeling, unnecessary background tinting, missing gridlines, and oversized markers. In this article, I present two new graphic schemes, plotplain and plottig, that attempt to address these concerns. These schemes provide users a set of 21 colors, of which 7 colors are distinguishable for people suffering from color blindness. I also give an introduction on how users can program their own graphic schemes.

The landmark study by Adams et al. (2006) finds that niche parties are unresponsive to the median voter and provides two theoretical reasons for this pattern: these parties are (1) more policy-seeking and (2) more influenced by their activists. Recent research adds that niche parties have narrow issue appeals beyond the traditional left-right dimension, implying that these parties pay less attention to the left-right median voter. We test these three mechanisms in a replication and extension of the original findings by Adams et al. (2006). We find that policy-seeking parties and parties with a narrow issue focus are less likely to track median voter changes, while activist influence has no moderating effect. This finding has important implications for our understanding of party responsiveness. * We thank Jim Adams, Simon Bornschier, Moritz Marbach, Thomas Meyer and the participants of the University of Zurich publication seminar for excellent feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. We also want to thank Jim Adams, Lawrence Ezrow and Garrett Glasgow for sharing their data and analysis files with us. The excellent feedback of three anonymous reviewers significantly helped us to improve the quality of this paper. All remaining errors are our own. A supplementary online appendix and replication data and code are available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JPS.