During the 1980s and the 1990s, the elites of the two largest Dutch parties converged dramatically in debates on income redistribution, nuclear power and the overall Left-Right dimension, paving the way for the Dutch party system's polarization on immigration and cultural issues. Did the Dutch mass public depolarize along with party elites, and, if so, was this mass-level depolarization confined to affluent, educated, politically engaged citizens? Analysis of Dutch Parliamentary Election Study respondents' policy beliefs and partisan loyalties in 1986-98 shows that the mass public depolarized during this period, and that this extended equally throughout the electorate. These conclusions mirror previous findings on Britain, but differ from those on the United States, and have important implications for political representation and for parties' election strategies. policy shifts. 3 These questions are important because they bear on how strongly party elites influence public opinion, whether the public holds elites accountable for their policies, and whether, more generally, the public approves of policy moderation by political elites. 4 The studies cited above report consistent evidence that, taken as a whole, the mass publics in both countries have followed the leads of political elites, i.e., that the American mass public has polarized over the past three decades while the British public has depolarized during the post-Thatcher era. 5 By contrast, these studies reach conflicting conclusions with respect to subconstituency-based polarization: namely, studies on the United States conclude that subgroups of affluent, educated and politically engaged citizens have polarized more than other subgroups in the electorate, while studies on Britain conclude that mass depolarization extends roughly equally across different subgroups. 6 Although the research summarized above illuminates mass-elite policy linkages in Britain and the United States, it is unclear whether we should expect these patterns to extend to other Western democracies. In particular, both Britain and the United States employ plurality voting systems and feature two dominant, mainstream, political parties, 7 while most Western democracies employ some form of proportional representation and feature both mainstream parties and smaller 'niche' parties that present more radical policies and/or that emphasize alternative policy dimensions.

Previous empirical research has found evidence suggesting that the character-based valence attributes of parties, such as competence and integrity, can have notable effects of levels of electoral support (Clark, 2009; Mondak, 1995). A related strand of literature analyzes the importance of parties’ policy positions. In this study, we bring together research on valence and party dispersion to examine whether the ideological dispersion of parties in a party system mediates the electoral impact of valence. We perform empirical analyses covering nine Western European countries over the period 1976 to 2003, and test the hypothesis that when parties are more ideologically proximate to the mean voter position, character-based valence attributes will be of greater significance in determining parties’ electoral fortunes. Surprisingly, we find no support for this hypothesis. Instead, our analyses suggest that the more ideologically dispersed parties are, the more likely it is that character-based valence attributes will affect parties’ vote shares.

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