, we presented empirical evidence that political parties in Western European democracies tend to shift their ideological orientations in response to shifts in voters' policy preferences, as suggested by the model of "dynamic representation" developed by Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson (1995; see also Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002). Here, we extend this analysis to consider whether the type of party makes a difference. Specifically, we explore whether the members of party families who present either an extreme ideology (such as Communist and extreme nationalist parties) or James Adams is associate professor of political science, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616 (jfadams@ucdavis.edu). Michael Clark is a Ph.D. candidate in political science, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9420 (mcl@umail.ucsb.edu). Lawrence Ezrow is a postdoctoral fellow of political science, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (lj.ezrow@fsw.vu.nl). Garrett Glasgow is assistant professor of political science, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9420 (glasgow@polsci.ucsb.edu).Authors are listed in alphabetical order. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association and at a 2004 departmental symposium at the University of Texas at Austin. We thank Neal Beck, Melvin Hinich, Jonathan Katz, Orit Kedar, Gary King, George Krause, Jeff Lewis, Michael Lewis-Beck, Michael McDonald, Bonnie Meguid, Lorelei Moosbrugger, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. Any remaining errors are the authors' sole responsibility. a noncentrist "niche" ideology (i.e., the Greens) respond differently to shifts in public opinion than do the political elites who represent mainstream or catch-all parties such as Labor, Socialist, Social Democratic, Liberal, Conservative, and Christian Democratic parties. We label the members of the Communist, Green, and extreme nationalist party families as niche parties.Our study, which encompasses eight Western European party systems over the period 1976-1998, produces two central findings. First, we conclude that while mainstream parties' policy shifts during this period corresponded strongly to shifts in public opinion, niche parties
Previous research explains the evolution of parties' ideological positions in terms of decision rules that stress the uncertainty of the political environment. The authors extend this research by examining whether parties adjust their ideologies in response to two possible influences: shifts in public opinion, and past election results. Their empirical analyses, which are based on the Comparative Manifesto Project's codings of parties' post-war programmes in eight West European nations, suggest that parties respond to shifts in public opinion, but that these effects are only significant in situations where public opinion is clearly shifting away from the party's policy positions. By contrast, no evidence is found here that parties adjust their ideologies in response to past election results. These findings have important implications for parties' election strategies and for models of political representation.The study of party policy platforms has been the focus of two very different research traditions. One approach, epitomized by the work of the Comparative Manifesto Project, involves empirical examinations of party platforms. The second approach, which may be traced back to Anthony Downs and before, is spatial modelling. Spatial modellers typically assume that parties compete for votes from an issue-oriented electorate, and attempt to deduce the policies that parties will present in order to win elections. These two research traditions have evolved largely independently of each other.Participants in the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) are concerned with determining the content of parties' policy proposals, as well as how these policies evolve over time. Specifically, through comparative coding of parties' election programmes the CMP assigns positions to parties along a variety of policy dimensions. To date, this coding procedure has been applied to over 1,500 programmes, in about thirty democracies, during the post-war period. Spatial modellers, by contrast, typically assume that parties maximize votes, or, in multiparty systems, that they maximize their chances of obtaining membership in the governing coalition. The general quest is for a policy equilibrium during a single election period -i.e., a set of party platforms such that no party can improve its position by changing its policies, given the policies of its rivals.The spatial maps of parties' policy movements published by the CMP reveal dynamic patterns that spatial modellers, with their focus on party equilibrium during single election periods, rarely attempt to explain. This gap in the literature is unfortunate, because many critical issues relating to our understanding of political parties, elections and representation
Questions of causation are important issues in empirical research on political behavior. Most of the discussion of the econometric problems associated with multi-equation mod els with reciprocal causation has focused on models with continuous dependent variables ( e.g Markus and Converse 1979;Page and Jones 1979). Since many models of political be havior involve discrete or dichotomous dependent variables, this paper turns to two tech niques which can be employed to estimate reciprocal relationships between dichotomous and continuous dependent variables. One technique which I call two-stage probit least squares (2SPLS) is very similar to familiar two-stage instrumental variable techniques. The second technique, called two-stage conditional maximum likelihood (2SCML), may overcome problems associated with 2SPLS, but has not been used in the political science literature. First I show the properties of both techniques using Monte Carlo simulations. Then, I apply these techniques to an empirical example which focuses on the relationship between voter preferences in a presidential election and the voter's uncertainty about the policy positions taken by the candidates. This example demonstrates the importance of these techniques for political science research.
In recent years, a consensus has developed that the conditional logit (CL) model is the most appropriate strategy for modeling government choice. In this paper, we reconsider this approach and make three methodological contributions. First, we employ a mixed logit with random coefficients that allows us to take account of unobserved heterogeneity in the government formation process and relax the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption. Second, we demonstrate that the procedure used in the literature to test the IIA assumption is biased against finding IIA violations. An improved testing procedure reveals clear evidence of IIA violations, indicating that the CL model is inappropriate. Third, we move beyond simply presenting the sign and significance of model coefficients, suggesting various strategies for interpreting the substantive influence of variables in models of government choice.
Mixed logit (MXL) is a general discrete choice model thus far unexamined in the study of multicandidate and multiparty elections. Mixed logit assumes that the unobserved portions of utility are a mixture of an IID extreme value term and another multivariate distribution selected by the researcher. This general specification allows MXL to avoid imposing the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property on the choice probabilities. Further, MXL is a flexible tool for examining heterogeneity in voter behavior through random-coefficients specifications. MXL is a more general discrete choice model than multinomial probit (MNP) in several respects, and can be applied to a wider variety of questions about voting behavior than MNP. An empirical example using data from the 1987 British General Election demonstrates the utility of MXL in the study of multicandidate and multiparty elections.
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