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.

Although spatial theory posits that political parties adjust their policies in response to rival parties’ policy strategies, there is little comparative research that evaluates this hypothesis. Using the Comparative Manifesto Project data, we analyse the relationship between parties’ policy programmes and the policies of their opponents in twenty-five post-war democracies. The authors conclude that parties tended to shift their policy positions in the same direction that their opponents had shifted their policies at the previous election; furthermore, parties were particularly responsive to policy shifts by other members of their ‘ideological families’, i.e. leftist parties responded to other leftist parties while right-wing parties responded to right-wing parties. Their findings have important implications for spatial models of elections, for the dynamics of party systems and for political representation.

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. P olitical pundits, commentators, and scholars alike expect clarity and consistency from political parties, especially in multiparty systems. While Downs (1957, 136) argues that parties in a two-party system should disguise their positions "in a fog of ambiguity" to increase the size of their constituency, he argues that parties in multiparty systems should distinguish themselves ideologically from each other and take clear and differentiated positions to win (126-27).Taking clear, consistent, and differentiated positions also has important implications for many normative conceptions of representation and is often thought to be critical for the effective functioning of a representative democracy (Berelson 1952;Dahlberg 2009). When parties do not clearly articulate their positions, or appear consistent and to the point, voters arguably have a much harder task when attempting to identify the party that would best represent their interests in office. The failure to take clear and consistent positions during campaigns Zeynep Somer-Topcu is Assistant Professor,

A central tenet of spatial modeling and political representation studies is that, to the extent that citizens vote prospectively, they evaluate the policies that political parties are currently proposing. Yet research on issue evolution and macropartisanship suggests that significant time periods often elapse before voters update their perceptions of parties' policy positions. We report cross-national, time-series analyses on the relationship between parties' policy programs and election outcomes in 25 postwar democracies, which suggest that parties' policy promises exert lagged effects on their electoral support: namely, parties gain votes at the current election when they moderated their policies at the previous election. By contrast, we find only weak and inconsistent evidence that parties' support responds to their current policy programs. Our findings have important implications for spatial modeling and for studies on political representation.

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. the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. Replication materials are available at the AJPS Data Archive on Dataverse (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ajps). bel the latter two processes, whereby citizens respond to parties, as partisan sorting (Carmines and Stimson 1989).We analyze the dynamics of mass-level partisan sorting on European integration, an increasingly salient cleavage in numerous polities, including Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, whose governments have encountered widespread public disapproval of the austerity policies they implemented to conform with the terms of international loans; Germany, where the fall 2013 national election was projected to feature heated debates over the terms and advisability of (past and future) financial assistance packages to distressed European Union (EU) member states; and Britain, where Prime Minister David Cameron has promised a national referendum on European integration for 2017 (assuming the Conservatives are reelected in 2015). We evaluate whether citizens' perceptions of party shifts on European integration