Desperate Needs, Desperate Deeds: Why Mainstream Parties Respond to the Issues of Niche Parties

Wardt, Marc-Paul Van de

doi:10.1080/01402382.2014.945247

Cited by 40 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(98 reference statements)

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“…Moreover, Van de Wardt (2015) shows, for the case of Denmark, that parliamentary activities of challenger parties on European integration provoke salience shifts by mainstream parties. Thus, given the higher salience and higher polarization of European issues among the wider electorate, mainstream parties should have an incentive to react to publically visible mobilization efforts from their Eurosceptic challengers.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Has Eurosceptic Mobilization Become More Contagious? Comparing the 2009 and 2014 EP Election Campaigns in The Netherlands and France

Meijers

Rauh

2016

PaG

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With the lingering Euro crisis, personalized competition for the Commission presidency, and a surge of Eurosceptic parties, the 2014 European Parliament elections took place against an unknown level of European Union politicization. How does this changing context affect the supply side of party competition on European issues in EP election campaigns? This article compares the 2014 and 2009 EP elections in two EU founding members with high electoral support for radical left and radical right Euroscepticism-France and the Netherlands. We study publically visible patterns of partisan mobilization in the written news media with semi-automated content analyses. The data indicate that visible party mobilization on EU issues was on average not significantly higher in 2014. While particularly mainstream and especially incumbent parties publically mobilize on European issues during both campaigns, the radical right's mobilization efforts have become more visible during the 2014 elections. Examining the temporal dynamics within electoral campaigns, we show that the Eurosceptic fringes exhibit significant contagion effects on the mainstream parties, but that the extent of this contagion was surprisingly lower in the 2014 campaign. As a result, the increasing EU politicization between the 2009 and 2014 electoral contests has not resulted in an enhanced and more interactive supply of partisan debate about Europe.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Has Eurosceptic Mobilization Become More Contagious? Comparing the 2009 and 2014 EP Election Campaigns in The Netherlands and France

Meijers

Rauh

2016

PaG

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“…This was supported by Van de Wardt's (2015) model and study of agenda-setting in the Danish multiparty system, which showed how niche parties are the catalysts for putting new issues such as immigration on the political elite's agenda. After new issues were brought forward by an issue entrepreneur -that is a niche party competitor -mainstream opposition parties first responded to the new issue followed by the governing mainstream parties.…”

Section: Issue Evolution In a Multiparty System: Theoretical Implicatmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…This argument was further developed into competition between mainstream government, mainstream opposition, and niche party challengers (De Vries and Hobolt, 2012;Hobolt and De Vries, 2015;van de Wardt, 2015 (Meguid, 2005;Green-Pedersen, 2011).…”

Section: Issue Evolution In a Multiparty System: Theoretical Implicatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Issue evolution and partisan polarization in a European multiparty system: Elite and mass repositioning in Denmark 1968–2011

Arndt

2016

European Union Politics

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Issue evolution is a well-established theoretical perspective in the analysis of long-term party competition and partisanship in the US. However, this perspective has rarely been used to analyze political elite effects on partisan polarization in European multiparty systems. Consequently, I apply the issue evolution perspective to polarization in a European multiparty system. I find an emergence of cultural issues in Denmark, where mass level polarization on cultural issues followed elite level polarization. Unlike two-party systems, niche parties drive issue evolution on the elite level, which is then followed by niche partisan polarization and, finally, mainstream party adaption. The findings illustrate the mechanisms of issue evolution in a European-style multiparty system and the role of niche parties.

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“…Euroscepticism can be understood as one of the latest attempts by parties located at the periphery to penetrate into party systems and legislatures across Europe (Taggart, 1998). 6 Thus, the niche segments introduced here are: (a) segments which were at some point located at the periphery of party systems, (b) attempting to destabilize entrenched party voter alignments and (c) a set of noneconomic segments.…”

Section: What Is a Niche Segment?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…7 As such, the dimensions presented here are deduced from the theoretical section of the paper and arguments put forward elsewhere (Meguid, 2005). Finally, they attempt to allocate which segments researchers (Jensen and Spoon, 2010;Meguid, 2005;Taggart, 1998) and the public (Walgrave et al, 2012) associate with being niche, instead of relying on dimensions established for different research purposes (Meyer and Miller, 2013;Wagner, 2012a). 8 I collapsed directional issues into single issue dimensions, since this study is not interested in directionality, but segment emphasis.…”

Section: What Is a Niche Segment?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a renewal of the niche party concept

Bischof

2015

Party Politics

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Scholars' attention to the concept of niche parties has greatly increased. While researchers agree that niche parties matter in a variety of ways, the definitions and measurements of such parties are manifold and an accordance remains yet to be found. I argue the given conceptualizations of niche parties (a) suffer from gaps between their measurements and theoretical concepts or (b) conceptual clarity. The theoretical concept I propose understands niche parties as (a) predominantly competing on niche market segments neglected by their competitors and (b) not discussing a broad range of these segments. By measuring exactly these two components in an additive index drawn from the MARPOR data, the validation shows that parties emphasizing niche segments differentiate themselves from their competitors also by using a condensed message on these segments. In particular, this component of party competition, the specialization of party offers, has not been studied in the literature on niche parties and should receive more attention.

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Desperate Needs, Desperate Deeds: Why Mainstream Parties Respond to the Issues of Niche Parties

Cited by 40 publications

References 67 publications

Has Eurosceptic Mobilization Become More Contagious? Comparing the 2009 and 2014 EP Election Campaigns in The Netherlands and France

Has Eurosceptic Mobilization Become More Contagious? Comparing the 2009 and 2014 EP Election Campaigns in The Netherlands and France

Issue evolution and partisan polarization in a European multiparty system: Elite and mass repositioning in Denmark 1968–2011

Towards a renewal of the niche party concept

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