Dimensions of political conflict and party positions in multi-level democracies: evidence from the Local Manifesto Project

Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems

“…Even though data availability on sub-national party positions increased in the last years (see e.g. Alonso, Gómez, and Cabeza 2013;Benoit, Bräuninger, and Debus 2009;Gross and Jankowski 2020) and provided scholars with the opportunity to analyse these positions comparatively (Müller 2013;Stecker 2015), only recently scholars started to carefully consider the interactions between the national and sub-national level with regard to party positions, the level of decentralization and electoral systems' incentives (see e.g. Baumann, Debus, and Klingelhöfer 2017;Cabeza, Gómez, and Alonso 2017;León 2014).…”

Determinants of Government Membership at the Subnational Level: Empirical Evidence from Large Cities in Germany (1999–2016)

“…4 Except for the two coalition formation situations in Darmstadt 2011 and 2016, where the mayor is a member of the Green Party, all mayors are members of either the CDU or the Social Democratic Party (SPD). 5 See Gross and Jankowski (2020) for a detailed discussion of the validity of using 'wordscores' for estimating local party positions in Germany. 6 Using the mean ideological distance between the coalition members and the mayor's party, weighted by the seat share of each coalition party, does not affect the substantial results of the analysis.…”

“…Even if candidates are supported not only by their own party but also by other parties, they could not move their policy positions too far away from the policy positions of their own party because this could send 'mixed signals' to partisan supporters and traditional voters of the parties on which the candidates have to rely. 2 The coalition agreements can be retrieved from the Local Manifesto Project(Gross and Jankowski 2020). Note that theoretically the 'bindingness' of a coalition agreement at the local level is somewhat different from the situation at the state or federal level in Germany: if a local coalition breaks up due to intracoalitional conflicts, then local parties can still work with changing majorities without 'officially' declaring the formation of a new government.…”

Rage against the party machine? Wählergemeinschaften als Alternative im kommunalpolitischen Wettbewerb

“…Bisherige Befunde deuten darauf hin, dass auch in programmatischer Hinsicht Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen Wählergemeinschaften und Parteien überwiegen (Holtmann 2012, S. 38-41). Mit dem in jüngerer Zeit ins Leben gerufenen Local Manifesto Project (Gross und Jankowski 2019 existiert nunmehr eine Datenbasis von Wahlprogrammen der örtlichen Parteien und Wählergemeinschaften, die einen Hinweis darauf liefert, dass Wählergemeinschaften einen deutlichen Kontrast zwischen der örtlichen und überörtlichen Politik zeichnen (Gross und Jankowski 2019, S. 87). Für künftige Untersuchungen ist deshalb von Interesse, wie sich die programmatischen Unterschiede und gesetzten Frames erklären lassen.…”