Finding a niche? Challenger parties and issue emphasis in the 2015 televised leaders’ debates

Abstract

Do leaders of ‘challenger’ parties adopt a ‘niche’ strategy in national televised debates? This article answers this question by analysing the content of the two multiparty televised leaders’ debates that took place ahead of the 2015 British general election. Using computer-aided text analysis (CATA), it provides reliable and valid measures of what the leaders said in both debates and develops our theoretical understanding of how challenger-party leaders make their pitches. It finds that the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Green Party, Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru leaders all demonstrated a degree of ‘nicheness’ in their contributions in comparison with the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour leaders. It also finds that the challenger-party leaders placed a greater emphasis on their core concerns. Nevertheless, the debates covered much policy ground. Their structure obliged all party leaders to talk about a broad range of issues.

Left-wing regionalist populism in the ‘Celtic’ peripheries: Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party’s anti-austerity challenge against the British elites

“…2a, b, the time dedicated to austerity by the SNP's leader Nicola Sturgeon and Plaid's leader Leanne Wood was, respectively, 43% and 100% higher than the average of all leaders in the first TV debate, held on ITV on the 2nd of April 2015; and 33% and 50% higher than the average in the following debate, held on the BBC on the 16th of April 2015. It is worth pointing out that austerity was the only issue, besides that of constitutional/territorial reforms, which clearly set the SNP and Plaid's leaders apart from the leaders of the all the other parties that took part in the debates (Allen et al 2017).…”

“…The empirical evidence presented in this article-based on a qualitative analysis of party manifestos, interviews with party elected representatives, the use of data generated by expert surveys (Polk et al 2017), and of data concerning leaders' TV debates during the 2015 election campaign (Allen et al 2017)-shows that Plaid and the SNP have combined their established left-leaning regionalist ideology with 1 To my knowledge, the only scholar who has used the populist label in relation to the SNP is Keating (1996: 182), while the only author that identified Plaid Cymru as a populist party is Combes (1977). 2 For a terminological/conceptual discussion of this party family, see Massetti (2009a).…”

“…Relative salience of austerity (percentage above or below the average) in leaders' TV debates on ITV (a) and BBC (b) during the 2015 electoral campaign. Source Author's elaboration on the basis of data fromAllen et al (2017) …”