Moderate as Necessary: The Role of Electoral Competitiveness and Party Size in Explaining Parties’ Policy Shifts

Abstract

This article investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties' policy positions. It follows a growing body of research on party positioning in multiparty competition that regards elections as signals for parties that have to choose their positions and issue strategies. In this article we argue that previous elections provide information about the competitiveness of the upcoming election. The expected degree of electoral competition affects parties' future policy positions since with increasing competitiveness of an election, parties have higher incentives to move toward a vote-maximizing position. However, what constitutes a vote-maximizing strategy varies between parties. While large mainstream parties have an incentive to moderate their positions, small and niche parties choose more extreme positions to distinguish themselves from their mainstream competitors. Applying a novel measure of electoral competitiveness, we find that the degree of electoral competition indeed determines parties' policy shifts, but that this effect is moderated by party size. AbstractThis paper investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties'

Party convergence and vote switching: Explaining mainstream party decline across Europe

“…Importantly, scholars have also found that parties benefit electorally when moderating their positions in multiparty systems (see, e.g., Ezrow ; Adams & Somer‐Topcu ; Abou‐Chadi & Orlowski ). When electoral competition is high, for example, Abou‐Chadi and Orlowski () find that large mainstream parties will moderate their positions.…”

“…Importantly, scholars have also found that parties benefit electorally when moderating their positions in multiparty systems (see, e.g., Ezrow ; Adams & Somer‐Topcu ; Abou‐Chadi & Orlowski ). When electoral competition is high, for example, Abou‐Chadi and Orlowski () find that large mainstream parties will moderate their positions. Rovny (), moreover, has argued that parties may choose to blur issues they wish to de‐emphasise and Somer‐Topcu () has demonstrated that parties in multiparty systems that use a ‘broad appeal strategy’ do better electorally.…”

“…In doing this, parties reduce the certainty by which voters can identify their positions and thus voters could then potentially vote for either party in the two-party context. Importantly, scholars have also found that parties benefit electorally when moderating their positions in multiparty systems (see, e.g., Ezrow 2005;Adams & Somer-Topcu 2009;Abou-Chadi & Orlowski 2016). When electoral competition is high, for example, Abou-Chadi and Orlowski (2016) find that large mainstream parties will moderate their positions.…”

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

“…And indeed, some studies can demonstrate how varying degrees of competition affect policy making and social policy more specifically (Hobolt & Klemmensen 2008;Immergut & Abou-Chadi 2014;Hübscher & Sattler 2017). This is achieved in two steps: the derivation of an optimisation problem from a set of inequalities describing the bargaining position of each party in a legislature; and the estimation of seatsvotes curves for all parties to express every party's seat share as a function of its own and every other party's vote share (Abou-Chadi & Orlowski 2016). We thus rely on the measure provided by Abou-Chadi and Orlowski (2016), which is the only measure that truly varies at the party level.…”

“…We define the degree of electoral competition as the probability that a vote shift will occur that changes a party's bargaining position in parliament (Abou-Chadi & Orlowski 2016). First, we examine the link between these electoral incentives and policy outcomes; and second, we place the intensity and directionality of electoral competition at the centre of the analysis.…”