Parties’ electoral strategies in a two-dimensional political space

Abstract

This article has two objectives. Firstly, we test the theoretical assumptions about the repertoire of party strategies in a twodimensional political space presented in the introduction to this special issue. We use a new dataset that content-analyzes electoral parties' manifestos for regional elections in Spain and Great Britain (the Regional Manifestos Project) in order to see how well the theoretically-derived strategies approximate what parties in regional elections really do. Secondly, we develop tentative explanations of parties' strategies: Which parties are more likely to use what type of strategy and under what circumstances? After running a multinomial logistic model we find that, in contrast to the niche party thesis, regionalist parties strategize simultaneously along the territorial and the economic dimensions of competition, while state-wide parties react to the presence of regionalist opponents by incorporating the territorial dimension into the agenda.

Position, selective emphasis and framing

“…As stated above, the contribution by Alonso et al (2015) provides evidence of the two-dimensional behaviour of such parties in Spain and the UK. Furthermore, Basile (2015) demonstrates that Italian mainstream parties went beyond the predictions made by Meguid's (2008) PSO theory when responding to the challenge mounted by the Lega Nord.…”

“…Alonso et al (2015) show that competition spaces in those regions of Spain and the UK that host relevant regionalist parties are thoroughly two-dimensional and that regionalist parties use both of these dimensions in electoral contest, rather than focusing exclusively on territorial issues. Their explorative regression analyses also show that state-wide parties that face peripheral competitors are more likely to adopt the two-dimensional strategy than a one-dimensional strategy compared with statewide parties that are not challenged by regional parties.…”

“…In doing so, the authors adopt methodologically innovative ways of measuring the different strategies. With regard to the first two tools, position and salience, systematic data collection for the territorial dimension has only recently begun and the contributors to this Special Issue are at the forefront of this development (Alonso, 2012;Alonso et al, 2015;Massetti, 2009;Massetti and Schakel, 2015;Szöcsik and Zuber, 2015). With regard to the third tool, parties' framing of issues, and independent of whether these issues belong to the economic or the territorial dimension, only few scholars have thus far systematically measured this important component of parties' strategies (Basile, 2013;Chaney, 2013Chaney, , 2014Helbling et al, 2010).…”

“…These sources range from national (Basile, 2015) and regional (Alonso et al, 2015) electoral manifestos and bill proposals in parliament (Hamann and Field, 2015), to the systematic collection and coding of case studies (Massetti and Schakel, 2015). On the basis of these sources, the authors present descriptive inferences about the strategies mainstream and ethno-regionalist parties employ during national elections (Basile, 2015;Massetti and Schakel, 2015) and during regional elections (Alonso et al, 2015 andMassetti andSchakel, 2015), but also during the inter-electoral period of political competition when parties fulfil their representative tasks and engage in policy-making in parliament (Hamann and Field, 2015). They test whether mainstream and ethno-regionalist parties use different strategies across different regional electoral arenas within the same state as well as across states (Alonso et al, 2015;Massetti and Schakel, 2015) and across different national electoral arenas (Massetti and Schakel, 2015).…”

Does EU regional policy increase parties’ support for European integration?

“…Arnold et al 2012;Hooghe et al 2004;Williams and Spoon 2015), whereas the positions of sub-national parties (SNPs), which can deviate from those of the national party organisations (e.g. Alonso et al 2013Alonso et al , 2015Bäck et al 2013), towards further European integration are still unknown.…”