Understanding Change and Stability in Party Ideologies: Do Parties Respond to Public Opinion or to Past Election Results?

Abstract

Previous research explains the evolution of parties' ideological positions in terms of decision rules that stress the uncertainty of the political environment. The authors extend this research by examining whether parties adjust their ideologies in response to two possible influences: shifts in public opinion, and past election results. Their empirical analyses, which are based on the Comparative Manifesto Project's codings of parties' post-war programmes in eight West European nations, suggest that parties respond to shifts in public opinion, but that these effects are only significant in situations where public opinion is clearly shifting away from the party's policy positions. By contrast, no evidence is found here that parties adjust their ideologies in response to past election results. These findings have important implications for parties' election strategies and for models of political representation.The study of party policy platforms has been the focus of two very different research traditions. One approach, epitomized by the work of the Comparative Manifesto Project, involves empirical examinations of party platforms. The second approach, which may be traced back to Anthony Downs and before, is spatial modelling. Spatial modellers typically assume that parties compete for votes from an issue-oriented electorate, and attempt to deduce the policies that parties will present in order to win elections. These two research traditions have evolved largely independently of each other.Participants in the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) are concerned with determining the content of parties' policy proposals, as well as how these policies evolve over time. Specifically, through comparative coding of parties' election programmes the CMP assigns positions to parties along a variety of policy dimensions. To date, this coding procedure has been applied to over 1,500 programmes, in about thirty democracies, during the post-war period. Spatial modellers, by contrast, typically assume that parties maximize votes, or, in multiparty systems, that they maximize their chances of obtaining membership in the governing coalition. The general quest is for a policy equilibrium during a single election period -i.e., a set of party platforms such that no party can improve its position by changing its policies, given the policies of its rivals.The spatial maps of parties' policy movements published by the CMP reveal dynamic patterns that spatial modellers, with their focus on party equilibrium during single election periods, rarely attempt to explain. This gap in the literature is unfortunate, because many critical issues relating to our understanding of political parties, elections and representation

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

“…These effects, however, are not statistically significant. Confirming earlier findings on parties' zig-zag movements (Adams et al, 2004;Budge, 1994), we find that parties that held more extreme positions at the previous election, moderate their position at the following one. We also do not find a significant effect of government participation on policy moderation.…”

“…We also control for the government participation of a party before the election at time t since Bawn and Somer-Topcu (2012) suggest that government parties have an incentive to choose more extreme positions in order to counterbalance positional discounting by voters. Our models also include a control variable for the electoral system type (PR) 6 and for policy extremism at t − 1 in order to take into account parties' zig-zag movements that have been confirmed in several analyses (Adams et al, 2004;Budge, 1994). Summary statistics for all variables can be found in the online appendix.…”

“…Following Budge's (1994) work on party competition, several scholars have argued that election results constitute an important signal of these preferences and should, thus, affect strategic decisions made by candidates and parties (Adams et al, 2004;Somer-Topcu, 2009). When making these decisions, parties only have information about their past policy shifts and how these shifts were rewarded or punished at the polls.…”

“…Empirical assessments of this relationship, however, present rather mixed findings. While some studies only find minor effects of electoral results on party positioning (Ezrow, Vries, et al, 2011) or no effects at all (Adams et al, 2004(Adams et al, , 2006Schumacher, Vries, and Vis, 2013), others show that the effect declines over time (SomerTopcu, 2009). Thus, while most scholars agree that past elections matter for future party strategies, the precise nature of this relationship still remains to be uncovered.…”

“…This literature has established that parties, indeed, follow a pattern of "dynamic representation" (Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson, 1995) and adapt their position to shifts in public opinion (Adams et al, 2004), economic conditions (Adams, Haupt, and Stoll, 2008), and the behavior and success of other parties (Abou-Chadi, 2014;Adams and Somer-Topcu, 2009b). Moreover, the degree and direction of these shifts depends on the type of party as well as their internal organization (Adams et al, 2006;Schumacher, Vries, and Vis, 2013).…”