Issue Diversification: Which Niche Parties Can Succeed Electorally by Broadening Their Agenda? (original) (raw)
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Disentangling Peripheral Parties’ Issue Packages in Subnational Elections
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Parties craft their campaign messages to mobilize diverse constituencies. Theories of election strategy find that parties choose their tactics dependent on their electoral context. However, analyses on the electoral consequences of party competition have only begun to explore the dependency between context and tactic. Building on theories of party competition, I predict that the broad electoral context, such as incumbent status or the state of the economy, decides the effect of electoral tactics on the votes parties receive. Parties benefit from branching out to a wider range of issues when they are in the opposition. Instead, government parties have less control of their reputation. Economic conditions limit the incumbent's ability to selectively construct its policy message. However, these parties profit from pairing down their policy appeals when the economy grows. Using evidence from the Comparative Manifestos Project for 24 OECD countries over a 60 year period, I find that conditioning party campaign messages on their economic environment demonstrates a clear and strong electoral impact. Individual level evidence from 12 OECD countries in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems adds evidence consistent with the underlying mechanism. Governing parties earn a reward for focusing their platforms when the economy grows more than the economy alone would predict. The results from this analysis complement a growing literature on the effect of parties' election tactics and help explain evidence that voters only respond to parties' election strategies.
Issue dimensionality and party competition in turbulent times
Party Politics, 2019
We start from the premise that the content of political competition is regularly remade by shifting contexts and by the strategic activity of political actors including parties. But while there are naturally thousands of potential issues on which politics can be contested, there are in practice and for good reasons ways in which structure and limits come to reduce the competition to more cognitively manageable and regularized divisions—in short, to issue dimensions. It is highly timely to return to these questions since, we argue, the social, political, and economic turbulence of recent years raises the possibility that the ideological structure of how parties present themselves to voters may be radically shifting. The papers in this special issue, therefore, each tackle an important aspect of the shifting character of the issues that underlie party competition in various European settings. In this article, we provide an overview of the relevant “state of the art” on issue dimension...
From Voting Bloc to Fragmentation: The Chinese Opposition Votes in the 2021 Sarawak State Election
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Policy agendas and births and deaths of political parties
2013
The standard model of political party density emphasizing the interaction of social cleavages and district magnitude (M) is incomplete in accounting for number of parties in cases of high values of M in an arbitrary way. We explore an alternative model for such cases emphasizing the slack in the issue agenda available to parties with which to construct viable identities or niches they can employ to mobilize cognitively-limited voters. The model is tested with time series data and event history analysis on the sizes of the public policy agenda and the political
Niche parties in European countries have struggled to win seats in national legislatures. Accounts of niche party development describe how attempts to win these seats often begin with second-order election campaigns for the European Parliament (EP) or a regional assembly. Strong second-order campaigns can signal that a party is locally competitive, which will help niche parties by reducing defections due to strategic voting in later first-order elections. In this paper, I argue that according to such accounts, improvements in second-order election results should be correlated with subsequent improvements in first-order election results in any given constituency. I also argue that the magnitude of this correlation can be compared across different types of second-order elections, to gauge how credible voters perceive these second-order signals of local viability to be. I find that only regional assembly election results, not EP election results, are consistently and statistically significantly correlated with national election results. This suggests that niche parties can only build their support through bottom-up rather than top-down means, and that EP election results cannot be used to predict how niche parties will perform at national elections.
Parliamentary Affairs, 2020
This contribution considers how niche parties react when they lose their niche, using the cases of three parties in the turbulent period prior to the 2019 UK general election: the Brexit Party, the Green Party and Change UK. I overview the background of these parties before showing that each lost its respective policy niches to larger, more established parties. I show that each responded with some combination of directly competing with the mainstream party; electorally cooperating with them or other parties; or diversifying into something distinct from their mainstream analogue. I explain how each party's approach partially explains their 2019 general election result, as well as European Parliament elections result, using British Election Study data. I suggest that this 'compete, cooperate or diversify' approach provides a theoretical framework for understanding how niche parties are likely to react to losing their niche elsewhere. 1. Niche parties in the UK prior to the 2019 UK general election Even though they ultimately received relatively few votes, the pivotal role played by 'niche parties' during the 2017-2019 parliament does much to explain the outcome of the election and the subsequent direction of British politics. Such parties have received various academic definitions, with perhaps the most succinct being that they are 'parties that compete primarily on a small number of non-economic issues' (Wagner, 2012, p. 845). There have been a number of attempts in the academic literature to make sense of niche parties. Adams et al. (2006) show that niche parties, first, do not respond to shifts in public opinion by changing their policy positions, whereas mainstream parties do, and, secondly, are electorally punished when moderating their positions, unlike mainstream parties (see also,