Issue salience in regional and national party manifestos in the UK

The study reveals the salience of particular issues in the manifestos of the main British parties for the 1997 and 2003 UK general elections, as well as the 2003 Scottish and Welsh elections, using the method introduced by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) and a modified list of issue categories to reflect the division of government competences between the central and regional governments. Ideological and social base of a party, as well as the delimitation of government competences, are found to be important determinants of issue salience. A more consensual institutional design of the regional government in Scotland and Wales seems to have conditioned larger differences among the issue profiles of parties competing in regional elections, in comparison with general elections. With the institutionalisation of devolution, however, we observe an increase in the similarity of the issue profiles of the same parties in general and in Scottish and Welsh elections, as well as among different parties competing in the same regional elections.     

Positions and saliency of immigration in party manifestos: A novel dataset using crowd coding

Immigration is one of the most widely debated issues today. It has, therefore, also become an important issue in party competition, and radical right parties are trying to exploit the issue. This opens up many pressing questions for researchers. To answer these questions, data on the self‐ascribed and unified party positions on immigration and immigrant integration issues is needed. So far, researchers have relied on expert survey data, media analysis data and ‘proxy’ categories from the Manifesto Project Dataset. However, the former two only give the mediated party position, and the latter relies on proxies that do not specifically measure immigration. The new dataset presented in this article provides researchers with party positions and saliency estimates on two issue dimensions – immigration and immigrant integration – in 14 countries and 43 elections. Deriving the data from manifestos enables the provision of parties’ unified and unfiltered immigration positions for countries and time points not covered in expert surveys and media studies, making it possible to link immigration and immigrant integration positions and saliency scores to other issue areas covered in the Manifesto Project Dataset. Well‐established criteria are used to distinguish between statements on (1) immigration control and (2) immigrant integration. This allows for a more fine‐grained analysis along these two dimensions. Furthermore, the dataset has been generated using the new method of crowd coding, which allows a relatively fast manual coding of political texts. Some of the advantages of crowd coding are that it is easily replicated and expanded, and, as such, presents the research community with the opportunity to amend and expand upon this coding scheme.     

Signalling issue salience: Explaining niche party support in second-order elections

Why do many mainstream party voters switch to voting for niche parties in second-order elections? I develop a simple framework to explain niche party switching in second-order elections and propose that some voters defect strategically to niche parties as a way to signal the salience of an otherwise overlooked issue to their preferred mainstream party. Using panel data from the United Kingdom and Germany, I find that vote switching in second-order elections is more common among those who perceive a mismatch between the party they feel close to and the party perceived as best able to handle an issue of importance to them, as well as when they believe less is at stake and when they place much importance on an overlooked issue.     

The selection of party leaders in Spain

Abstract. Few parties apart from the PSOE have enjoyed stable and cohesive leaderships. A comparison between the PSOE and the AP/PP shows how much more stable the experience of the former has been. Both elect leaders at delegate congesses, although in practice there is little real involvement by rank and file members. Political culture, cleavages and the role of TV all account for this instability.     

Issue salience, issue ownership, and issue-based vote choice

According to the issue ownership theory of voting, voters identify the most credible party proponent of a particular issue and cast their ballots for that issue owner. Despite the centrality of this voter-level mechanism to ownership theories of party behavior, it has seldom been examined in the literature. We explore this model and offer a refinement to its current understanding and operationalization. Returning to the roots of ownership theory, we argue that the effect of issue ownership on vote choice is conditioned by the perceived salience of the issue in question. Through individual-level analyses of vote choice in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, we demonstrate that issue ownership affects the voting decisions of only those individuals who think that the issue is salient.     

Measuring party positions and issue salience from media coverage: Discussing and cross-validating new indicators

Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue salience from media coverage: the core sentence approach and political claims analysis. Our cross-validation shows that with regard to party positions, indicators derived from the media converge with traditionally used measurements from party manifestos, mass surveys and expert judgments, but that salience indicators measure different underlying constructs. We conclude with a discussion of specific research questions for which media data offer potential advantages over more established methods.     

Blind spots in the party system: Spatial voting and issue salience if voters face scarce choices

Drawing on spatial models of political competition, this research investigates whether decision weights vary across groups of voters defined by their policy positioning in a two-dimensional space. Our analyses of electoral survey data from England, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland reveal that the economic and cultural dimensions of electoral competition are salient for the vote choice of most groups of voters. However, those voters who hold economically right and culturally libertarian preferences weigh their preferences on the economic dimension more and discount parties’ position on cultural issues when no party represents their configuration of preferences. Consequently, left parties are less able to attain votes of economically right but culturally libertarian voters for cultural policy reasons, when electoral choices are scarce, while right parties are successful in attaining votes based on both dimensions. As a result, significant representation gaps can occur.     

From autocracy to party government: Interpreting regime changes in Spain and Portugal

The Transition to Democracy in Spain. By José Maravall. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Pp.213. £14.95.

Democratic Politics in Spain. Edited by David S. Bell London: Frances Pinter, 1983. Pp.xiii + 203. £15.00.

Spain, Conditional Democracy. Editedby Christopher Abel and Nissa Torrents. London: Croom Helm, 1984. Pp. 198. £14.95.

Portugal, A Twentieth‐century Interpretation. By TOM Gallagher. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. Pp.xii + 278. £18.50.

Portugal Since the Revolution: Economic and Political Perspectives. Edited by Jorge Braga de Macedo and Simon Serfaty. Colorado: Westview Press, 1981. Pp.xiv + 217. £13.25.

In Search of Modern Portugal. The Revolution and its Consequences. Edited by Lawrence S. Graham and Douglas L. Wheeler. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1983. Pp.xv + 380. $30.00.     

Issue ownership and salience shocks: The electoral impact of Australian bushfires

As climate change increases the frequency of natural disasters, understanding how such disasters affect voting behavior has become crucial. While the literature has demonstrated that voters punish the party of the incumbent when they experience severe destruction, it remains unclear how other political parties are affected. In particular, we argue that voters shift their support to Green parties following natural disasters, given that these parties have ownership of environmental issues. We further argue that disasters decrease mainstream leftist parties’ vote share because liberal-minded voters are more likely to be the ones switching to Green parties. Empirical tests on bushfires and voting in Australia provide some support for our predictions, as all the expected effects of fires on voting manifest in state-level tests but not constituency-level tests. This suggests that our theory may operate only at certain levels of governance, paving the way for future research into why this might be.     

The business firm model of party organisation: Cases from Spain and Italy

Abstract. Discussion of new forms of party organisation have largely focused on the ways in which institutionalised parties have adapted to pressures towards 'catch–all' or 'electoral–professional' behaviour. This article examines the ways in which new parties respond to these pressures. A model of the 'party as business firm' is generated from rational choice assumptions and it is suggested that such a model can emerge when new party systems are created in advanced societies. Two cases of political parties which resemble the business firm model in important ways are analysed in order to gauge the consequences of this type of party organisation: UCD in Spain and Forza Italia in Italy. On the basis of this analysis it is argued that business firm parties are likely to be electorally unstable and politically incoherent, and also prone to serving particularistic interests.     

The effects of party competition on budget outcomes: Empirical evidence from local governments in Spain

This paper investigates the link between local budget outcomes and the intensity of party competition, measured as the margin of victory obtained by the incumbent in the previous local election (i.e. the difference between the vote share and 50%). Two competing hypotheses are tested in the paper. On the one hand, the Leviathan government hypothesis suggests that the lower the intensity of party competition is, the greater is the increase in the size of the local public sector, irrespective of the ideology of the party in power. On the other hand, the Partisan government hypothesis suggests that the incumbent will find it easier to advance its platform when intensity of competition is low (i.e., parties on the left/right will increase/decrease the size of the local public sector when the intensity of the challenge from the opposition is low). These hypotheses are tested with information on spending, own revenues and deficit for more than 500 Spanish local governments over 8 years (1992–1999), and information on the results of two local electoral contests (1991 and 1995). The evidence favors the Partisan hypothesis over the Leviathan one. We found that, for left-wing governments, spending, taxes and deficits increased as the electoral margin increases; whereas, for right-wing governments, a greater margin of victory led to reductions in all these variables.     

Critical election and a new party system: Italy after the 2015 regional election

Although party system change has been widely explored, it is less so for the regional level. The article provides the first systematic attempt to discuss party system change at the regional level in Italy. Through a comprehensive overview of the five 1995–2015 regional elections, indicators of party system change, based on an original database, are explored. It will be showed that in the 2013–15 election cycle while party system fragmentation, volatility and recomposition reached their maximum high – parallel to what happened in 1995 – the level of bipolarism, one of the main features of Italian party system since the mid-1990s, dramatically dropped replaced by a three-pole configuration. These results, and their consistency with the relevant junctures at the national level in 1994 and 2013, may allow to state that a party system change at the regional level occurred and thus to consider 2013–15 elections as critical.     

Government termination in multilevel settings. How party congruence affects the survival of sub-national governments in Germany and Spain

ABSTRACT

Past studies on government survival in parliamentary democracies have been limited to national governments. However, most societies live in a multilevel polity where different policies are decided at distinct governmental layers. So far, the conditions triggering sub-national governments’ termination have remained unexplored. Our paper makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we explicitly focus our analysis on the sub-national government level. Second, we expand the analytical scope by assuming a multilevel setting, in which the survival of sub-national governments is dependent on both the party composition of the national government (vertical congruence) and their sub-national peers (horizontal congruence). We test the impact of both congruence measures on the early termination risk of regional governments. Our analysis is complemented by including “traditional” factors from national government termination literature, such as structural attributes of governments and their bargaining environment, into empirical modelling. Analysing a novel dataset on 494 regional governments in Germany and Spain we find that the risk of sub-national government termination is related to varying levels of vertical congruence. Furthermore, we find interesting explanatory variation between the two countries with regard to the effect size of economic performance, regional authority and congruence.     

Building party organisations and the relevance of past models: The communist and socialist parties in Spain and Portugal

This article explores the development of the party organisations of the communist and socialist parties in contemporary Spain and Portugal. An attempt is made to answer the question of whether these parties resemble the western European mass party model of organisation, which is characterised by the representation and integration of a particular segment of society within the organisational structure. From the contrasting western and southern European paths towards democracy, a hypothesis is generated contending that the limited opportunities and the lack of necessity diminish the likelihood for southern European working‐class parties to build mass organisations. The empirical findings, analysing the nature and size of individual membership, as well as the nature of the linkages between parties and trade unions, reveal that, with the possible exception of the Portuguese communists, the classic mass party is not reproduced in southern Europe. At the same time, however, the model of the party as a membership organisation apparently has not lost its legitimacy.     

The party road to representation: Unequal responsiveness in party platforms

This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue-areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesises that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesises that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi-country, multi-issue-area, multi-wave survey data with data on party platforms for 39 democracies.     

Origins of party formation and new party success in advanced democracies

Which new parties entered national parliaments in advanced democracies over the last four decades and how did they perform after their national breakthrough? This article argues that distinguishing two types of party formation (that facilitate or complicate party institutionalisation) helps to explain why some entries flourish, while others vanish quickly from the national stage. New parties formed by individual entrepreneurs that cannot rely on ties to already organised groups are less likely to get reelected to parliament after breakthrough than rooted newcomers. This hypothesis is tested on a newly compiled dataset of new parties that entered parliaments in 17 advanced democracies from 1968 onwards. Applying multilevel analyses, the factors that shape newcomers' capacity to reenter parliament after breakthrough are assessed. Five factors have significant effects, yet affect party performance only in particular phases: both a party's electoral support at breakthrough and its operation in a system with a strong regional tier increase the likelihood of initial reelection. In contrast, a distinct programmatic profile, the permissiveness of the electoral system and easy access to free broadcasting increase a party's chance of repeated reelection. Only formation type significantly affects both phases and does so most strongly, substantiating the theoretical approach used in this article.     

Issue ownership attack: how a political party can counteract a rival’s issue ownership

Abstract

A central part of representative democracy is that voters evaluate political parties based on how competently they handle issues, so-called ‘issue ownership’. Since issue ownership is a central ingredient in the vote choice, rival parties often try to influence how voters evaluate a competing party. This is an issue ownership attack. However, despite intense scholarly interest in issue ownership, the understanding of how parties shape issue ownership is very limited. Therefore a new theoretical model is tested here to understand issue ownership attack. Using several survey experiments, the analysis shows that a mainstream party can counteract another mainstream party’s issue ownership by reframing the issue and by blaming the party for its performance, but not by changing its own position on the issue. Hence, the study not only advances the understanding of issue ownership stability and change but also brings important insights on how parties influence voters.     

Measuring portfolio salience in Eastern European parliamentary democracies

Abstract.  This article presents the results of an expert survey of 14 Eastern European countries on the subject of portfolio salience. Respondents provided ratings of the relative value of all ministerial portfolios in these countries over the years 1990–2002. The ratings are unique in the study of Eastern Europe and appear to possess the characteristics of comprehensiveness and reliability. Comparing the results with a similar survey of Western Europe indicates that individual portfolios are rated nearly identically in both regions. Some significant differences, however, emerge when we look separately at more advanced and less advanced Eastern European countries. Various suggestions are made for how scholars can use these new data in future work.     

Conflict and cohesion in the British labour party and French communist party

The article examines the differing organisational structures and political cultures which provide the bases for cohesion in the PCF and British Labour Party. It argues that the electoral decline of the two parties since the late 1960s, and the rise of new political forces to challenge their primacy on the Left, have generated growing internal conflict in each case. Despite the greater pressures towards unity in the PCF such conflicts have threatened the existing bases of cohesion in both parties. The article concludes by considering the possibilities of surmounting the current problems.