Abstract
Based on observational as well as experimental accounts, this meta-analytical article deals with the structure of opportunities and limitations that is encountered in party competition by political actors (especially parties, but, in more personalized contexts, also candidates) when they try to decide whether to prioritize between strategies based on the differentiation of positions on political issues and strategies based on factors that are not directly related to competing on issues. Further, the article outlines the mechanisms that serve to interconnect these two strategies and thus lead to a full-fledged political competition with sufficiently developed positional differentiation. In contrast, emphasizing the disappearance of “the politics of goals” in favour of “the politics of outcomes” is not, according to the current state of knowledge in the field, a rewarding strategy of political competition among parties.
Highlights
The politics of goals and the politics of outcomes: position, valence, and issue ownership In current European political thought, discussions on “the disappearance of politics” have been fairly animated
I presuppose that a necessary condition for the politicization of issues is that parties define their position on them, and that they do so by explicitly articulating what the issues are as well as by specifying in what ways their own position differs from the positions taken by their competitors, and in this way, a competition is created amongst the various parties
This article has attempted to provide at least a brief overview of the structure of opportunities and limitations related to the potential transition from competition strategies characterized by party conflict on political issues to other strategies
Summary
Positional location is just one strategy available to actors in political competition amongst parties. To better understand the valence choice phenomenon, it is necessary to operationalize factors such as political scandals, party disunity, and the assessment of a party’s overall competence (Clark 2008) It is precisely these factors, tightly connected with the politics of outcomes and “noncompetition,” which can generate incentives for actors lagging in these areas towards a wider spatial differentiation. Clark and Leiter assert nothing less than that a rewarding strategy for parties with high valence is to simultaneously encourage a positional issue conflict because it is this conflict that brings foregrounds their valence advantage, more so than in the case of competition without positional polarization This conclusion has been confirmed by another study (Pardos-Prado 2012), which found that in reality valence choice offers a stronger explanation in party systems as well as electorates that are more polarized than in those that are more consensual. For the Spanish political scientist, this was evidence that both strategies support each other by generally drawing voters’ attention to political topics
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