Is anybody listening?

Abstract

Although extensive research analyzes the factors that motivate European parties to shift their policy positions, there is little cross-national research that analyzes how voters respond to parties’ policy shifts. We report pooled, time-series, analyses of election survey data from several European polities, which suggest that voters do not systematically adjust their perceptions of parties’ positions in response to shifts in parties’ policy statements during election campaigns. We also find no evidence that voters adjust their Left-Right positions or their partisan loyalties in response to shifts in parties’ campaign-based policy statements. By contrast, we find that voters do respond to their subjective perceptions of the parties’ positions. Our findings have important implications for party policy strategies and for political representation. Research on political representation in Europe emphasizes the linkages between parties’ policy positions and their supporters’ policy beliefs. According to this responsible party model of political representation, it is normatively desirable that parties’ policy programmes – and governing parties’ policy outputs – match the views of the party’s supporters, a desiratum that reflects Sartori’s observation that “citizens in Western democracies are represented by and through parties. This is inevitable” (1968, page 471, emphasis in original). Over the past thirty years dozens of studies have analyzed the mass-elite policy linkages that the responsible party model highlights (see, e.g., Dalton 1985; Powell 1989; Iversen 1994). These studies typically report reasonably close matches between parties’ positions and their supporters’ policy preferences, particularly with respect to policy debates over Left-Right social welfare issues (see, e.g., Dalton 1985). In an evolving political environment wherein both parties and voters shift their policy positions, policy correspondence between political parties and their supporters can be maintained through some combination of party elites responding to their supporters and these supporters responding to party elites, i.e., elites may dynamically adjust their policy positions in response to shifts in their supporters’ beliefs, a process we label party responsiveness, and party supporters may dynamically adjust their beliefs in response to shifts in their preferred party’s policy positions, a process we label party persuasion. Alternatively, rank-and-file voters may switch their partisan loyalties in response to parties’ policy shifts, i.e. voters may engage in policy-based partisan switching. The latter two processes both involve voters responding to parties, and we collectively label these as processes of partisan adjustments. We analyze the dynamics of voters’ responses to shifts in European parties’ Left-Right positions. We ask the following questions: When parties shift their Left-Right policy statements, as re1 An alternative representation criterion emphasizes the link between government policies and the median voter position in the electorate (see, e.g., Powell 2000; McDonald and Budge 2005). flected in their election manifestos, do citizens update their perceptions of the parties’ Left-Right positions? And, do we observe partisan adjustments in response to parties’ shifting policy statements, i.e., do citizens respond to parties’ statements by shifting their own Left-Right positions (a persuasion process) and/or their partisan loyalties (partisan switching)? The surprising answer we provide to each of the above questions is no. We find no substantively or statistically significant evidence that voters adjust their perceptions of parties’ Left-Right positions in response to the policy statements in parties’ election manifestos – a conclusion that is striking given that interviews with European political elites that we conducted (discussed below) suggest that parties campaign on the basis of these manifestos. We also find no evidence of citizens’ partisan adjustments in response to parties’ policy statements, i.e., we find no evidence that voters adjust their Left-Right positions or their partisan loyalties in response to these policy statements. This latter conclusion holds both for analyses of national election surveys from five European countries, and for separate analyses of Eurobarometer data from 12 countries over the period 19732002. Simply put, we find that when parties shift the statements in their policy programmes – statements that form the basis for the parties’ election campaigns, according to the party elites we interviewed – there is no evidence that voters respond by adjusting their perceptions of the parties’ Left-Right positions, their own Left-Right positions, or their partisan loyalties. By contrast, we find that European citizens do react to their perceptions of parties’ Left-Right positions, i.e., citizens adjust their Left-Right positions and their partisan loyalties in response to the parties’ policy images. Overall, our findings thereby suggest that Left-Right ideology does matter to 2 The five countries are Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway, the five European polities for which national election survey data are available over a lengthy time period. 3 The twelve countries that are included in the Eurobarometer surveys are Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Luxembourg, Greece, Ireland, Belgium, and Italy.