Party policy change. Exploring the limits of ideological flexibility in Belgium

Abstract

Parties need to adapt their policy platforms in order to win elections, yet this is not without risk. Policy shifts can reduce credibility and foster intra-party conflicts. As a result, parties tend to proceed with caution when programmatic changes are made. In this article two risk reduction methods are formulated as hypotheses and investigated. First, we claim that parties will prefer making changes to the amount of attention issues get in a manifesto than to the positions they defend. Second, we argue that the amount of change is related to the ideological and electoral importance of the issue. In other words, we assume that parties are less likely to make positional changes on issues they own because this can possibly bring about loss in credibility and contradicts with the fact that politicians and party members are policy driven. These hypotheses are examined with new data gathered through the content analysis of the party manifestos of the Belgian Liberal party and the social-democratic party for elections held between 1961 and 2010. The article concludes that parties make smaller positional changes as opposed to changes in the issues they emphasize. Only weak evidence was found for the fact that the positional flexibility toward an issue correlates with the ideological and electoral importance of an issue.