Multidimensional Policy Space Research Articles

Beyond the U-curve: Citizen preferences on European integration in multidimensional political space

One of the major findings of the literature on Euroscepticism is that support for European integration generally declines as one moves closer to the extremes of the left-right ideological spectrum. However, in multidimensional policy space, Euroscepticism varies in more complex ways. This article explores the relief of Euroscepticism for citizens in four European states – the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France – based on data from voting advice applications fielded before the 2019 elections of the European Parliament. The results reveal that the way Euroscepticism maps onto other dimensions differs significantly for citizens and for parties and across political contexts. Such variation is important for understanding how preferences for European integration are embedded into existing structures of political competition.

Editorial Introduction: Multidimensional policy spaces, policy actors and the policy process, and an update to the institutional collective action framework

Editorial Introduction: Multidimensional policy spaces, policy actors and the policy process, and an update to the institutional collective action framework

Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Tacit Collusion in Politics

We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting, allowing a multidimensional policy space and multiple political parties. This model entails multiple equilibria. When parties hold different opinions on some policy, they may take different policy positions that do not coincide with the median voter’s preferred policy platform but converge towards it. In contrast, when parties have a mutual understanding on a particular policy, their policy positions may converge (on some dimension) but not to the median voter’s preferred policy. Parties may collude with one another and take a position that differs from what the median voter prefers, despite political competition. Collusion may collapse, for instance, after the entry of a new political party. We substantiate the theoretical arguments with descriptive evidence using Swedish survey data on politicians and voters, which suggests that there is competition on some dimensions and collusion on others.

Competition and interaction: Party ties to interest groups in a multidimensional policy space

AbstractPolitical parties and interest groups play a vital role in incorporating societal interests into democratic decision‐making. Therefore, explaining the nature and variation in the relationship between them will advance our understanding of democratic governance. Existing research has primarily drawn attention to how exchange of resources shapes these relationships largely neglecting the role of contextual conditions. Our contribution is to examine whether parties’ structured interactions with different categories of interest groups vary systematically with the pattern of party competition at the level of policy dimensions. First, we argue that higher party fragmentation in a policy space makes organisational ties to interest groups more likely, due to fears of voter loss and splinter groups. Second, we expect higher polarisation between parties on a policy dimension to make ties to relevant groups less likely due to increased electoral costs. We find support for both expectations when analysing new data on 116 party units in 13 mature democracies along nine different policy dimensions. Our findings underline the value of considering the strategic context in which parties and interest groups interact to understand their relationship. The study sheds new light on parties and interest groups as intermediaries in democracy and contributes to a new research agenda connecting interest group research with studies of parties’ policy positions and responsiveness.

Optimal Timing of Policy Announcements in Dynamic Election Campaigns*

AbstractWe construct a dynamic model of election campaigns. In the model, opportunities for candidates to refine/clarify their policy positions are limited and arrive stochastically along the course of the campaign until the predetermined election date. We show that this simple friction leads to rich and subtle campaign dynamics. We first demonstrate these effects in a series of canonical static models of elections that we extend to dynamic settings, including models with valence and a multidimensional policy space. We then present general principles that underlie the results from those models. In particular, we establish that candidates spend a long time using ambiguous language during the election campaign in equilibrium.

Inferring party positions across issue dimensions

In this article, we argue that voters use party positions on an issue dimension as a heuristic device to locate parties on other dimensions on which they have less information about. We confirm our argument by fielding two survey experiments in a context with two distinct issue dimensions: the left-right and national dimensions in Catalonia. We find that the position of a hypothetical (but plausible) candidate on a national dimension exerts a great deal of influence on where respondents locate him on the left-right dimension, as well as on a more narrowly-defined socioeconomic dimension, but that the left-right position does not affect the perceived placement on the national divide. This asymmetry can be partly explained by the different nature of these issue domains, and specifically by the distinct ability of the national dimension to activate social group cues that give rise to projection biases. These findings have important implications for our understanding of issue misperceptions and of the strategic choices available to parties in multidimensional policy spaces. The nature of the issue dimension could facilitate why some issue dimensions tend to function as cue givers and others as cue receivers. We discuss the implications of our findings in constraining the strategies available to parties in multidimensional contexts.

When dominant parties adopt proportional representation: the mysterious case of Belgium

AbstractAs the first country to introduce proportional representation (PR), Belgium has attracted considerable attention. Yet, we find the existing explanations for the 1899 breakthrough lacking. At the time of reform, the Catholic Party was politically dominant, advantaged by the electoral system, and facing reformist Socialists. Nevertheless, they single-handedly changed the electoral system and lost 26 seats in the first election under PR. We argue that the Catholics had good reasons to adopt PR. Majoritarian rules tend to create high levels of uncertainty because they provide incentives for non-dominant parties to cooperate. Such electoral coalitions are facilitated by multidimensional policy spaces that make electoral coalitions other than between nonsocialist parties possible. PR reduces the effectiveness of cooperation between non-dominant parties, but such certainty comes at a price. In addition, in the presence of dominant parties, divisions over electoral system reform often result in intra-party conflicts that may be more decisive than inter-party conflicts.

Parties, governments and the integration of immigrants

ABSTRACT Integration of immigrants into the labor market is a sizeable policy concern for developed democracies. This article argues that government type influences immigrants’ labor market outcomes. Since immigrant integration constitutes a multidimensional policy space, differences in party preferences and the dynamics of intragovernmental and legislative bargaining make it hard for coalition and minority governments to implement effective labor market integration policies. Consequently, single-party majority governments are better able to foster the labor market integration of immigrants. Fixed-effects estimations in a panel of OECD countries provide evidence in favor of this argument. A single-party majority government reduces the employment gap between the foreign and the native-born population with several percentage points.

How do governments determine policy priorities? Studying development strategies through spillover networks

Determining policy priorities is a challenging task for any government because there may be, for example, a multiple objectives to be simultaneously attained, a multidimensional policy space to be explored, inefficiencies in the implementation of public policies, interdependencies between policy issues, etc. Altogether, these factors generate a complex landscape that governments need to navigate in order to reach their goals. To address this problem, we develop a framework to model the evolution of development indicators as a political economy game on a network. Our approach accounts for the –recently documented– network of interactions between policy issues, as well as the well-known political economy problem arising from budget assignment. This allows us to infer not only policy priorities, but also the effective use of resources in each policy issue. Using development indicators data from more than 100 countries over 11 years, we show that the country-specific context is a central determinant of the effectiveness of policy priorities. In addition, our model explains well-known aggregate facts about the relationship between corruption and development. Finally, this framework provides a new analytic tool to generate bespoke advice on development strategies.

Multi-dimensional policy preferences in the 2015 British general election: A conjoint analysis

This research explores voter preferences in the multi-dimensional policy space of the 2015 UK general election, as well as the influence of those preferences on vote choice. In our original pre-election survey, we apply a conjoint experimental design where we use actual party manifestos to examine voters' policy preferences across five main policy domains. This design allows us to both identify voters' sincere preferences, as estimated by their responses to hypothetical policy packages, and to reveal the influence of these preferences on voter support in the actual election. Our analysis reveals a considerable level of congruence between voters' underlying policy preferences and their vote choice in the 2015 election. Our results also speak to the previous literature on policy preferences and vote choice by demonstrating that voters not only weigh the importance of particular policy domains differently, but also have clear preferences regarding specific policy positions in a given domain, which eventually influence their support for a party in the election.

Redistribution Without a Median Voter: Models of Multidimensional Politics

Most work on redistribution in democracies is anchored in long-standing unidimensional models, notably the seminal Meltzer-Richard-Romer model. When scholars venture outside the security of unidimensionality, many either abandon theoretical rigor or miss the full consequences of adding more dimensions (whether ideological or economic). There is now a substantial literature on redistributive politics in multidimensional policy spaces, but it tends to be very technical and frequently misinterpreted, if not ignored. This purpose of this article is to review this relatively new literature using simple graphical representations, focusing on the key assumptions, intuitions, and results. We show how issue bundling, issue salience, and the distribution of preferences can affect redistribution, and we discuss the role of political institutions in inducing particular outcomes. We also highlight the opportunities for dialogue between formal models and more constructivist approaches by exploring the effects of political entrepreneurs manipulating salience, institutions, and even identities.

How Do Governments Determine Policy Priorities? Studying Development Strategies Through Networked Spillovers

Determining policy priorities is a challenging task for any government because there may be, for example, a multiplicity of objectives to be simultaneously attained, a multidimensional policy space to be explored, inefficiencies in the implementation of public policies, interdependencies between policy issues, etc. Altogether, these factors generate a complex landscape that governments need to navigate in order to reach their goals. To address this problem, we develop a framework to model the evolution of development indicators as a political economy game on a network. Our approach accounts for the --recently documented-- network of spillovers between policy issues, as well as the well-known political economy problem arising from budget assignment. This allows us to infer not only policy priorities, but also the effective use of resources in each policy issue. Using development indicators data from more than 100 countries over 11 years, we show that the country-specific context is a central determinant of the effectiveness of policy priorities. In addition, our model explains well-known aggregate facts about the relationship between corruption and development. Finally, this framework provides a new analytic tool to generate bespoke advice on development strategies.

Communicating on electoral platforms

This paper proposes an analysis of strategic communication on platforms by candidates during an electoral campaign. A candidate's platform in a (possibly) multidimensional policy space is fixed, but is imperfectly known by voters. A candidate strategically decides the emphasis he puts on the various issues, and thus the precision of the information he conveys to voters on his position on each issue. We show that if voters are fully rational, then all the relevant information is revealed at equilibrium, whatever the candidate's true position. We then study a model of boundedly rational voters, who take at face value the messages sent by the politicians, without being able to decipher their strategies. If voters are boundedly rational in this sense, a politician will not transmit all the relevant information; his communication strategy will depend on both the prior in the electorate and his true positions (unknown to the electorate). In particular, we show that candidates address all issues with positive probability, but tend to talk more often on issues on which they are a priori congruent with the representative voter, thereby providing a “nuanced” version of Petrocik's “issue ownership theory”.

Democracies Adrift: How the European Crises Affect East-Central Europe

Electoral landslides, corruption scandals, mass protests, a declining satisfaction with democracy and weakened democratic accountability in Hungary and Poland pose questions about where East-Central European democracies are heading and how their paths are related to the crisis of European integration. I argue that the crises of economic and European integration have discredited the nexus between economic integration and prosperity and made responsive and responsible government more incongruent. Multi-dimensional policy spaces facilitated the growth of anti-establishment parties in the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Higher performance expectations of citizens, the mixed electoral system, and missing institutional safeguards of societal-political pluralism rendered Hungary’s democracy more vulnerable.

Heterogeneity in voter perceptions of party competition in multidimensional space: Evidence from Japan

On the question of how voters perceive party positions, much of the existing literature has not adequately considered the case of a multidimensional policy space. Since the ideological cues related to each issue differ in a policy space of multiple dimensions, it is possible that each individual favors different dimensional cues. To test this hypothesis, this paper focuses on Japan’s 2012 Lower House election, which took place in a two-dimensional policy space. An analysis of how voters position the three major parties relative to each other reveals that there is actually heterogeneity in the voter perception of the policy space. Further, using a mixed logit model, we find that demographic factors and political attitudes explain this heterogeneity.

Multidimensional political competition with non-common beliefs

This paper extends a probabilistic voting model with a multidimensional policy space, allowing candidates to have different prior probability distributions of the distribution of voters’ ideal policies. In this model, we show that a platform pair is a Nash equilibrium if and only if both candidates choose a common generalized median of expected ideal policies. Thus, the existence of a Nash equilibrium requires not only that each candidate’s belief have an expected generalized median, which is already a knife-edge condition, but also that the two medians coincide. We also study limits of ϵ-equilibria of Radner (1980) as ϵ ! 0, which we call “limit equilibria.” Limit equilibria are policy pairs that approximate choices by the candidates who almost perfectly optimize. We show that a policy pair is a limit equilibrium if and only if both candidates choose the same policy around which they form “opposite expectations” in a certain sense. For a limit equilibrium to exist (equivalently, for ϵ-equilibria to exist for all ϵ > 0), it is sufficient, though not necessary, that either candidate has an expected generalized median.

Position, selective emphasis and framing

This Special Issue aims to (1) theorise party strategies in multi-dimensional policy spaces; and (2) apply the theory to party competition in multinational democracies characterised by a salient territorial dimension alongside a more established economic dimension. The introductory article brings together recent contributions treating spatial and salience theories as compatible and policy spaces as two-dimensional to propose four party strategies that can be ranked from one- to two-dimensional competitive behaviour: uni-dimensionality, blurring, subsuming, and two- dimensionality. The remaining contributions operationalise these strategies and draw on a variety of data sources ranging from manifestos to parliamentary bill proposals and expert surveys to describe when and explore why parties use these strategies in competition, focusing on patterns of party competition in multinational democracies, selected as typical cases of multi-dimensional competition.

Expert advice to a voting body

I provide a theory of information transmission in collective choice settings. In the model, an expert has private information on the effect of a policy proposal and communicates to a set of voters prior to a vote over whether or not to implement the proposal. In contrast to previous game-theoretic models of political communication, the results apply to situations involving multiple voters, multidimensional policy spaces and a broad class of voting rules. The results highlight how experts can use information to manipulate collective choices in a way that reduces the ex ante expected utilities of all voters. Opportunities for expert manipulation are the result of collective choice instability: all voting rules that allow collective preference cycles also allow welfare-reducing manipulative persuasion by an expert. The results challenge prevailing theories of institutions in which procedures are designed to maximize information transmission.

What Accounts for Party System Stability? Comparing the Dimensions of Party Competition in Postcommunist Europe

Why do party systems stabilise quickly in some new democracies while others remain in extended flux? As a core variable of comparative politics, party system stability has led scholars to generate various theoretical explanations, but consensus is still lacking. Given its widely divergent party systems, postcommunist Europe presents an important opportunity to revisit stability's determinants. Applying hypotheses derived from theories about competition in multidimensional policy spaces, I find that they better explain variation in a 14-case sample than contending hypotheses about the electoral system, economic performance, constitutional design, political culture, or previous democratic experience.

Lobbying in a Multidimensional Policy Space with Salient Issues

We present a citizen-candidate model on a multidimensional policy space with lobbying, where citizens regard some issues more salient than others. We find that special interest groups that lobby on less salient topics move the implemented policy closer to their preferred policy, compared to the ones that lobby on more salient issues. When we introduce two types of citizens, who differ with respect to the salience of issues, we find pooling equilibria where voters are not able to offset the effect of lobbying on the implemented policy. This result is in sharp contrast with previous work on unidimensional citizen-candidate models that predict the irrelevance of lobbying on the implemented policy. In an extension of the model we provide citizens with the possibility of giving monetary contributions to lobbies in order to increase their power. With more than one lobby per dimension we have two findings. First, under some conditions only the most extreme lobbies receive contributions. Second, the effectiveness of a lobby is maximized when the salience of an issue is low in the population and high for a small group of citizens.