Party Manifestos Research Articles

Charter–manifesto congruence as a signal for issue salience: democratic innovations within political parties in Hungary

ABSTRACT This article proposes a proxy for issue salience via studying congruence between parties’ organizational structure and the policies they promote to their voters. This charter-manifesto congruence, i.e. institutionalizing the same democratic innovations at the intra-party level and advocating for their adoption at the national level, is particularly useful to demarcate party profiles in dominant party systems and electoral autocracies. To demonstrate how such congruence can be measured, we analyse the credibility of the commitments made by opposition parties in Hungary to a variety of democratic innovations. Drawing on novel survey data, we further substantiate our argument by showing high support for these innovations among party members and voters. The analysis identifies gender quotas as the most congruent innovation. Our longitudinal research design also reveals a recent breakthrough of e-democracy in party manifestos. We then discuss how preferences for various innovations are potentially shaped by membership size, party founders’ political socialization or organizational learning. At the normative level, the analysis suggests that some forms of democratic innovations are better suited for intra-party organizations than for party manifestos. These implications might be relevant for those committed to promoting deliberation, gender equality and (re-)engagement of the youth in politics.

Revisiting Manifestos: An Assessment and the Prospects for the Upcoming Indian General Election 2024

India is the largest democracy and a land of multi-party-political system. During the wake of the election, every single party attempted to seize the attention of the citizenry, as they recognized their need to be legitimized by this set of political actors in India. In the phase of technological progression, while social media and alphanumeric expertise have traded almost all the old communication formats among these three political communication actors, the political parties, too, opt for more prompt forms of communication. What remains static is the party manifesto, a declared statement that is put into the movement as the proposed policy documents. In the same venture, almost a decade ago, India witnessed a political shift that was projected through the manifesto of the political party that is enjoying the position of the current Indian government. This research paper aims to analyze the released manifestoes of two national-level political giants in India, the BJP and INC, for the 2014 and 2019 general elections in India. It aims to explore the pattern of issues that are being addressed in the manifesto and to make predictions for the upcoming manifestos of the 2024 general election for both parties. The researcher has used the abductive reasoning method to make abductive predictions based on the previous manifestoes of the BJP and INC. After following the process of detailed exploration, examination, selection, and explanation, predictions have been given. The analysis explored that both political parties have their own exclusive issues of concern apart from common concerns, and these new set of issues will be posed in the manifesto of the 2024 general election

Migrants’ Political Participation and Representation in Poland: What Do Political Parties Have to Offer?

Since 2018, Poland has been a net migration country, yet public debates on migrants and migration remain scarce and have been defined by a reactionary nature. This article, adopting a political opportunity structure perspective, focuses on political parties as the main actors shaping opportunities and constraints for migrant political participation and representation in Polish society. Based on a qualitative content analysis of party manifestos and parliamentary debates, and using the deductive thematic analysis framework, this study analysed three types of arguments parties have adopted regarding the admission of migrants. The findings revealed that Polish political parties, failing to see non-voting migrants as promising electoral targets, have weaponised the migrant issue and used it as an element of the partisan battle to attack opponents, especially during the election campaign period, instead of stimulating migrants’ political participation and offering them channels for representation.

Political mobilisation and socioeconomic inequality in policy congruence

AbstractIn recent years, scholars have observed that political parties’ policy positions frequently fit the preferences of well‐to‐do voters better than those of the less well‐to‐do; a phenomenon known as policy congruence inequality. While the existence of inequality in policy congruence is well‐established, we currently only have a modest understanding of the causes of it. We develop an argument proposing that the political mobilisation of citizens with low socioeconomic status (SES) both in the parliamentary channel, in the form of high turnout, and in the extra‐parliamentary channel, in the form of high union density, is pivotal. Both high turnout and union density force parties to pay more attention to the preferences of the disadvantaged, thereby creating lower policy congruence inequality. To test the argument, we have collected and harmonised election surveys and party manifestos covering 90 elections in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, covering several decades until today, yielding more than 120,000 voter–party dyads. Employing this new dataset, our results confirm that the political mobilisation of citizens with low SES is a strong predictor of policy congruence inequality. This finding nuances the conclusion of extant research by showing that low‐SES citizens are not always on the losing side politically. It also implies the important role of maintaining or maybe even increasing turnout and union membership among the disadvantaged in society. Places where either turnout or union density is slipping in these years are likely to witness further increases in policy congruence inequality in the years to come.

Can the party family approach explain Polish partisan positions? A case study on the policy field of higher education in post-socialist Poland

ABSTRACT Research on partisan positions on higher education policies has focused to date mainly on parties in sustained democratic regimes in Western Europe. This study compares these findings with Polish parties’ positioning and investigates the extent to which parties’ preferences in post-socialist Poland can be explained by their party family affiliations. Poland provides an interesting case because of its socialist heritage of strong government control in the higher education sector and the rather fluid party system with a comparatively large share of populist right parties. By means of a qualitative content analysis of 41 party manifestos from 1989–2019, partisan positions of Christian democratic, social democratic, liberal, agrarian, and populist right parties are categorized along the re-distributive and control dimension of higher education policies. While party families can explain Polish parties’ positioning on the control dimension, there is a cross-party consensus to expand the sector and increase public funding due to strong popular demand after the transformation which contrasts with the positions of West European parties. Key results are a rising salience of this policy field in party manifestos and a detailed description of populist right parties’ preferences for government control of higher education institutions and expansion of this sector.

They shall not pass? The role of supply-side factors in the electoral breakthrough of VOX and Chega

ABSTRACT No country is immune to the electoral success of populist radical right (PRR) parties: Spain and Portugal seemed to be the exception to this rule because, for decades, PRR parties remained relegated to the margins of the Iberian political systems. However, in 2019 VOX and Chega gained parliamentary representation: how did they manage to obtain their historic electoral breakthrough? From a supply-side perspective, we use the Party Manifesto dataset to show that VOX and Chega chose to position themselves within the existing political space and cleavages in ways that set them apart from the competition. VOX exploited the Spanish centre-periphery cleavage insisting on strong nationalist elements while advocating for increased centralization, while Chega insisted on personal freedom and welfare limitation to break the ties with the political system born out of the Carnation Revolution.

‘Organic unity through a new order’: Ideas of corporatism and the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling

This paper analyses the complex relationship between ideas of corporatism, the Norwegian fascist party Nasjonal Samling (National Unity, NS), fascist Italy, and fascist internationalism in the 1930s. It demonstrates how the NS fused the foreign corporative model provided by fascist Italy with nativist traditions and used corporatism to its ends as a signifier for a national and international ‘new order’ on the rise, based on ideas of solidarity. The NS party manifesto from 1934 envisioned corporatism as a promising alternative to capitalist liberalism and as a solution to the parliamentary crisis. The corporatist NS program also facilitated connections between the Norwegian party and Italian Fascism, culminating in the idea of corporatism as a uniting principle of fascist internationalism in the mid-1930s. Finally, the paper discusses briefly the legacy of the corporatist NS program and its fragmentary implementation in the 1940s during the German occupation of Norway (1940-1945).

The National Recovery and Resilience Plans: Towards a Next Generation of Fiscal Coordination?

The Recovery and Resilience Facility reflects unprecedented solidarity through common financing paired with an innovative governance framework. Member states can access grants and loans through the formulation of National Recovery and Resilience Plans, under a set of conditions that include minimum allocation targets and addressing country-specific recommendations. The analysis evaluates whether the governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility mitigates one of the longstanding weaknesses of the Economic and Monetary Union architecture: fiscal coordination. Assessing the prevalence of green, digital, and social priorities in the (a) National Recovery and Resilience Plans, (b) the country-specific recommendations, and (c) party manifestos through a quantitative and qualitative text analysis shows some convergence toward supranational preferences, albeit only in the green domain. I provide preliminary evidence at the stage of the formulation of the plans of the effectiveness of the Recovery and Resilience Facility fiscal policy coordination by testing whether recovery agendas in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans reflect EU or national priorities. Deviating from the limited implementation of country-specific recommendations within the European Semester, the analysis indicates the governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility orients the National Recovery and Resilience Plans toward fostering a green recovery. Findings contribute to the assessment of how pandemic recovery instruments innovate EU fiscal governance and longstanding discussions on the ineffectiveness of fiscal coordination within the Economic and Monetary Union, informing the ongoing debate on the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact and a permanent successor to the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

Alternative democracy? Crisis, discourse and versions of democracy in Zimbabwean politics in the post-2000 context

Democracy is a much contested concept in political movements and politics. The post-2000 context reveals a multiplicity of complex political, social and economic challenges linked to the Zimbabwean crisis which can be best unpacked and understood through critical discourse analysis (CDA). These challenges reflect multiple contestations to the conceptualisation of democracy. This chapter will debunk the political personalisation of democracy and how political parties insert their parties in the narrative of the concept’s modern manifestations, conceptions and practices of democracy. Democracy incorporates multiple layers of meaning and practices. This chapter focuses on how Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) narratives and stylistic designs are incorporated into their agenda-setting strategies, identity construction and discursive legitimation. Analysis of the theory and discourse of democracy illuminates the conventions, logic and dictates of language, knowledge and meaning. It exposes the inherent politics, nuances and paradoxes of democracy. Analyses of democratic movement(s) through CDA highlight democracy as a political strategy that at once contests power but also gestures to a political alternative and a sustainable development plan. Considering that CDA as a qualitative and narrative analysis method focused on generic features of whole texts rather than isolated features of the text, this chapter analyses the politics of democracy discourse and its relationship to Zimbabwean politics in the context of broader narratives of the Zimbabwean crisis. The paper problematises selected party manifestoes to illuminate and dissect the discourses and power contestations characterising Zimbabwean politics since the emergence of a strong opposition contender, the MDC in 2000. In contrast to normative representations in political discourses, knowledge is embedded in specific cultures, that is, institutionalised practices of decision-making and means of legitimation. In this regard, insights from cultural enquiries necessitated by CDA create the prerequisite for the analysis of political texts.

Economic Ideology in Indian Politics: Why Do Elite and Mass Politics Differ?

A long line of scholarship has argued that ideological division structures party politics in many parts of the world. In India, however, there is a long-held consensus that the parties do not sort themselves ideologically, especially regarding economic policymaking. The paper analyses National Election Studies data between 1996 and 2019 by Lokniti-CSDS, and shows that voters cluster around the centre-left position on economic issues. Nevertheless, there are discernible ideological differences among the party members. The Bhartiya Janata Party members are more likely to favour privatisation, and members of Left parties prefer labour rights. These ideological differences are also evident in our analysis of the manifestos of political parties since 1952 and an expert survey conducted in 2022. We argue that these elite differences in economic policy do not translate into mass politics because all political parties present the State as the solution to economic deprivation. The rise of welfare populism in Indian politics in the past two decades, we suggest, is a result of centralisation within political parties in which the welfare promises are directly linked to the party leaders.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s Administration and the Change Mantra in Nigeria

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and its largest economy is credited with an abundance of natural and human resource endowments placing it potentially, among resource-rich nations and raising hopes of its development potentials. Contrary to this potentiality, the country remains underdeveloped with a large portion of the population living below all indices of human development. Democracy offers hope for pragmatic changes to leadership and government policies in society’s quest for change and stability. It was on this basis that numerous disenchanted Nigerians embraced the prospect of ‘change’ put forward as campaign slogan by Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress against the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party in the run-ups to the 2015 elections. Consequently, Mr. Buhari was sworn in as President on the back of his change mantra, on the 29th of May 2015 with his party remarkably defeating an incumbent president. The party was re–elected for another four years in 2019 arguably aided by factors of incumbency and some remnant of civil optimism. After the expiration of his eight year tenure, there are questions on the performance of the Buhari administration that need exploration, viz-a-viz performance to voters’ expectations; the party’s delivery relative to party manifesto; and public disposition to, and perception of standard of living under the administration. Eight years after this government, were they able to introduce the much needed change? How far did they go in fulfilling some of their laudable promises as contained in their manifesto? Did they live up to the expectations of the citizens? This paper seeks to answer these questions through evaluation of the major promises made to the citizens by the ‘Change Mantra’ government. The social contract theory was employed. The paper relies on secondary means of data collection and is analyzed using descriptive analysis and narrative report. The study concludes that the Government did not live up to the citizen’s expectations and most of their promises were never accomplished. The study recommends that corrupt politicians should be jailed to serve as a deterrent to others. Our political culture should be changed; citizens should begin to demand for dividends of democracy from their elected representatives

Relationship Between Political Parties, Democratic Governance, and Sustainable Development in Nigeria's Fourth Republic

This paper studies the correlation between parties, democracy, and development in Nigeria. The functions of parties in democratic states, notably that of competent leadership recruitment and that of articulating cohesive policy frameworks that translate socio-economic visions into reality, make them critical institutions for sustainable development. Against this background, we examine the role of parties in promoting development in the Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This study is important since it investigates the factors that affect parties' ability to pursue cohesive policies for the development of Nigeria since democratization in 1999. Our findings will enrich the current discourse on development, especially the relevance of parties in it. We rely on textual data from multiple sources, including policy briefs, party manifestoes, and other relevant literature on parties and governance. We content analyzed these data to reveal insightful themes and sub-themes about our questions. Our conclusion shows that although parties can promote good governance and development, factors associated with their sociological origins and institutional capacities undermine this ability in the Fourth Republic. Parties' failure since 1999 is partly responsible for Nigeria's current governance and development crises.

‘The first, but not the last’: women’s descriptive and substantive representation in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election

The 2021 Scottish Parliament election delivered the most diverse range of MSPs in Holyrood’s history, including a record number of women. We situate the 2021 election within its wider context, evaluating dynamics of party feminisation over time. Drawing on original candidate data and analysis of party manifestos across the main Scottish parties, we assess parties’ substantive appeals to women voters; the integration of different groups of women as candidates, MSPs and leaders; and the adoption and implementation of gender quotas. We find evidence of descriptive and substantive party feminisation in Scotland over time—including increases in both the amount and diversity of party manifesto pledges directed at women voters; improvements in the number and diversity of women selected and elected; and the increasing diffusion of, and inter-party competition over, gender quota measures. Yet we also find that progress has been uneven across parties and that some groups of women continue to be descriptively and substantively under-represented in Scottish politics.

Advantages and pitfalls of machine translation for party research: the translation of party manifestos of European parties using DeepL

Parties are the central actors in representative democracies as they perform important democratic functions. Thus, the identification of party positions is a crucial concern. Party researchers mainly rely on party manifestos to estimate policy positions. However, the analysis of manifestos is accompanied by challenges—one of the biggest being cross-national comparisons because of different institutional settings and languages. This article discusses machine translation (MT) as a new option for party research, and reports on the author's experiences with the translation of more than 200 party manifestos using the commercial artificial intelligence (AI) translation tool DeepL. To make this approach widely applicable, the (technical) procedure, including its problems and workarounds for large-scale projects, is presented as a step-by-step guide using R. Additionally, drawing on the most recent German, Estonian, Italian and Polish parliamentary election manifestos this article evaluates the quality of the DeepL translations by applying both back translation and Wordfish analyses. The main findings indicate that DeepL offers high-quality translations as more than 90% of the checked sentences are reproduced word-for-word or at least synonymously and with stable positioning on the left-right scale of both original and English translation. The results have greater implications for political science research as they speak to the reliability of machine translation for political texts.

Nostalgia in European Party Politics: A Text-Based Measurement Approach

Abstract Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of communication. It usually concentrates on promises, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising, given that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. This article presents a novel dataset, PolNos, which contains six text-based measures of nostalgic rhetoric in 1,648 party manifestos across 24 European democracies from 1946 to 2018. The measures combine dictionaries, word embeddings, sentiment approaches, and supervised machine learning. Our analysis yields a consistent result: nostalgia is most prevalent in manifestos of culturally conservative parties, notably Christian democratic, nationalist, and radical right parties. However, substantial variation remains regarding regional differences and whether nostalgia concerns the economy or culture. We discuss the implications and use of our dataset for studying political parties, party competition, and elections.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICAL PARTIES, DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE, AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA'S FOURTH REPUBLIC

This paper studies the correlation between parties, democracy, and development in Nigeria. The functions of parties in democratic states, notably that of competent leadership recruitment and that of articulating cohesive policy frameworks that translate socio-economic visions into reality, make them critical institutions for sustainable development. Against this background, we examine the role of parties in promoting development in the Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. This study is important since it investigates the factors that affect parties' ability to pursue cohesive policies for the development of Nigeria since democratization in 1999. Our findings will enrich the current discourse on development, especially the relevance of parties in it. We rely on textual data from multiple sources, including policy briefs, party manifestoes, and other relevant literature on parties and governance. We content analyzed these data to reveal insightful themes and sub-themes about our questions. Our conclusion shows that although parties can promote good governance and development, factors associated with their sociological origins and institutional capacities undermine this ability in the Fourth Republic. Parties' failure since 1999 is partly responsible for Nigeria's current governance and development crises.

From qualified to conspirative Euroscepticism: how the German AfD frames the EU in multiple crisis

ABSTRACT Research on Euroscepticism tends to portray parties opposing European integration or criticising the European Union (EU) as a family of Eurosceptic parties (either hard or soft). Recent literature, however, offers empirical evidence on the ambivalence and diversity of the EU critique. What is still unclear are the reasons behind the chameleonic nature of Euroscepticism and the implications that this may have for the EU critique and the changes proposed about EU policy or institutions. The present article addresses this question exploring the role of EU crises to capture the changing nature of Euroscepticism and suggests that it is related to contextual pressures on the political debate around the EU. The paper develops this argument and illustrates it through the analysis of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, covering the EU crises of the last decade, including the recent period of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine invasion. Drawing on a corpus of party manifestos and speeches between 2013 and 2022, this study shows that there are three main frames used by the party to criticise the EU. It also concludes that these frames involve distinct political implications for the EU critique and the alternative proposals presented by the party.

Competing on competence: the issue profiles of mainstream parties in Western Europe

Despite a more volatile electoral landscape and in many countries also the electoral rise of niche parties, major mainstream parties continue to define the major political alternatives that citizens in Western Europe face when it comes to government alternatives. However, the voluminous literature on party competition in Western Europe mostly takes niche parties as the starting point to understand the consequences of the changing electoral landscape and also to understand the issue strategies of major mainstream parties. These parties should come to the centerstage. They pursue a common competence strategy which leads them to focus particularly on macroeconomics, health care, and education where they can document government competence to large parts of the electorate. This implies an increased overall similarity in their issue profiles. These findings are based on CAP coded party manifestos from seven countries since the early 1980s.

Politicization of redistributive policies and political behavior of the poor in German elections

The socio-economic gradient in political participation is a growing concern in Germany and many other democracies. We investigate whether campaigns that politicize socio-economic conflicts can mobilize the poor to become more politically active. Using a mixed-methods design that draws on party manifestos, election surveys, and focus group discussions, we show that the 2021 election followed a trend of re-positioning of the SPD, shifting their focus again towards redistributive issues. However, these changes were only partly perceived by citizens on the micro level. While greater politicization of socio-economic issues was followed by greater political involvement of the poor in recent elections, the SPD could not capitalize much on that development. Our qualitative findings indicate that the poor paid little attention to the SPD campaign discourse outside the minimum wage issue. Furthermore, it becomes obvious that the SPD faces a greater credibility problem among its former electorate.

Protecting the climate to challenge the centre? Secessionism and climate policy preferences in Catalonia

ABSTRACT Climate policy is mostly ruled by national governments, which in multi-level systems creates tensions with sub-national tiers. Recent research has suggested that political parties’ climate policy preferences and their stances on decentralisation are associated as pro-peripheral parties tend to assume the role of climate pioneers not solely due to environmental concerns, but also as a means to challenge the central authority of the state. In this research, we analyse whether the salience of climate change in the manifestos of parties competing in the 2017 and 2021 Catalan regional elections varies between them and if these differences are associated with the aforementioned cleavage. Our empirical findings reveal that the prominence given to climate change in the manifestos of the parties studied tends to be higher the more pro-periphery the positions of parties are, and the more salient decentralisation and independence.