Policy-seeking Parties Research Articles

Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals

One of the most common critiques of political parties is that they no longer represent the interests of their voters. On one hand, representation literature tasks all parties equally to ensure high ideological congruence with their voters. On the other hand, party behaviour literature acknowledges that parties have legitimately different primary goals, in particular vote-maximisation or policy-seeking. Thus, this article analyses whether ideological congruence depends on the general goals that parties pursue. Furthermore, this article proposes a novel, distribution-based measure of party-voter ideological congruence that reduces the loss of voter information stemming from the many-to-one data relationship. This measure is applied to 470 data points from parties in 10 Western European countries from 1970 to 2009. The article finds that vote-maximising parties create higher levels of congruence than policy-seeking parties. On this basis, the article calls for evaluations of party behaviour considering party-type specificity.

Do Minority Cabinets Govern More Flexibly and Inclusively? Evidence from Germany

A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985–2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet’s legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties.

Measuring and comparing party ideology and heterogeneity

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but generally lack the ability to provide an insight into the intraparty politics of party elites. In this article, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data that enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has some advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll-call voting, and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several mostly European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to examine sources of party elite heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules are associated with less party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, such contexts appear to condition the effect of district magnitude.

Which Issues do Parties Emphasise? Salience Strategies and Party Organisation in Multiparty Systems

Party system issue agendas are formed by the topics that individual parties decide to address, and these salience decisions are likely to be strategic. Two key strategies are commonly discussed in the literature: parties’ focus on (1) issues that they have ownership over and (2) issues that currently concern voters. Yet it is not known what explains the extent to which parties pursue each of these strategies. This paper argues that aspects of party organisation influence which salience strategy is pursued. Parties that have more resources will be able to ‘ride the wave’ of current concerns while parties with fewer resources are more likely to focus on their best issues. Furthermore, policy-seeking parties with strong activist influence will be less likely to ‘ride the wave’ and more likely to follow issue ownership strategies. An analysis of 105 election manifestos from 27 elections in 17 countries shows that aspects of party organisation are indeed strong and robust moderators of issue ownership strategies. Limited, albeit mixed, evidence is also found that party organisation affects the use of ‘riding the wave’ strategies. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party competition and voter representation.

Will to power? Intra-party conflict in social democratic parties and the choice for neoliberal policies in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain (1980–2010)

Why do social democrats choose neoliberal labor market policies? Since social democrats are typically punished for welfare state retrenchment and because these policies do not equate well with social democratic egalitarian principles, it is difficult to see what they gain from it. We argue that, depending on the intra-party balance of power between activists and leaders, some parties are office-seeking, whereas others are policy-seeking. This behavioral difference explains why some parties are responsive to environmental incentives such as the economy and public opinion (office-seeking parties) and others are responsive to policy-motivated activists (policy-seeking parties). Using three case studies of social democratic parties (Germany, the Netherlands and Spain) in the period 1980–2010, we analyze when and why these parties introduced neoliberal reforms. The study shows that office-seeking parties introduce neoliberal measures if the risk of losing votes due to an underperforming economy becomes larger than the risk of losing votes due to the mobilization of unions and opposition parties. Policy-seeking social democrats retain a social democratic ideology, unless prolonged failure to win office empowers pragmatic leaders to push through office-seeking strategies.

Legitimacy from above: the partisan foundations of support for the political system in democracies

We investigate the partisan foundations of political legitimacy. We argue that the goals parties pursue shape their supporters’ views about the political system via the messages they communicate about the desirability of the political system. Combining public opinion survey data collected in 15 democracies with data on the goal orientations and policy positions of 116 political parties, we find that office-seeking parties take more positive positions toward the status quo of the political regime than policy-seeking parties. Moreover, we find that these positions have consequences. Specifically, supporters of parties with more positive positions toward the system report systematically higher levels of support than supporters of parties that communicate more negative views. Taken together, these findings suggest that political parties play an active role in shaping citizens’ views of the political system and that office-seeking parties in particular mobilize consent among citizens in contemporary democracies.

Does Collective Responsibility for Performance Alter Party Strategies? Policy-Seeking Parties in Proportional Systems

AbstractAdams and Merrill have developed a model of policy-seeking parties in a parliamentary democracy competing in a PR electoral system, in which party elites are uncertain about voters’ evaluations of the parties’valenceattributes such as competence, integrity and charisma. This article extends that model to situations where voters hold coalitions of partiescollectivelyresponsible for their valence-related performances, such as how voters evaluate governing parties’ competence in handling issues like the economy, crime and foreign policy crises. It may also be relevant to voters’ evaluations of proto-coalitions of opposition parties. Computations suggest the central substantive conclusions reported in Adams and Merrill extend to this generalized model, and that collective responsibility enhances coalition members’ incentives to converge to similar policy positions but depresses their prospects of achieving their policy objectives.

Policy-Seeking Parties in a Parliamentary Democracy with Proportional Representation: A Valence-Uncertainty Model

A unidimensional spatial model of multiparty parliamentary elections under proportional representation is presented, in which parties project that the median parliamentary party will implement its policy position. The parties are assumed to be uncertain about the electoral impact of valence issues relating to party elites’ images of competence, integrity and charisma. The assumptions of the model, highlighting the importance of the median party in parliament, are consistent with empirical work by McDonald and Budge. Under them, the existence of a Nash equilibrium under quite general concavity conditions is proved and it is shown that parties will moderate their positions when their valence images deteriorate. Computations of party equilibria are reported. The model and its implications for policy-seeking parties with results on vote-seeking parties can be contrasted with that recently reported by Schofield and Sened.

The effects of alternative power-sharing arrangements: Do “moderating” institutions moderate party strategies and government policy outputs?

Advocates of consensual political institutions, i.e. institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties, claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs. To date, however, there exists little research – either theoretical or empirical – that evaluates whether consensual institutions promote moderation in parties' policy declarations. We develop a multiparty spatial model with policy-seeking parties operating under proportional representation, in which we vary the extent to which government policies reflect power-sharing among all parties as opposed to being determined by a single party. We determine parties' optimal (Nash equilibrium) policy positions and conclude that power-sharing does not typically motivate parties to moderate their policy declarations; in fact, policy positioning under power-sharing appears to be similar to or more extreme than under single-party dominance. Consistent with previous research, however, we find that power-sharing does promote moderation in government policy outputs. Our results have implications for parties’ election strategies, for the design of political institutions, and for representative government.

Why Small, Centrist Third Parties Motivate Policy Divergence by Major Parties

Plurality-based elections between two major parties or candidates sometimes feature small, centrist, third parties. We modify the standard two-party spatial model of policy-seeking parties to incorporate a centrist third party, and we show that the presence of such a party—even if it has no chance of winning—motivates the major parties to propose policies that are much more divergent than without the third party. We derive explicit formulas for party locations at a three-party equilibrium and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of that equilibrium. We show that, over time, the major parties can be expected to shift their policies in thesamedirection relative to each other but in theoppositedirection relative to the minor party. The predictions of this model are compared with estimates of party policy locations during appropriate periods in postwar Britain.

Opposition parties and democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa

Many accounts of democratisation in Africa from the early 1990s were infused with revived Afro-optimism at the outbreak of competitive elections in country after country on the continent. As noted by Huntington (1991:174) multiparty elections mean the demise of dictatorships and in many states the first years of the 1990s were heralded as the beginning of ac omplete political renewal (Ayittey 1992; Hyden and Bratton 1992; Joseph 1992). However, soon thereafter disputed elections in key states such as Kenya and Ghana in 1992, aborted processes in Togo and Cameroon, Zambia’s disappointing second elections in 1996, and breakdowns of the democratisation process in countries including Nigeria (1993), Angola (1992), and Gambia (1994) led to ah ost of pessimistic predictions: ac ontinuation of disorder and destructive politics (Chabal and Daloz 1999), no change at all (Akinrinade 1998), political closure (Joseph 1998), semi-authoritarianism (Carothers 1997), or ar eturn to ‘big man’, neopatrimonial, clientelist, informalised and disordered politics of the continent (Ake 1996; Bratton 1998; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Mbembe 1995; Villalon 1998). 1 While an umber of states have become either electoral or fully liberal democracies, many countries in Africa are still run by electoral authoritarian regimes. This article analyses the role of opposition parties’ behaviour in institutionalising democratic elections in electoral autocracies, and the effects of opposition choices on transformation of electoral authoritarian regimes to democracies. Specifically, the choices of opposition parties either to contest or boycott elections, and either accept or reject the outcome of the polls, are addressed in the analysis. The question is what type of opposition behaviour increases the likelihood of electoral autocracies becoming democracies and increasing participation, competition, and legitimacy? Political parties’ behaviour varies in important ways and that variation is taken as given in this article. One could legitimately also ask why opposition parties chose to act differently depending for example on the structural cleavages they represent (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), incentives of electoral systems they face (Sartori 1976; Lijphart 1984), the preferences of voters they seek to catch (Downs 1957), or because they are office-, voter-, or policy-seeking parties (Strom 1990). Seeking to explain the behaviour of opposition parties in Africa’s emerging democracies would be an interesting subject, but the focus on the con

A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties

The rational choice tradition has generated three models of competitive political party behavior: the vote-seeking party, the office-seeking party, and the policy-seeking party. Despite their usefulness in the analysis of interparty electoral competition and coalitional behavior, these models suffer from various theoretical and empirical limitations, and the conditions under which each model applies are not well specified. This article discusses the relationships between vote-seeking, officeseeking, and policy-seeking party behavior and develops a unified of the organizational and institutional factors that constrain party behavior in parliamentary democracies. Vote-seeking, officeseeking, and policy-seeking parties emerge as special cases of competitive party behavior under specific organizational and institutional conditions. Since Downs (1957), rational choice theories have come to play an increasingly important role in the study of competitive political parties. Efforts to develop such models of political parties have been of tremendous benefit to political science. Theories based on simple assumptions of party and voter objectives have generated influential (though often controversial) results. But even though rational choice models of political parties have been both powerful and suggestive, they have failed to generate any single, coherent of competitive party behavior or to produce robust results that apply under a variety of environmental conditions. There is little to help us choose between existing models, and where their assumptions fail, we are often left in the dark. Arguably the defining characteristic and virtue of rational choice is precisely its resistance to ad hoc explanation and its quest for equilibrium results independent of structural peculiarities. However, neoinstitutionalists, both within and outside the rational choice tradition, have recently challenged this conception of pure theory (March and Olsen 1984; Schlesinger 1984; Shepsle 1979). Moreover, the reluctance of many rational choice theorists to apply their models of electoral competition beyond individual candidates in simple institutional contexts has limited their influence on the empirical study of parties. My objective in this article is to provide a framework in which to explain