Abstract
Parties act with an eye to the future, but with a foot firmly planted in the past. Thomas Meyer’s important contribution shows how a number of factors constrain party policy change. The observation from which the book departs is that ‘parties do not choose their positions from scratch’ (p. 6). Chief among the constraints on party policy change are the party’s past positions. Shifts away from those positions between one election and the next involve costs – the new position needs to be communicated to voters – and uncertainty. Organisational factors also constrain parties from choosing what might otherwise be electorally optimal positions.
The most striking finding in this book is descriptive: based on an analysis of British panel election studies, Meyer finds that most of the electorate (about two-thirds on average) did not perceive positional shifts between one election and the next, either because they did not receive information concerning the party’s shift or because, despite receiving this information, they did not believe that the party had shifted position. Even in the case of the Labour Party’s marked shift to the right between 1992 and 1997, less than two-thirds of the British electorate perceived it (pp. 112–113). Drawing on cross-national data, Meyer later shows that voter expectations concerning parties’ relative positions are a very important constraint on party policy shifts (Chapter 7). Together, these findings highlight the importance of long-term factors for electoral behaviour – and, thus, for the costs of party policy shifts.
Meyer’s work is rich with findings concerning the constraining role of conditions that vary across voters, parties and systems. The less political interest among voters, the less likely they are to receive information concerning party shifts, and the less likely are parties to shift. Parties in opposition, with lower visibility, are less likely to change position than those in government due to their lower visibility and, thus, their reduced capacity to communicate those shifts to voters. The complexity of the political market, too, influences voters’ reception of information concerning party shifts. Party leader prestige (that is, popularity), which contributed to the relatively widespread perception of the Labour Party shift in the mid-1990s – along with voter expectations concerning the parties’ relative positions – increases voters’ propensity to believe that these shifts have occurred.
The nature of parties’ resources and decision-making structures matters too. Parties with a substantial mass organisation are more constrained from shifting positions, but public funding modifies this effect, mitigating these parties’ membership-dependence. Parties in which ordinary members have virtually no say in decision-making are less constrained in shifting positions than other parties.
In the process of producing these findings, Meyer makes some important ancillary contributions. Chapter 3 will serve as an excellent starting point for researchers considering using the data produced by the Comparative Manifestos Project. It provides a careful analysis of a wide range of criticisms of the data, accepting some of them, yet highlighting the costs of proposed modifications.
Meyer works creatively to match a project of ambitious scope with the limited data available to him, which he draws from a wide range of national and cross-national data sets. In Chapter 9, he draws attention to the relative lack of data on a number of aspects of party organisation. His study – and his admirable efforts to collect data from a range of secondary sources – highlights the long-term value of collecting that data on a regular basis.
The outstanding characteristic of the book is the care and thoroughness with which each step of the analysis is carried out, from an extensive discussion of measurement issues to the scrupulous reporting of results. Meyer develops and tests a wide range of hypotheses at multiple levels and in multiple contexts (Britain in 1997, Britain since the 1970s and 10 West European countries since the 1940s), using a range of data sets and multiple models. This thoroughness extends to the theoretical framework: Meyer’s careful deduction of the conditions for voter indifference to party policy shifts (pp. 61–62) is one example of this attention to detail.
Discussions of negative findings will be of considerable value to those intending to build on this work; Meyer takes these seriously and gives them their due attention. His discussion of the failure of leadership change to provoke party policy shifts (pp. 152–155) is particularly interesting. He suggests that new leaders may be constrained from shifting positions. This should prompt some revision of the idea of leadership change as a stimulus for party change.
Some ambiguity arises from the use of ‘acceptance’ as a label that denotes a voter’s belief that a party has shifted. Outside of Zaller’s (1992) framework on which Meyer draws, the term suggests normative acceptance of the party’s position. This is a minor, if frequently-occurring, kink that is frequently clarified in the text. It is also understandable: faced with the choice between fidelity to the original framework and expressing the precise meaning, the book arrives at this compromise.
Meyer claims that the book ‘does not deal with motivation or incentives for party policy change’ (p. 15, emphasis in the original), and he provides examples of both incentives and constraints (p. 21). One might question the clear-cut distinction between incentives and constraints assumed here. Are incentives not to shift and constraints on shifting always distinct? However, this does not detract from the study’s substantive contribution.
The study leaves the reader wanting to know more about the pathways to policy shifts (and stasis) that underpin the effects detected in its multiple statistical analyses. In this regard, it may be complemented by further qualitative studies in the vein of Fraser Duncan’s (2007) study of party change in the Dutch Christian Democrats (CDA). Meyer’s work provides a solid framework in which to situate such further projects.