It hurts when it really matters

Abstract

Do political parties’ shifts on sociocultural issues, which signify the withdrawal of ideological commitment and disturb their supporters, cause vote loss? We argue that the negative electoral impact of positional shifts is constrained by party supporters’ opinion as well as parties’ ideological strength on sociocultural issues. Using data on party positions and ideologies in Western Europe from 1990 to 2008, we find that only parties holding strong ideologies on sociocultural issues lose votes by shifting their positions on these issues. Even these parties, however, do not lose votes when their position shifts in the same direction as that of their supporters. The results indicate that niche parties are straightforwardly affected by position shifts regarding sociocultural issues; they should adopt different strategies between values they endorse and those they reject; and political parties should not be worried about vote loss from position shifts as long as they follow their supporters’ opinions.

Keywords

new politics niche party party position party supporters’ opinion sociocultural issue

Introduction

There is a broad consensus in the scholarly literature on party politics in Western Europe that the salience of sociocultural issues has grown and substantially influenced diverse aspects of party politics. These aspects include changes in voting behavior (Van der Waal et al., 2007), the growth of new political parties (Inglehart, 1997; Wagner, 2012), and different strategic choices of (mainstream) political parties (Hooghe et al., 2002; Kitschelt, 1994). Scholars have rarely, however, studied the electoral effect of party positions on sociocultural issues, particularly through the use of quantitative data on party positioning.¹

One notable exception is Tavits (2007), who finds that parties lose voter support when they shift their position(s) on sociocultural “principled issues,” such as those relating to the natural environment, nationalism, and law and order. Because positions on these issues are often expressions of political identity and ideological commitment, voters focus on values and ideology in domain of these issues. Consequently, parties that shift positions on sociocultural issues do not encourage more electoral support but rather disturb their own supporters who feel betrayed by these positional shifts.²

This article builds off of the work of by Tavits (2007) by examining under what conditions shifts on such principled, sociocultural issues result in vote loss. We argue that the electoral effect of positional shifts regarding sociocultural issues hinges on two features of political parties: the nature of the parties’ ideology and the extent to which party positions align with the opinions of party supporters. The nature of a party’s ideology matters because it determines how strongly the party emphasizes a particular issue position, and thus how much the issue position contributes to party support (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). The congruence between party positions and party supporters’ opinions matters because the ideological proximity between parties and voters is a major determinant of voting behavior not only regarding socioeconomic issues but also regarding sociocultural issues (Van der Brug et al., 2000).

The empirical analysis utilizes quantitative data on party manifestoes in 16 Western European countries from 1990 to 2008. The results indicate that positional shifts regarding the green/libertarian items of sociocultural issues reduce the vote share only of political parties with strong green/libertarian ideologies, while position shifts regarding the authoritarian/nationalist items of reduce the vote share only of political parties with authoritarian/nationalist ideologies. Furthermore, when political parties hold strong ideologies on sociocultural issues (i.e. either extreme green/libertarian ideologies or radical authoritarian/nationalist ideologies), a vote-reducing positional shift effect occurs only when a shift goes in the opposite direction from the change of party supporters’ opinion.

These findings correspond with the conclusions of the broad literature on party politics. First, the finding that party positions regarding sociocultural issues have (conditional) electoral effects confirms that they have become key issues in party competition in Western European politics (cf. Meguid, 2007; Tavits, 2007). Second, the finding that position shifts on sociocultural issues affect mainstream and niche parties differently further demonstrates the unlike dynamics of party politics between the two distinct types of parties (cf. Adams et al., 2006; Ezrow, 2008; Meyer and Wagner, 2013).³ Finally, the recent literature on democratic representation suggests that, under certain conditions, political parties respond to their supporters’ opinion more than that of the general public (Ezrow et al., 2011; Han, 2015). The results reported here suggest that political parties that compete primarily on sociocultural issues with strong ideologies do not lose votes by their position changes on these issues as long as their positions correspond to their supporters’ opinion.

Ideological strength, issue salience, and position shift effect

Previous scholarship suggests that voters may follow different decision rules across issues (Van Deth and Scarbrough, 1995). On socioeconomic issues, such as those relating to market regulation and corporatism, voters follow outcome-oriented, pragmatic decision rules. Voters’ main concern lies on viable policies that maximize their material interest, and so the decision rules that underlie these issues are interpreted in terms of personal self-interest and practicality (Tavits, 2007). Therefore, the main purpose of the discussion of socioeconomic issues is to achieve practical solutions, and political parties’ position shifts on these issues are considered their “attempt to tackle the constantly changing real-life economic conditions” to secure voters’ material interest (Tavits, 2007: 155).

On sociocultural issues, such as those relating to the natural environment, nationalism, and law and order, voters follow ideology-oriented, principled decision rules. Voters are concerned with ideology and values more than pragmatic solutions regarding these issues (Fiorina, 1981). The main rationale behind the discourse on sociocultural issues is recognizing and expressing identity, value, and ideological commitment rather than achieving practical solutions (Dougan and Munger, 1989). Political parties need to develop their identity and build a reputation of commitment and consistency regarding sociocultural issues, but their position shifts trigger “cognitive dissonance for voters and undermine the credibility and commitment” of the parties (Tavits, 2007: 154). Therefore, political parties that shift positions on sociocultural issues do not then encourage more electoral support but rather disturb their own supporters who feel betrayed by these positional shifts.

Ideology, which is a key component that shapes the nature of sociocultural issues, is comprised of a hierarchy of values that applies different weights to different values: Values compose the core nature of political ideology, and they are ordered by relative significance (Schwartz, 1992). Consequently, ideology makes political actors emphasize issues that represent some values more than other issues that signify less preferred values. In other words, ideological commitment drives political actors to hold different levels of salience between sociocultural issues and also construct different political agendas.

In Western Europe, newer political parties, such as ecological “green” and radical right-wing parties, have developed as responses to the emergence of new sociocultural issues and the mobilization of voters who care about these issues, such as ecology, civic rights, immigration, and others. Such parties hold strong and extreme ideologies on these issues, alongside putting great ideological emphasis and salience upon them.⁴ These parties hold radical views on these issues, politicize the issues, mobilize political support from those with extremist ideologies on the issues, and focus mostly on these issues in their political campaign by putting the issues ahead of traditional socioeconomic issues.⁵

This association between ideological strength and issue salience regarding sociocultural issues is also found among mainstream parties.⁶ In response to the maturity of overall postmaterialist values in society (Inglehart 1997; Kitschelt, 1994), the growth of niche parties that mobilize particular sociocultural issues (Meguid, 2007), and/or the electoral challenges from the rise of sociocultural issues and niche parties (Han, 2015), many mainstream parties have extended their electoral focus to these issues and reached out to voters with strong preferences on these issues.

The relationship between ideological strength and issue salience is confirmed by data on party ideologies and issue salience. For example, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on party positions (Bakker et al., 2015) includes political parties’ salience on diverse issues as well as their ideologies on the sociocultural dimension of green/alternative/libertarian versus traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (GALTAN) and shows that political parties with either strong green/alternative/libertarian ideologies or intense traditional/authoritarian/nationalist ones put great salience on these issues.⁷

As the CHES assumes, many of the sociocultural issues developed in Western Europe can be located on the dimension of green/libertarian-authoritarian/nationalist (e.g. Hooghe et al., 2002). Despite green/libertarian and authoritarian/nationalist ideologies constituting the two poles of a new politics spectrum, political actors with strong green/libertarian ideologies emphasize the discussion of green/libertarian items more than authoritarian/nationalist items and those with intense authoritarian/nationalist ideologies emphasize the discussion of authoritarian/nationalist items more than green/libertarian items. Political actors put greater importance on the values they support than those they reject, as ideology is often “a person’s assumptions about an ‘ideal’ social-political system” (Szalay et al, 1972: 153). Since values, a core factor in ideology, pertain to desirable status or behaviors, ideology drives people to promote values they endorse more than those they reject.

For example, although ecology parties and radical right-wing parties take opposite positions on issues relating to the environment and immigration, the former focus on environmental issues more than immigration issues and the latter focus on immigration issues more than environmental issues. As Inglehart (1997: 245) mentions on German radical right-wing and ecology parties, “the Republikaner do not call themselves the Anti-Environment Party; nor do the Greens call themselves the Pro-Immigrant Party.”⁸ In short, while political parties and their supporters either with strong green/libertarian ideologies or with extremist authoritarian/nationalist ideologies put great salience on sociocultural issues, each emphasizes the particular ideological pole they promote.

Issue salience is an important determinant of voting behavior. If an issue is not salient, voters are unlikely to recognize differences in positions between political parties on the issue. Even when voters do recognize the different positions of political parties, they will not incorporate them as a factor for their voting decision because the issue does not alter their utility function on voting (Selek, 2006). Consequently, a party position regarding an issue does not have an electoral impact if political actors do not consider the issue salient (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008).

This article submits that the variation in issue salience on sociocultural issues among political parties exists because their ideology, as a hierarchy of values, places unlike weights on different issues. In terms of sociocultural issues in Western Europe, political parties with strong ideologies on green/libertarian items put great salience on these, while political parties with extreme ideologies on authoritarian/nationalist items put great salience on these. Therefore, issue salience as well as issue positions taken by political parties determines electoral outcomes because voters take into account not only position proximity between themselves and political parties but also the level of salience they put on issues. If a political party does not emphasize an issue, a position shift will not bring in vote loss (or any vote change, for that matter). However, if a party does, it will lose votes due to its position shift that disturbs its core supporters.

Ideological strength hypothesis: Position shifts regarding the green/libertarian items of sociocultural issues reduce the vote share only of political parties with strong green/libertarian ideologies. Position shifts regarding the authoritarian/nationalist items of sociocultural issues reduce the vote share only of political parties with extreme authoritarian/nationalist ideologies.

Party supporters’ opinion and position shift effect

Do political parties, if they place great salience on particular sociocultural issues, lose votes by shifting their positions on these issues even when voters’ opinion also changes? Tavits (2007) tests whether position shifts on principled issues reduce the vote share of political parties even when the shifts correspond to the change of public opinion on these issues and finds that position shifts hurt vote share no matter how public opinion changes.

While some scholarship emphasizes the role of public opinion in determining party positions and electoral outcomes (e.g. Adams and Somer-Topcu, 2009), particularly regarding socioeconomic issues, other scholarship suggests that it is the opinion of party supporters rather than that of the general public that constrains the behavior of political parties and determines their electoral outcomes (e.g. Miller and Schofield, 2003). Political parties cannot easily attract votes from voters who support other parties even when their positions move toward the positions of these voters because non-policy factors, such as party loyalty, also decide voting behavior (Adams et al., 2005). Therefore, party “leader’s freedom to set policy is constrained by the policy preferences of current party supporters” who occupy the core of the parties’ ideological space (Laver, 2005: 267).

We suggest that party supporters’ opinion matters more than general public opinion does particularly regarding sociocultural issues. A party’s positional shifts regarding socioeconomic issues may attract more support from the general public because welfare maximization and problem-solving play a more substantial role in pragmatic socioeconomic issues than ideological commitment does. Thus, voters accept political parties’ position shifts on such issues and give them their electoral support in response, as these shifts are seen as efforts to solve practical problems (rather than abandoning a particular principle out of political expediency). A party’s positional shifts on sociocultural issues, however, do not realize new votes from the general public because ideology and non-policy factors such as identity and values determine party support based on these issues (Adams et al., 2005). While positional shifts on sociocultural issues do not attract more voters who formerly supported other parties, they disturb a party’s core supporters (who are more policy- and ideology oriented than the general public). Consequently, political parties are likely to lose support when they follow the opinion of the general public regarding sociocultural issues.

Therefore, party supporters and activists will likely play a larger role in the causes and the effects of positional shifts regarding sociocultural issues than the general public does.⁹ Concerning the cause of positional shifts, Han (2015) finds that left-wing mainstream parties adopt more restrictive positions regarding multiculturalism, a sociocultural issue, as a response to the rise of radical right-wing parties only when their supporters’ opinion, not the opinion of the general public, is also changed in the same direction. Regarding the electoral effect of positional shifts, shifting positions along with the change of party supporters’ opinion will not cause vote loss, as existing supporters will not be disturbed by the position shifts of the parties if their own opinion has also changed. However, deviating from core supporters’ stances will cause a problem.

Thus, the vote-reducing effect of a positional shift on sociocultural issues is constrained not only by political parties’ ideological strength, as proposed by the ideological strength hypothesis but also by the congruence between the positional shift of the party and the opinion change of the party’s core supporters, with the incongruence of the two disturbing party supporters and resulting in them switching their support to other parties.

Party supporters’ opinion hypothesis: When political parties hold strong ideologies on sociocultural issues, they will lose vote share if their position shift on an issue goes in a different direction than that of the party’s core supporters.

Data and variables

The empirical analysis includes 16 Western European countries from 1990 to 2008 (Volkens et al., 2014).¹⁰ The dependent variable is the change of the vote share of political parties. The data for vote share are from Volkens et al. (2014).

Sociocultural issues are categorized into two groups: green/libertarian and authoritarian/nationalist. Party positions regarding each of these groups are constructed by subtracting the scores of negative statements on the item from those of positive statements.¹¹

The ideological strength hypothesis suggests that the shift of party position regarding sociocultural issues reduces the vote share of political parties only when they have strong ideologies on the issues. The position shift variables (Position shift on green/libertarian items and Position shift on authoritarian/nationalist items), which indicate the absolute values of the changes of parties’ positions, incorporate the magnitude of a position shift but not its direction because it is suggested that voters are disturbed by a party position shift itself rather than its direction (Tavits, 2007).

In addition, lagged position shifts are used in the models because voters are found to change their perceptions on party positions slowly over time: it takes years for parties’ policy behavior changes to change voters’ perceptions on the parties (Erikson et al., 2002). Fernandez-Vazquez (2014) also finds that voters’ perceptions of current party positions are substantially determined by previous party positions because voters “update” their perceptions based on their prior perceptions. Therefore, voters’ behavior in a particular period is significantly determined by previous party behavior (Adams and Somer-Topcu, 2009).

The ideological strength of political parties on green/libertarian and authoritarian/nationalist items is measured by the GALTAN score in the CHES. Greater (smaller) values indicate stronger authoritarian/nationalist (green/libertarian) ideologies (new politics ideology).¹²

The party supporters’ opinion hypothesis suggests that the incongruence between party position change and the change in party supporters’ opinion on sociocultural issues reduces the vote share of political parties when they hold strong ideologies on the issues.¹³ Thus, unlike the position shift variables described above, the direction as well as the magnitude of both position and opinion changes needs to be considered. To test this hypothesis, dummy variables of position-opinion incongruence are utilized, with a value of one indicating that parties changed their positions on each sociocultural item in the past period in the opposite direction from the change of party supporters’ opinion (position-opinion incongruence on green/libertarian items and position-opinion incongruence on authoritarian/nationalist items). This dummy variable is then interacted with the new politics ideology variable.¹⁴

The model also includes control variables whose description and data sources are summarized in the Supplementary Appendix (Table S4).

Model

Three aspects of model specification deserve to be noted. First, given that time-series cross-sectional data are used, a lagged dependent variable is included to control for possible serial correlation. Second, each party is nested within an election. Thus, the assumption of independent errors will be violated if there are any unobserved election-specific factors. To control for these factors, ordinary least squares (OLS) with robust standard errors clustered by election are used. Third, all of the models include country dummies to control for unmeasured country-specific effects.¹⁵

Analysis results

We first test the ideological strength hypothesis. To simplify the presentation, the presented tables include only the results for the main independent variables (full results can be found in the Supplementary Appendix). Model 1 in Table 1 uses only the lagged position shift variables while model 2 includes the current position shift as well. First, there is an interacting effect between position shift and new politics ideology: while strong authoritarian/nationalist ideology intensifies the negative effect of position shift regarding authoritarian/nationalist items, it weakens the negative impact of position shift regarding green/libertarian items.¹⁶ Second, it is the lagged position shift that has an electoral effect, not the current one: current electoral outcomes are determined by position shifts in the previous election.

Table 1.

Testing the ideological strength hypothesis (results on main variables).^a

Model	1	2	3	4
Δ Vote share_(t−1)	−0.12* (0.06)	−0.12* (0.06)	−0.12* (0.06)	−0.22** (0.11)
Position shift on green/libertarian items_(t−1)	−0.20** (0.09)	−0.22** (0.08)
Position shift on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1)	0.18 (0.11)	0.16 (0.11)
New politics ideology_(t−1)	−0.12 (0.19)	−0.07 (0.22)
New politics ideology_(t−1) × Position shift on green/libertarian items_(t−1)	0.04* (0.02)	0.05** (0.02)
New politics ideology_(t−1) × Position shift on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1)	−0.04* (0.02)	−0.04* (0.02)
Position shift on socioeconomic items_(t−1)	0.08* (0.05)	0.06 (0.04)	0.06 (0.04)	0.10 (0.08)
Position moderation on green/libertarian items_(t−1)			0.04 (0.03)
Position moderation on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1)			−0.03 (0.03)
Niche party			0.08 (0.71)
Position moderation on green/libertarian items_(t−1) × Niche party			−0.03 (0.05)
Position moderation on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1) × Niche party			−0.04 (0.09)
Position shift on sociocultural issues_(t−1)				−26.20*** (7.72)
Salience on sociocultural issues_(t−1)				−0.21 (0.73)
Position shift on sociocultural issues_(t−1) × Salience on sociocultural issues_(t−1)				−7.70*** (2.53)
Constant	−0.30 (1.49)	−6.09** (2.55)	−0.95 (1.11)	26.52** (9.77)
Number of observations	381	380	426	137
R ²	0.1981	0.2047	0.1602	0.2698

^aStandard errors are in parentheses.

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

The interacting effects of position shift and ideological strength are graphically presented in Figure 1. The vertical axes of the graphs indicate the coefficients and standard errors of the position shift variables on sociocultural issues, while the horizontal axes indicate new politics ideology.¹⁷ The left graph shows that position shifts regarding green/libertarian items reduce the vote share only of political parties that have strong green/libertarian ideologies. The cutoff point is around 3, and all the ecology parties hold green/libertarian ideologies below this point. The right graph shows that position shifts regarding authoritarian/nationalist issues reduce the vote share only of political parties that have intense authoritarian/nationalist ideologies. The cutoff point is around 8, and most of the radical right-wing parties and some Christian democratic parties sustain strong authoritarian/nationalist ideologies above this point.¹⁸

Figure 1.

Ideological strength and position shift effect on vote share change. Solid lines are coefficients, and shaded areas indicate 95% confidence levels. The coefficients and standard errors are from model 1 of Table 1.

Ezrow (2008) suggests that mainstream parties gain votes by moderating their positions, but niche parties do so by radicalizing their positions. In order to examine this claim, model 3 includes three dummy variables on position moderation on green/libertarian items, position moderation on authoritarian/nationalist items, and niche parties, and two interaction terms, each consisting of one of the position moderation variables and the variable for niche parties.¹⁹ However, none of the interaction terms is found to be statistically significant: Voters appear to be disturbed by a party position shift, regardless of its direction.²⁰

Finally, a model with alternative measurement and data on issue salience and party position are tested in model 4. Concerning issue salience, the CHES 2006 and 2010 have questions on issue salience, but they cover only recent years, lacking some Western European countries like Norway and Sweden. Despite these limitations, we use this direct measurement of issue salience in model 4.²¹ Regarding party positions, the conventional method of scaling manifesto data has been questioned. For example, the method ignores the presence of uncoded or unrelated categories in the manifesto data, which may manipulate the party position score (Gemenis, 2013), and creates spikes at the boundaries of the scale in its distribution by allowing the existence of fixed endpoints (Lowe et al., 2011). Consequently, alternative scaling methods have been proposed, and we use one that is suggested to be superior to others as a robustness check in model 4: the logarithm of odds ratios (Lowe et al., 2011).²² The position shift variable indicates the absolute values of the changes of these new party position scores on sociocultural issues.²³ The interaction term is statistically significant with a negative coefficient: The negative effect of position shift, in any direction, on sociocultural issues is intensified by salience that political parties put on the issues.

We test the party supporters’ opinion hypothesis in Table 2. Only lagged position-opinion incongruence variables are included in model 1 and both lagged and current position-opinion incongruence variables are included in model 2. The interaction terms with the lagged incongruence variables are found to be statistically significant: the negative incongruence effect regarding authoritarian/nationalist (or green/libertarian) items is intensified when political parties hold strong authoritarian/nationalist (or green/libertarian) ideologies.

Table 2.

Testing the party supporters’ opinion hypothesis (results on main variables).^a

Model	1	2
Δ Vote share_(t−1)	−0.02 (0.07)	−0.02 (0.07)
New politics ideology_(t−1)	−0.15 (0.18)	−0.10 (0.24)
Position-opinion incongruence on green/libertarian items_(t−1)	−1.50 (0.94)	−1.96* (1.04)
Position-opinion incongruence on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1)	−2.86** (1.27)	−3.01** (1.18)
New politics ideology_(t−1) × Incongruence on green/libertarian items_(t−1)	0.32* (0.20)	0.41** (0.20)
New politics ideology_(t−1) × Incongruence on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1)	−0.58** (0.25)	−0.56** (0.24)
Δ Party position on socioeconomic items_(t−1)	−0.03 (0.03)	−0.04 (0.03)
Constant	−0.04 (1.88)	−1.19 (2.15)
Number of observations	260	260
R ²	0.1257	0.1403

^aStandard errors are in parentheses.

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

The interactive effects are confirmed in Figure 2 that shows the effects of position-opinion incongruence (the vertical axes) at different levels of new politics ideology (the horizontal axes). The two graphs demonstrate that the position-opinion incongruence regarding green/libertarian (authoritarian/nationalist) items reduces the vote share of political parties only when they hold strong green/libertarian (authoritarian/nationalist) ideologies. ² ⁴

Figure 2.

Ideological strength and incongruence effect on vote share change. Solid lines are coefficients, and shaded areas indicate 95% confidence levels. The coefficients and standard errors are from model 1 of Table 2.

To see the incongruence effect more specifically, each party family is separated in Table 3, under the assumption that some party families hold stronger green/libertarian or authoritarian/nationalist ideologies than other party families.²⁵ Also included are interaction terms containing party position change and party supporters’ opinion variables. The greater values of each of these variables indicate the adoption of stronger (more extreme green/libertarian or more radical authoritarian/nationalist) positions or opinions on the issues.

Table 3.

Testing the party supporters’ opinion hypothesis by party family (results on main variables).

Model	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Political parties	Ecology	Communist	Social democratic	Liberal	Conservative	Christian democratic	Nationalist
Δ Vote share_(t−1)	−0.73*** (0.12)	−0.41 (0.59)	−0.12 (0.20)	−0.18 (0.34)	0.26 (0.23)	−0.06 (0.21)	−0.22 (0.28)
Δ Party position on green/libertarian items_(t−1)	−0.38* (0.22)	−0.11 (0.12)	0.15 (0.15)	−0.32 (0.39)	0.15 (0.32)	0.27 (0.34)	−0.34 (0.25)
Δ Party position on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1)	−0.36 (0.38)	−0.11 (0.31)	0.13 (0.33)	0.13 (0.30)	0.06 (0.42)	−0.31** (0.12)	0.84** (0.28)
Δ Party supporters’ opinion on green/libertarian items_(t)	−17.61** (6.68)	−48.00 (33.53)	−2.43 (15.18)	5.67 (24.21)	31.29 (28.84)	−42.89 (34.98)	−0.07 (8.27)
Δ Party supporters’ opinion on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t)	−2.08 (3.36)	−18.47 (14.49)	33.82 (54.87)	5.91 (15.35)	−14.57 (19.04)	26.30 (23.72)	−9.71 (15.04)
Δ Party position on green/libertarian items_(t−1) × Δ party supporters’ opinion on green/libertarian items_(t)	1.36* (0.78)	3.09 (5.52)	−1.21 (2.06)	4.64 (5.65)	1.78 (4.07)	0.55 (0.89)	0.18 (1.51)
Δ Party position on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t−1) × Δ party supporters’ opinion on authoritarian/nationalist items_(t)	−4.83 (4.16)	2.33 (1.81)	0.81 (2.62)	1.76 (1.85)	2.03 (5.58)	6.94* (3.92)	5.35* (2.79)
Constant	1.06 (2.05)	28.45 (45.83)	−34.38 (24.72)	−37.44 (29.28)	−2.56 (42.77)	8.41 (7.40)	2.92 (10.05)
Number of observations	36	32	62	34	33	40	30
R ²	0.7398	0.6776	0.6368	0.6236	0.6197	0.6137	0.5259

^aStandard errors are in parentheses.

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

Interactive effects of position change and opinion change are found among three political party families that hold either strong green/libertarian ideologies (ecology parties) or extreme authoritarian/nationalist ideologies (Christian democratic parties and nationalist parties).²⁶ The interactive effects are graphically presented in Figure 3 that shows the effects of party position change (the vertical axes) at different levels of party supporters’ opinion change (the horizontal axes).²⁷ Ecology parties lose votes by adopting more green/libertarian positions only when their supporters’ opinion does not similarly move in a more green/libertarian direction. Likewise, Christian democratic parties lose votes by adopting more authoritarian/nationalist positions only when their supporters’ opinion does not similarly move in a more authoritarian/nationalist direction.²⁸

Figure 3.

Party supporters’ opinion and position change effect on vote share change. Solid lines are coefficients, and shaded areas indicate 95% confidence levels. The coefficients and standard errors are from models 1, 6, and 7 of Table 3.

The graph on nationalist parties, while showing the same general interactive effect, provides a substantively dissimilar result. The graph demonstrates that when party supporters become less authoritarian/nationalist, the adoption of more authoritarian/nationalist positions does not have an electoral effect. However, the same position shift actually increases the parties’ vote share when their supporters become more authoritarian/nationalist. When party supporters’ opinion become very affirmative on the issues (the rightist end of the horizontal axis in the graph), a one standard deviation change in the party position regarding the issues (adoption of more authoritarian/nationalist positions) increases the vote share of nationalist parties by two standard deviations (10 percentage points).

If position shifts regarding sociocultural issues can bring in vote loss to political parties that hold strong ideologies on the issues, why do the parties sometimes make such positional shifts? There can be three plausible answers. First, the leaders of parties with strong ideologies, who are more office seeking than party activists, may want to moderate their positions in order to gain opportunities to cooperate with other parties in the medium term to long term, even if doing so harms their vote share in the short term (Müller and Strøm, 1999). For example, Van Spanje and Van der Brug (2007) find that radical right-wing parties that are not “ostracized” by mainstream parties become more moderate because political parties need to come closer and have some ground in common in order to cooperate with each other.²⁹

Second, and related with the previous plausible answer, the arrival of new party leadership may bring in changes to party organization, party identity, and party positions, especially in leadership-dominated parties (Harmel et al., 1995; Ignazi, 2003). Such changes can create a gap between party positions and supporters’ opinions when new leadership holds different preferences from the majority of party supporters.³⁰

Third, Meyer and Wagner (2013) find that niche parties switch to mainstream profiles by weakening their ideologies on sociocultural issues and diverting their focus to socioeconomic issues when they struggle with electoral deficiency. Given that a focus on sociocultural issues is not producing electoral success anymore due to the low salience level of the issues, these parties may want to adopt relatively moderate positions on socioeconomic issues in an effort to broaden their base of support and build coalitions with larger, more mainstream parties, even at the expense of losing core supporters who have strongly held views on the parties’ core sociocultural issues (Luther, 2011).

Conclusion

The findings demonstrate that although position shifts regarding sociocultural issues can cause vote loss, two factors constrain this vote-reducing effect. First, only when political parties have a strong ideology on a particular issue, they suffer vote loss by shifting their position. Second, even when political parties hold strong ideologies on a sociocultural issue, position shifts do not reduce their vote share as long as the shifts follow the changes of party supporters’ opinion.

These findings are consistent with recent research on democratic representation emphasizing the importance of party supporters’ opinion for electoral outcomes. In particular, this literature implies that political parties respond to their supporters’ opinion more than that of the general public, particularly when the parties compete primarily on sociocultural issues (see also Adams et al., 2006; Ezrow et al., 2011; Han, 2015). Then, our results provide an implication on the electoral consequence of such party-supporter linkage: Political parties that compete primarily on sociocultural issues with strong ideologies do not lose votes by their position changes regarding the issues as long as their positions correspond to their supporters’ opinion.

Despite the negative, though conditional, electoral effect, niche parties that have maintained extremist ideologies, put great salience, and competed primarily on a few non-economic issues may want to adopt different strategies between values they endorse and those they reject. Niche parties need to take care when choosing to shift their positions on issues and values that they support, and the discourse and rhetoric they utilize to explain such shifts to their voters. However, they can feel freer to shift their positions and change their discourse on issues they disapprove, because such shifts and modifications do not lead to vote loss.

Are mainstream parties free from the electoral effect of position shift regarding sociocultural issues? This study’s results seem to conflict with the literature that finds that rising new politics issues sometimes make them suffer vote loss because of their lack of response to changing demands on these issues (Meguid, 2007). However, the electoral effect of mainstream parties’ positions on sociocultural issues may be more complicated than initially thought. For example, Kitschelt (1994) finds that it was not whether socialist parties made position adjustment, but whether any positional shift, or the absence of a positional shift, was an appropriate action in the context of the party system and party competition environments that they were operating within. Thus, this article does not suggest that sociocultural issues do not impact mainstream parties at all, but that such electoral effects should be understood in the context of the overall party system.

Finally, Figure 3 demonstrates that although political parties with a strong ideology on sociocultural issues do not lose votes when they follow supporters’ opinion, such conformity leads to vote gain only for radical right-wing parties. More research is needed to determine under what conditions ecology parties, or niche parties in general, can increase their vote share, but two preliminary conditions can be offered. First, radical right-wing parties might have been able to gain votes by following supporters’ opinion in the period examined in this paper (1990–2008) because of the high salience level of immigration issues and the parties’ aggressive mobilization of the issues (Ignazi, 2003). While economic and cultural challenges across Europe have increased the salience of issues important to radical right-wing parties, the same cannot be said for ecology parties. Then, ecology parties are likely to see their vote share rise if the salience of their core issues grows due to, for example, increasing concern regarding climate change and its effects.

Second, recent literature suggests that political parties, mainstream parties as well as niche parties can expand their support by adopting “broad-appeal” strategies and presenting ambiguous positions on some issues (Somer-Topcu, 2015). For example, Rovny (2013) suggests that an efficient strategy of radical right-wing parties in multidimensional party competition is presenting both strong and clear positions on immigration (to sustain their supporters who have homogenous stances on immigration) and mixed positions on socioeconomic issues (to attract new voters who have heterogeneous ideological profiles on the issues).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Supplemental material

Supplementary material for this article is available online.

References

Adams

Clark

Ezrow

. (2004) Understanding change and stability in party ideologies: do parties respond to public opinion or to past election results? British Journal of Political Science 34(4): 589–610.

Adams

Clark

Ezrow

. (2006) Are Niche parties fundamentally different from mainstream parties? The causes and the electoral consequences of Western European parties’ policy shifts, 1976-1998. American Journal of Political Science 50(3): 513–529.

Adams

Ezrow

Somer-Topcu

(2011) Is anybody listening? Evidence that voters do not respond to European parties’ policy statements during elections. American Journal of Political Science 55(2): 370–382.

Adams

Ezrow

Somer-Topcu

(2014) Do voters respond to party manifestos or to a wider information environment? An analysis of mass-elite linkage on European integration. American Journal of Political Science 58(4): 967–978.

Adams

Merrill

III S

Grofman

(2005) A United Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Adams

Somer-Topcu

(2009) Moderate now, win votes later: the electoral consequences of parties’ policy shifts in 25 postwar democracies. Journal of Politics 71(2): 678–692.

Albertazzi

McDonnell

(2010) The Lega Nord back in government. West European Politics 33(6): 1318–1340.

Bakker

de Vries

Edwards

. (2015) Measuring party positions in Europe: The Chapel Hill expert survey trend file, 1999–2010. Party Politics 21(1): 143–152.

Beaudonnet

Vasilopoulos

(2014) Green parties in hard times: the case of EELV in the 2012 French presidential election. Party Politics 20(2): 275–285.

10.

Bélanger

Meguid

(2008) Issue salience, issue ownership, and issue-based vote choice. Electoral Studies 27(3): 477–491.

11.

Dougan

Munger

(1989) The rationality of ideology? Journal of Law and Economics 32(1): 119–124.

12.

Downs

(1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

13.

Erikson

MacKuen

Stimson

(2002) The Macro Polity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Ezrow

(2008) On the inverse relationship between votes and proximity for Niche parties. European Journal of Political Research 47(2): 206–220.

15.

Ezrow

De Vries

Steenbergen

. (2011) Mean voter representation and partisan constituency representation: do parties respond to the mean voter position or to their supporters? Party Politics 17(3): 275–301.

16.

Fernandez-Vazquez

(2014) And yet it moves: the effect of election platforms on party policy image. Comparative Political Studies 47(4): 1919–1944.

17.

Fiorina

(1981) Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press.

18.

Gemenis

(2013) What to do (and Not to Do) with the comparative manifesto project data. Political Studies 61(S1): 3–23.

19.

Han

(2015) The impact of radical right-wing parties on the positions of mainstream parties regarding multiculturalism. West European Politics 38(3): 557–576.

20.

Harmel

Heo

Tan

. (1995) Performance, leadership, factions, and party change: an empirical analysis. West European Politics 18(1): 1–33.

21.

Hooghe

Marks

Wilson

(2002) Does left/right structure party positions on European integration? Comparative Political Studies 35(8): 965–989.

22.

Ignazi

(2003) Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

23.

Inglehart

(1997) Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

24.

Kitschelt

(1994) The Transformation of European Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

25.

Kitschelt

(1995) The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

26.

Laver

(2005) Policy and the dynamics of political competition. American Political Science Review 99(2): 263–281.

27.

Lowe

Benoit

Mikhaylov

. (2011) Scaling policy preferences from coded political texts. Legislative Studies Quarterly 36(1): 123–155.

28.

Lupu

(2013) Party brands and partisanship: theory with evidence from a survey experiment in Argentina. American Journal of Political Science 57(1): 49–64.

29.

Luther

(2011) Of goals and own goals: a case study of right-wing populist party strategy for and during incumbency. Party Politics 17(4): 453–470.

30.

Meguid

(2007) Party Competition between Unequals: Strategies and Electoral Fortunes in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

31.

Meyer

Miller

(2015) The niche party concept and its measurement. Party Politics 21(2): 259–271.

32.

Meyer

Wagner

(2013) Mainstream or Niche? Vote-seeking incentives and the programmatic strategies of political parties. Comparative Political Studies 46(10): 1246–1272.

33.

Miller

Schofield

(2003) Activists and partisan realignment in the United States. American Political Science Review 97(2): 245–260.

34.

Müller

Strøm

(1999) Policy, Office, or Votes? How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

35.

Müller-Rommel

(1985) Social movements and the greens: new internal politics in Germany. European Journal of Political Research 13(1): 53–67.

36.

Rovny

(2013) Where do radical right parties stand? Position blurring in multidimensional competition. European Political Science Review 5(1): 1–26.

37.

Schumacher

de Vries

Vis

(2013) Why do parties change position? Party organization and environmental incentives. Journal of Politics 75(2): 464–477.

38.

Schwartz

(1992) Universals in the content and structure of values: theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In: Zanna

(ed) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 25. Orlando: Academic Press, pp. 1–65.

39.

Selek

(2006) The effects of issue salience on political decision-making. Constitutional Political Economy 17(1): 5–13.

40.

Somer-Topcu

(2015) Everything to everyone: the electoral consequences of the broad-appeal strategy in Europe. American Journal of Political Science 59(4): 841–854.

41.

Szalay

Kelly

Moon

(1972) Ideology: its meaning and measurement. Comparative Political Studies 5(2): 151–173.

42.

Tavits

(2007) Principle vs. pragmatism: policy shifts and political competition. American Journal of Political Science 51(1): 151–165.

43.

Van der Waal

Achterberg

Houtman

(2007) Class is not dead—it has been buried alive: class voting and cultural voting in postwar Western societies (1956–1990). Politics & Society 35(3): 403–426.

44.

Van der Brug

Fennema

Tillie

(2000) Anti-immigrant parties in Europe: ideological or protest vote? European Journal of Political Research 37(1): 77–102.

45.

Van Spanje

van der Brug

(2007) The party as pariah: the exclusion of anti-immigration parties and its effect on their ideological positions. West European Politics 30(5): 1022–1040.

46.

Van Deth

Scarbrough

(1995) The Impact of Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

47.

Volkens

Lehmann

Merz

. (2014) The Manifesto Data Collection: Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Berlin: WZB.

48.

Wagner

(2012) Defining and measuring Niche parties. Party Politics 18(6): 845–864.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.16 MB