Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T17:35:03.333Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ideological Clarity in Multiparty Competition: A New Measure and Test Using Election Manifestos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2014

Abstract

Parties in advanced democracies take ideological positions as part of electoral competition, but some parties communicate their position more clearly than others. Existing research on democratic party competition has paid much attention to assessing partisan position taking in electoral manifestos, but it has largely overlooked how manifestos reflect the clarity of these positions. This article presents a scaling procedure that better reflects the data-generating process of party manifestos. This new estimator allows us to recover not only positional estimates, but also estimates for the ideological clarity or ambiguity of parties. The study validates its results using Monte Carlo tests, a manifesto-drafting simulation and a human coding exercise. Finally, the article applies the estimator to party manifestos in four multiparty democracies and demonstrates that ambiguity can enhance the appeal of parties with platforms that become more moderate, and lessen the appeal of parties with platforms that become more extreme.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Princeton University; McGill University; University of Houston (emails: jameslo@princeton.edu, so.proksch@mcgill.ca, jslapin@uh.edu). We wish to thank the many individuals who commented on earlier drafts of this article, including Ken Benoit, Will Lowe, Shawn Treier, several anonymous reviewers, and seminar participants at the University of Mannheim, Nuffield College, Oxford and Rice University. James Lo and Sven-Oliver Proksch gratefully acknowledge financial support for this project from the SFB 884 on the Political Economy of Reforms at the University of Mannheim (project C4), funded by the German Research Foundation. Replication materials and an online appendix are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123414000192.

References

REFERENCES

Adams, James, Clark, Michael, Ezrow, Lawrence, and Glasgow, Garrett. 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):513529.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adams, James, and Somer-Topcu, Zeynep. 2009. Moderate Now, Win Votes Later: The Electoral Consequences of Parties’ Policy Shifts in 25 Postwar Democracies. Journal of Politics 71 (2):678702.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bawn, Kathleen, and Somer-Topcu, Zeynep. 2012. Government Versus Opposition at the Polls: How Governing Status Affects the Impact of Policy Positions. American Journal of Political Science 56 (2):433446.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Bräuninger, Thomas, and Debus, Mark. 2009a. Challenges for Estimating Policy Preferences: Announcing an Open Access Archive of Political Documents. German Politics 18 (3):441454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Laver, Michael, and Mikhaylov, Slava. 2009b. Treating Words as Data with Error: Uncertainty in Text Statements of Policy Positions. American Journal of Political Science 53 (2):495513.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budge, Ian, Robertson, David, and Hearl, Derek. 1987. Ideology, Strategy, and Party Change: Spatial Analyses of Post-War Election Programmes in 19 Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budge, Ian, Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Volkens, Andrea, Bara, Judith, and Tanenbaum, Eric. 2001. Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budge, Ian, Ezrow, Lawrence, and McDonald, Michael. 2010. Ideology, Party Factionalism and Policy Change: An Integrated Dynamic Theory. British Journal of Political Science 40 (4):781804.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, James E. 1983. The Electoral Consequences of Issue Ambiguity: An Examination of the Presidential Candidates’ Issue Positions from 1968 to 1980. Political Behavior 5 (3):277291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, John M. 2009. Legislative Voting and Accountability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dewan, Torun, and Myatt, David P.. 2008. The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation. American Political Science Review 102 (3):351368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diermeier, Daniel, Godbout, Jean-François, Yu, Bei, and Kaufmann, Stefan. 2012. Language and Ideology in Congress. British Journal of Political Science 42 (1):3155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Duverger, Maurice. 1963. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Ezrow, Lawrence. 2005. Are Moderate Parties Rewarded in Multiparty Systems? A Pooled Analysis of Western European Elections, 1984–1998. European Journal of Political Research 44 (6):881898.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ezrow, Lawrence. 2010. Linking Citizens and Parties: How Electoral Systems Matter for Political Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gabel, Matthew, and Huber, John. 2000. Putting Parties in their Place: Inferring Party Left-Right Ideological Positions from Party Manifestos Data. American Journal of Political Science 44 (1):94103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimmer, Justin. 2010. A Bayesian Hierarchical Topic Model for Political Texts: Measuring Expressed Agendas in Senate Press Releases. Political Analysis 18 (1):135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heller, William, and Mershon, Carol. 2008. Dealing in Discipline: Party Switching and Legislative Voting in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000. American Journal of Political Science 52 (4):910925.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooghe, Liesbet, Bakker, Ryan, Brigevich, Anna, De Vries, Catherine, Edwards, Erica, Marks, Gary, Rovny, Jan, Steenbergen, Marco, and Vachudova, Milada. 2010. Reliability and Validity of the 2002 and 2006 Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on Party Positioning. European Journal of Political Research 49 (5):687703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, Daniel J., and King, Gary. 2010. A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science. American Journal of Political Science 54 (1):229247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalandrakis, Tasos, and Spirling, Arthur. 2011. Radical Moderation: Recapturing Power in Two-Party Parliamentary Systems. American Journal of Political Science 56 (2):413432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kam, Christopher J. 2009. Party Discipline and Parliamentary Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Volkens, Andrea, Bara, Judith, Budge, Ian, and McDonald, Michael. 2006. Mapping Policy Preferences II: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments in Central and Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD 1990–2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, Michael, and Garry, John. 2000. Estimating Policy Positions from Political Texts. American Journal of Political Science 44 (3):619634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, Michael, and Shepsle, Kenneth A.. 1996. Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, Michael, Benoit, Kenneth, and Garry, John. 2003. Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data. American Political Science Review 97 (2):311332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowe, Will. 2008. Understanding Wordscores. Political Analysis 16 (4):356371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowe, Will, Benoit, Kenneth, Mikhaylov, Slava, and Laver, Michael. 2011. Scaling Policy Preferences from Coded Political Texts. Legislative Studies Quarterly 36 (1):123155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marks, Gary, Hooghe, Liesbet, Steenbergen, Marco, and Bakker, Ryan. 2007. Crossvalidating Data on Party Positioning on European Integration. Electoral Studies 26 (1):2338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Lanny, and Vanberg, Georg. 2011. Parliaments and Coalitions: The Role of Legislative Institutions in Multiparty Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, Benjamin I. 1976. The Theory of Political Ambiguity. American Political Science Review 70 (3):742752.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petrocik, John. 1996. Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study. American Journal of Political Science 40 (3):825850.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proksch, Sven-Oliver, Slapin, Jonathan, and Thies, Michael. 2011. Party System Dynamics in Post-War Japan: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Electoral Pledges. Electoral Studies 30 (1):114124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quinn, Kevin M., Monroe, Burt L., Colaresi, Michael, Crespin, Michael H., and Radev, Dragomir. 2010. How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs. American Journal of Political Science 54 (1):209228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riker, William. 1986. The Art of Political Manipulation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sartori, Giovanni. 2005. Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Essex: European Consortium for Political Research (first published in 1976).Google Scholar
Shepsle, Kenneth A.. 1972. The Strategy of Ambiguity: Uncertainty and Electoral Competition. American Political Science Review 66 (2):555568.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slapin, Jonathan B., and Proksch, Sven-Oliver. 2008. A Scaling Model for Estimating Time-Series Party Positions from Texts. American Journal of Political Science 52 (3):705722.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Somer-Topcu, Zeynep. 2013. Everything to Everyone: The Electoral Consequences of the Broad-Appeal Strategy in Europe. Unpublished manuscript, Vanderbilt University.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spirling, Arthur. 2011. US Treaty Making with American Indians: Institutional Change and Relative Power, 1784–1911. American Journal of Political Science 56 (1):8497.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tavits, Margit. 2009. The Making of Mavericks: Local Loyalties and Party Defection. Comparative Political Studies 42 (6):793815.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tavits, Margit. 2011. Power Within Parties: The Strength of the Local Party and MP Independence in Postcommunist Europe. American Journal of Political Science 55 (4):923936.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomz, Michael, and Van Houweling, Robert P.. 2009. The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity. American Political Science Review 103 (1):8398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsebelis, George. 2002. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton, NJ: Russell Sage/Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Lo Supplementary Material

Appendix

Download Lo Supplementary Material(PDF)
PDF 618.5 KB