Where is my party? Party position-taking between elections and its consequences for party performance

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Marc Debus
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2014 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 256967640

For elections to work effectively as instruments of democracy, at least two conditions need to be met. Citizens both require sufficient knowledge about the policy positions of parties, and they need to know whether political parties stay true to their announced positions after the election. It is by no means clear that these two conditions hold in practice. We will address the second of the above-mentioned requirements. The central research questions are (1) whether parties stay true to their campaign-time positions after election day, and, (2) if not, whether they are punished for doing so. To arrive at empirically grounded answers, we will analyze parties’ between-election position-taking based on the press releases they issue, and examine the consequences of their behavior for their performance as reflected in opinion polls and second-order elections. Theoretically and empirically, we will distinguish between policy dimensions falling into principled and pragmatic issue domains, and pay special attention to differences between government and opposition parties. For the empirical analysis, we will collect party press releases from two post-electoral two-year periods for each of the ten European countries already covered in the previous project. Press releases have the advantage of representing an ‘official’ but comparatively unconstrained statement by the party leadership. That is why they have become an important source of information for the analysis of the policy preferences of political parties and their strategies in political science in the last years. The documents will be analyzed with a combination of quantitative text analysis and hand-coding. To test to which degree press releases are covered in the media, and how the media reports cover the shifts in party positions, we will also code the media coverage of party policy positions for three separate randomly selected months in a comparative setting. To capture party popularity, we will assemble opinion polls, complemented with results from sub-national and European elections.We expect the new project to make important contributions to several branches of the literature. Work on party position-taking is currently limited to shifts that are inferred from comparing isolated pre-election periods. To study parties’ reactions to signals about the popularity of policies, and to generally better capture the interaction between parties, higher-frequency data is essential. Much is to be gained from studying proximate effects and short-run dynamics. And by comparing parties’ positions in between-election communication to those taken during the campaign, we can learn about the conditions under which parties give up on earlier positions, and how their and competitors’ communication affects citizens’ responses. Furthermore, the project results will provide a comparative perspective of how party press releases are covered by the media.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Zeynep Somer-Topcu, Ph.D.; Professorin Margit Tavits, Ph.D.