Carrots and Sticks: The Role of Voter Availability in European Party Competition

• In Event: Group-Specific Appeals in Party Campaigns

Abstract

Political parties demonstrate varying degrees of responsiveness to changing electoral dynamics, sometimes embracing new issues for voter mobilization while at other times adhering to their core policies. While prior research has explored the impact of competitive shifts and emergence of challengers on established parties’ programmatic adaptations, we know surprisingly little about the role of voter availability on the electoral market, which should determine the utility of programmatic changes. To ascertain the impact of electoral ‘opportunities’ (i.e., to mobilize new voters) and ‘loyalty’ (i.e., parties’ chances of holding on to previous voters) on parties’ strategies, I draw on ‘propensity to vote’ data from five rounds of the European Elections Study on the one hand, rely on the Manifesto Project data on the other, to gauge the relative salience of parties’ ‘core’ policy issues within their respective election manifestos. Developing a new dataset that provides harmonized party IDs between these two data sources and encompasses two decades of elections in 27 countries, I find that political parties indeed adapt their focus on core and peripheral issues depending on the expected utility of doing so. That is, increasing opportunities to win over voters induce a stronger emphasis on peripheral policy issues for voter mobilization; even after controlling for electoral performance. However, the effect of beckoning support from new voters, which is generally increases the utility of engaging with peripheral issues, is contingent on the loyalty of a party’s existing supporters. Taken together, the results indicate that opportunities (the carrot) and potential voter disloyalty (the stick), albeit to varying degrees, inform parties’ campaign choices. These findings contribute to the literature on party competition in Europe. They also shed light on why policy shifts often backfire, namely when a party’s appetite for new and salient issues outgrows the utility of engaging with them.

Author

• Fabian Jonas Habersack, University of Innsbruck