How Do Political Parties Adapt Their Communication and Representation?

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political parties remain the key actors in modern democracies. One of their core democratic tasks is to represent voters via, e.g., their issue priorities, their communication, and their choice of candidates for elected office. This is no easy task in a changing electoral and political landscape. Parties need for instance to adapt to a stronger polarization in the electorate including a greater focus on morality, adapt to an increasing focus in the public on unequal representation among members in parliament in terms of their gender and professional background, and adapt their internal party democracy to falling membership rates. Most parties have been around for a century or more, and they are therefore remarkably adaptive and resistant to these major challenges. This panel studies continuity and change in political parties’ issue priorities, communication, and choice of candidates for elected office, and thus, how political parties uphold a core democratic task of political representation. The panel papers each take a deep dive into the inner workings and intricacies of political parties, gather new large-scale cross-time data across multiple modern democracies, and use state-of-the-art methods including experiments to understand how politicians and political parties navigate the changing electoral landscape.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Chair

• Henrik Bech Seeberg University of Aarhus

Discussants

• Jacob Robert Gunderson University of Gothenburg

• Henrik Bech Seeberg University of Aarhus

Individual Presentations

• Moral Rhetoric in Party Campaigns - Jae-Hee Jung, University of Houston

• Why Can Parties Benefit from Promoting Occupational Diversity in Legislatures? - Mia Costa, Dartmouth College; Miguel M. Pereira, London School of Economics

• The Transformation of the Party Congress - Matthias Kaltenegger, University of Vienna; Wolfgang Mueller

• Do Parties’ Issue Emphases Lead Citizens’ Priorities? - James Adams, University of California, Davis; Henrik Bech Seeberg, University of Aarhus

• The Lady’s Not for Turning? Candidate Gender and Position Switching - Zeynep Somer-Topcu, University of Texas at Austin; Mohamed Nasr; Elizabeth N. Simas, Texas A&M University