Positional Competition Between Political Parties

Abstract

This panel will consider how parties compete over policy. The policy positions parties take are important for at least two reasons: First, from a normative point of view we prefer a close link between those who govern (parties) and those who are governed (voters). Second and related, differences in party policy platforms have important consequences for the policy output and outcome. While spatial models of party competition is one of the most established and well-elaborated fields in electoral politics, recent contributions have drawn the attention to various aspects that have so far been ignored in theoretical and empirical contributions on party position-taking. For instance, new research has considered when and how parties engage in policy shifts, with a particular focus on the forces and circumstances that limit parties’ freedom of movement. Other contributions have modified the positional approach by considering ambiguity and blurring or by combining positions and salience. For this panel, we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that continue these innovative analyses on policy competition between political parties. We are interested in particular in papers that deal with positional competition on the general left-right axis or on specific policy dimensions, analyses of the effects of multidimensional policy spaces on party competition, and papers focusing on the link between position-taking and issue emphasis.

Title	Details
Blurring the Issue; Transforming Ideology: Positional Ambiguity and Ideological Innovation in Multidimensional Party Competition	View Paper Details
Cheap Talk or Keeping/Making Promises? Parties' Verbal Statements Between Elections	View Paper Details
Party Competition on Environmental Issues: How Far can the Analysis of Manifestos Take Us?	View Paper Details
Modelling Party Competition: Accounting for Varying Levels of Issue Salience Among the Electorate	View Paper Details