Differences of Political Positions within Parties: The 2017 Elections in Liechtenstein

The paper seeks to analyse the variance in political positions among parties based on the usage of the VAA wahlhilfe.li in the course of the last parliamentary elections in Liechtenstein. Typical issues relating to self-placement including low participation rate and strategic responses (Gemenis and van Ham, 2014) are eliminated or considerably alleviated: 94% of the parliamentary candidates participated, wahlhilfe.li was the first VAA in Liechtenstein and candidates instead of parties responded to the questions. Data generated from VAAs can gainfully be used to analyse variance among parties (Schädel, 2011; Schwarz et al., 2010). VAA answers can equally be contrasted with later legislative behaviour (Fivaz et al., 2014) whilst taking into account the specificities of a country’s type of democracy and voting system (Ladner, 2016). In an open-list election, parties with less coherence among their candidates seem to benefit by catering to a more diverse constituency and, at the same time, to lose votes by diluting the brand of the party (Blumenau et al., 2014). To this research, the paper can add empirical insights from a uniquely small political environment – free lists, non-polarising campaigning (Marxer, 2018) and personal proximity to candidates – by engaging with the following questions: To what extent are the coherence of political positions of parliamentary candidates of a specific party and the reasons for voting for said party correlated? What explains the differences in absolute coherence of political positions within a party before and after the elections? Under which circumstances is it beneficial for candidates to break the average party line? To answer these questions, the responses of the candidates on wahlhilfe.li for the Liechtenstein parliamentary elections in 2017 as well as their demographic data are used alongside official election data, a representative post-election survey by the Liechtenstein-Institut based on 505 interviews (Marxer, 2017) and the voting patterns of MPs since (Frommelt, 2019). The coherence of political positions is measured by the Rice index (Rice, 1928; e.g. for Denmark: Hansen and Rasmussen, 2013). Acting as a simplified visual version, a two-dimensional scale based on a correspondence analysis illustrates the variance (Backhaus et al., 2011). To establish the pull factor of opinion outliers, they are isolated by the Rice index, connected to election data and controlled for demographic factors including age, gender and home town. Firstly, it is proposed that all parties except the smallest one, the Free List (FL), maintain a low coherence of opinions compared to Switzerland, whose VAA smartvote.ch follows the same methodology, and that issue voters are distinctly over-represented at said party. Furthermore, it is proposed that the, in absolute terms, considerably higher party discipline among MPs than among candidates is not reflected in contested topics, where the stances remain equally diverse before and after the elections. The difference stems from the selection of questions for wahlhilfe.li highlighting political differences and foregoing consensual topics. Lastly, it is proposed that, whilst outliers attract slightly more voters, breaking the average party line is of little significance when controlled for demographic factors.