The Causes and Consequences of Party Strategies and Competition

While the literature on the causes and consequences of party competition is vast, we still need a better understanding of why parties adopt certain competition strategies and how these strategies affect their electoral performance. Furthermore, while the main focus in the literature since Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy has been on understanding how parties take ideological positions and how these positions help or hurt them electorally, scholars are increasingly interested in understanding the causes and consequences of different party strategies for competition, such as issue ownership and issue attention/agenda setting, as well as why and how parties utilize other means, such as media framing, party organizational changes and speech making to compete with other parties. Our proposed ECPR section, entitled, “The Causes and Consequences of Party Strategies and Competition,” aims to provide a forum in which scholars of parties and elections can come together and present their theoretical and empirical explanations to further our understanding of how parties compete and how this competition and party strategies affect election results. Below we detail the eight proposed panels for our section aiming to explain party strategies and the consequences of party competition. Three of our panels examine party competition and its consequences with a focus on party policies and issues, and more specifically, through the lens of party position-taking, issue ownership, and issue attention. (1) Thomas Meyer (University of Vienna) and Markus Wagner’s (University of Vienna) panel, “Positional Competition between Political Parties,” will present papers that deal with positional competition on the general left-right axis or on specific policy dimensions, the effects of multidimensional policy spaces on party competition, and the link between position-taking and issue emphasis. (2) Shaun Bevan’s (University of Mannheim) panel, “Election Agendas—Agenda-Setting Electoral Politics,’’ will focus on the agenda-setting function of electoral politics. Elections and in particular partisan transitions mark one of the most important opportunities for political parties to set a distinct policy agenda. However, how parties’ agendas are set and the real effect of parties on issue attention once in government remains ambiguous. Papers in this panel will address that ambiguity. (3) Rune Stubager’s (Aarhus University) panel, “New Developments in the Field of Issue Ownership,” will bring together scholars working on understanding the causes and consequences of issue ownership. Issue ownership plays an important role in linking voters to parties. The papers in this panel will explore different dimensions of issue ownership and the roots of issue ownership at both the micro and macro levels. While issue/policy competition and its consequences have received broad scholarly attention and still do so (as evidenced from above panels), we lack a comprehensive understanding of competition for nonpolicy factors and its consequences. (4) Michael Clark (Northern Illinois University) and Debra Leiter’s (University of Missouri) panel, “Parties, Performance Politics, and Political Representation,” will present works that are about this nonpolicy competition, analyze the dynamics of valence competition in a multi-party setting, and answer questions like how the media affect voters’ valence judgments of parties, how valence evaluations affect party support, and the relationship between party valence evaluations and policy positions. Beyond these specific policy and nonpolicy strategies, political parties also utilize different means to signal their policy strategies and to emphasize their nonpolicy advantages. Three panels in our section explore these different means of party competition and their effects on parties’ electoral performances. (5) Hanna Bäck (Lund University) and Marc Debus’ (University of Mannheim) panel, “Parties and Legislative Speech Making,” will bring together participants who analyze speech-making in legislatures as a mean of party competition. Legislative speeches are an important instrument for parties and members of parliament (MPs) to signal their positions and priorities. While there is a growing literature that focuses on speech-making in legislatures we still lack an understanding of the determinants of speech-making, the use of speech-making for party competition and its electoral consequences. Moving from legislatures to mass media, (6) Christoffer Green-Pedersen’s (Aarhus University) panel, “Party Competition in the Mass Media,” will explore how parties use mass media to respond to each other’s policy standpoints and how media in turn affects party policy strategies. Finally, (7) Gijs Schumacher’s (University of Southern Denmark) panel, “Party Organization and Representation,” will include papers that examine how party competition is shaped by party organizational characteristics and changes in party organizations, and the consequences of party organizational changes for party policy, government participation, and electoral performance. These seven panels will largely focus on West European political parties and party systems to explore the causes and consequences of party competition. Our last panel, (8) Jan Rovny’s (University of Gothenburg) “Party Competition in Central and Eastern Europe,” aims to address many of the similar questions from above panels in the context of Central and Eastern European party systems. The papers in this panel will adopt traditional theoretical and methodological lenses developed in established democracies to understand party competition and its electoral consequences in this region. Florence So is a POLIS Research Unit’s postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2012. Her research interests include intra-party conflicts and elections in advanced democracies. Her current projects examine the dynamics of issue competition between parties and the link between intraparty conflicts and parties’ policy positions. She served as panel organizers for both the APSA and MPSA Annual Meetings. Zeynep Somer-Topcu is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2009. She has published extensively on party policy competition and its electoral consequences, and is currently working on projects examining the consequences of party policy strategies on election results and on voter perceptions of party positions. She previously served as the Comparative Institutions section chair of MPSA and organized panels for both the APSA and MPSA Annual Meetings.