Electoral volatility and parties’ ideological responsiveness

Dassonneville, Ruth

doi:10.1111/1475-6765.12262

Cited by 38 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 72 publications

(175 reference statements)

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“…4For recent contributions to this extensive literature, see, for example, Dassonneville (2018), de Vries and Hobolt (2020), and Hooghe and Marks (2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Competing for Loyalists? How Party Positioning Affects Populist Radical Right Voting

Chou¹,

Dancygier

Egami

et al. 2021

Comparative Political Studies

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As populist radical right parties muster increasing support in many democracies, an important question is how mainstream parties can recapture their voters. Focusing on Germany, we present original panel evidence that voters supporting the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)—the country’s largest populist radical right party—resemble partisan loyalists with entrenched anti-establishment views, seemingly beyond recapture by mainstream parties. Yet this loyalty does not only reflect anti-establishment voting, but also gridlocked party-issue positioning. Despite descriptive evidence of strong party loyalty, experimental evidence reveals that many AfD voters change allegiances when mainstream parties accommodate their preferences. However, for most parties this repositioning is extremely costly. While mainstream parties can attract populist radical right voters via restrictive immigration policies, they alienate their own voters in doing so. Examining position shifts across issue dimensions, parties, and voter groups, our research demonstrates that, absent significant changes in issue preferences or salience, the status quo is an equilibrium.

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“…4For recent contributions to this extensive literature, see, for example, Dassonneville (2018), de Vries and Hobolt (2020), and Hooghe and Marks (2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Competing for Loyalists? How Party Positioning Affects Populist Radical Right Voting

Chou¹,

Dancygier

Egami

et al. 2021

Comparative Political Studies

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“…Second, studies on party alignments and representation emphasise the growth in the number of independent voters, where mainstream Western European parties face a representational tension in attempting to appeal to equally large blocks of partisans and independents (Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2012). As a consequence, these parties increasingly have incentives to appeal to the general electorate (Dassonneville 2018). Finally, these predominantly office-seeking parties (Strøm and M€ uller 1999) have incentives to be responsive to shifts in the position of the median or average voter in order to be sufficiently moderate for consideration in the formation of government coalitions (Ezrow 2008;Lehrer 2012).…”

Section: Party Responsiveness: Theoretical Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Congruence and party responsiveness in Western Europe in the 21st century

Ibenskas

Polk

2021

West European Politics

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Research on party responsiveness in established democracies suggests that parties follow shifts in the preferences of either the general electorate or party supporters. Drawing on theoretical models of party competition and research on party-voter congruence, we argue in this article that in the 21st century Western European mainstream parties respond to their partisan constituents. Parties adjust their policy positions to eliminate previous incongruence between themselves and their constituents and follow the shifts in supporters' positions. Analyses based on a series of datasets that use expert surveys and election surveys to measure parties' positions and several crossnational and national surveys to measure voters' preferences between 1999 and 2014 strongly support the argument that mainstream parties respond to existing incongruence. The findings in this article update many of the empirical results of prior studies on party responsiveness to public opinion shifts, with important ramifications for our understanding of party-based representation in contemporary European democracies.

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“…Dutch voters in particular have been found to consider an increasing number of parties for the elections (van der Meer 2017). Indeed, as the AB allows the expression of pluralistic preferences, it may be a more suitable voting device in times of decreasing partisanship and volatility (André et al 2015;Dassonneville 2018). If voters do not have pluralistic political preferences or choose not to express them, however, all seats may be allocated to a single partyas in a categorical ballot.…”

Section: The Assembly Ballotmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the Dichotomous Vote: Can Expressive Ballots Increase Ideological Congruence and Decrease Parliamentary Polarization?

Ellenbroek¹,

Meijers²,

Krouwel

2019

Gov. & oppos.

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As scholars explore opportunities for democratic renewal, the potential of ballot structures to improve the quality of representation has been largely neglected. We argue that expressive ballots can improve the congruence of political preferences between voters and their vote choice and, subsequently, decrease parliamentary polarization. Recognizing that voters’ political preferences are more complex than a dichotomous party-vote allows, we propose the ‘assembly ballot’, which allows voters to choose their ‘ideal parliament’ by distributing 150 parliamentary seats across all participating parties. To assess the consequences of the assembly ballot for ideological congruence and parliamentary composition, we conducted a survey experiment with over 16,000 respondents around the 2017 Dutch parliamentary elections in which respondents cast a vote in a mock-election using the assembly ballot or a closed-list PR ballot. Results show that ideological congruence is, on average, significantly higher for voters voting with the assembly ballot for both the left–right dimension and the cultural dimension, while also producing a more centripetal, less polarized parliament.

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Electoral volatility and parties’ ideological responsiveness

Cited by 38 publications

References 72 publications

Competing for Loyalists? How Party Positioning Affects Populist Radical Right Voting

Competing for Loyalists? How Party Positioning Affects Populist Radical Right Voting

Congruence and party responsiveness in Western Europe in the 21st century

Beyond the Dichotomous Vote: Can Expressive Ballots Increase Ideological Congruence and Decrease Parliamentary Polarization?

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