Issue Entrepreneurship and Multiparty Competition

Abstract

How do issues enter the political arena and come to affect party competition? This study extends the literature on issue evolution from the US context to multiparty systems. While traditional models assume opposition parties to be the agents of issue evolution, this study argues that within multiparty competition not all parties in opposition have an incentive to change the issue basis of political competition. The central propositions of our issue entrepreneurship model are two-fold: first, political parties are more likely to become issue entrepreneurs when they are losers on the dominant dimension of contestation. We focus on three components of political loss in multiparty systems relating to the office seeking, voting-seeking and policy-seeking objectives of parties. Second, parties will choose which issue to promote on the basis of their internal cohesion and proximity to the mean voter on that same issue. We test these propositions by examining the evolution of the issue of European integration in 14 European party systems from 1984 to 2006. The time-series cross-section analyses lend strong support to our model.

Social media and political communication in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament

“…They were much more active on Twitter than the mainstream pro-EU candidates, suggesting that they were using the platform to politicise further the EU dimension by promoting an anti-EU rhetoric as they have in other communication channels (de Vries and Hobolt, 2012;Hobolt and de Vries, 2015). Furthermore, we found a spike in campaign-related communications around the leaders' debate, the only event event outside of the voting itself that targeted a truly Europe-wide audience.…”

“…In more recent years non-mainstream parties (mainly radical left and radical right parties) managed to exploit opposition towards the EU by promoting a Euroskeptic stance and polarizing the EU dimension, at the same time increasing its salience as a political issue (de Vries and Hobolt, 2012;Hobolt and de Vries, 2015;Rovny, 2012). It The economic and political crisis that preceded the 2014 EP elections and the associated debates about the future of the Eurozone, the bailout of debtor states, the austerity measures imposed by the EU, ECB and IMF, and their combined economic consequences, only further fuelled the rise of EU dimension.…”

Defence, Acquisition or Non-Competition? How Did the Form and Intensity of Czech Party Competition Change between 2006 and 2014?

“…I obranná soutěž je ovšem "soutěží" v tom smyslu, že nutí strany v dimenzi zaujímat urči-tou pozici a činit ji dostatečně významnou, aby agendě ve volební soutěži nedominovala pozice konkurenční strany, protože přenechat někomu pozici mluvčího v určitém tématu se nevyplácí [srov. Hobolt, de Vries 2015].…”

“…Ještě obecnější názor pak tvrdí, že snaha o změnu vý-znamnosti je obrannou strategií politických aktérů, kterým stávající dimen zionál ní struktura nevyhovuje a ohrožuje jejich elektorát [srov. Tavits, Letki 2014;Hobolt, de Vries 2015]. Tavits a Letki to demonstrují na příkladu pravicových stran, které se v posledním desetiletí zvýšeně zajímají o jiná než socioekonomická témata, protože v těch se cítí oproti levici handicapovány z důvodu faktorů, které mají vůči stranické soutěži vnější charakter.…”

Issue evolution and partisan polarization in a European multiparty system: Elite and mass repositioning in Denmark 1968–2011

“…Scholars of electoral behavior have engaged in intensive debates in recent decades on whether and how Western (European) party systems have undergone a transformation from being structured by class and/or religious cleavages to being characterized by conflicts about globalization, immigration, law-and-order, morality or European integration (e.g., Knutsen, 1995;Kriesi et al, 2006Kriesi et al, , 2008Enyedi and Deegan-Krause, 2010;Hobolt and de Vries, 2015). Especially Kriesi and colleagues stimulated a debate on whether the transformation of Western European politics can be best explained by using a top-down or bottom-up perspective.…”