The niche party concept and its measurement

Abstract

The concept of the niche party has become increasingly popular in analyses of party competition. Yet, existing approaches vary in their definitions and their measurement approaches. We propose using a minimal definition that allows us to compare political parties in terms of their ‘nicheness’. We argue that the conceptual core of the niche party concept is based on issue emphasis and that a niche party emphasizes policy areas neglected by its rivals. Based on this definition, we propose a continuous measure that allows for more fine-grained measurement of a party’s ‘nicheness’ than the dominant, dichotomous approaches and thereby limits the risk of measurement error. Drawing on data collected by the Comparative Manifesto Project, we show that (1) our measure has high face validity and (2) exposes differences among parties that are not captured by alternative, static or dichotomous measures.

Mainstream or Niche? Vote-Seeking Incentives and the Programmatic Strategies of Political Parties

“…This is because the decision whether to pursue a niche strategy is not just up to each party individually (see Meguid, 2005Meguid, , 2008Meyer & Miller, 2013;Wagner, 2011a). It is a characteristic that also depends on the actions of competitors: A party with a mainstream profile may attempt to become a niche party, but its success at doing so depends on the simultaneous issue emphases of its competitors.…”

“…Yet, almost all existing approaches to studying niche and mainstream party profiles have so far applied the terms to parties as a whole and have disregarded the possibility that parties can change their salience profile (see Meyer & Miller, 2013;Wagner, 2011a). Most prominently, Meguid (2005Meguid ( , 2008 has designated as "niche" those emerging parties competing on a narrow, novel set of issues and as "mainstream" their older, established mainstream rivals (Meguid, 2005(Meguid, , 2008.…”

Towards the median economic crisis voter? The new leftist economic agenda of the Front National in France

“…To have a PRR niche status, a party should meet all following criteria: 1/ a high emphasis on socio-cultural issues compared to its competitors; 2/ a high general party emphasis on sociocultural issues (at least 10 per cent of its manifesto); 3/ a low emphasis on economic policy compared to its competitors. This dichotomous approach to party nicheness is preferred to other continuous measurement alternatives (Meyer and Miller, 2015), as it provides clear cutoff values to establish whether a party is indeed breaking away from its niche location. As a rule of thumb, a party de/emphasizes an issue more than its competitors if its salience is at least one weighted standard deviation below/above the mean party system salience.…”

Working through the issues: how issue diversity and ideological disagreement influence coalition duration

“…Model 31 in Table A6 presents the results transformed with unemployment rate transformed to one divided by the natural log of the unemployment rate. more comprehensive electoral platforms (Adams et al 2006;Meyer and Miller 2015). 5 Scholars dedicate substantial attention to the role of parties' preferences and issue salience in election campaigns.…”