Who emphasizes and who blurs? Party strategies in multidimensional competition

Rovný, Jan

doi:10.1177/1465116511435822

Cited by 219 publications

(188 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…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.…”

Section: A C C E P T E D Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2016

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Social media play an increasingly important part in the communication strategies of political campaigns by reflecting information about the policy preferences and opinions of political actors and their public followers. In addition, the content of the messages provides rich information about the political issues and the framing of those issues during elections, such as whether contested issues concern Europe or rather extend pre-existing national debates. In this study, we survey the European landscape of social media using tweets originating from and referring to political actors during the 2014 European Parliament election campaign. We describe the language and national distribution of the messages, the relative volume of different types of communications, and the factors that determine the adoption and use of social media by the candidates. We also analyze the dynamics of the volume and content of the communications over the duration of the campaign with reference to both the EU integration dimension of the debate and the prominence of the most visible list-leading candidates. Our findings indicate that the lead candidates and their televised debate had a prominent influence on the volume and content of communications, and that the content and emotional tone of communications more reflects preferences along the EU dimension of political contestation rather than classic national issues relating to left-right differences. In this paper we map the usage of social media in the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election focusing on Twitter, including an analysis of the networks of followers, the usage of national and cross-national hashtags related to the EU, and the types of Twitter communication. We focus on Twitter because it is the most widely adopted platform by politicians for the purposes of personal promotion, diffusing policy positions, mobilization and because it enables a more direct and interactive engagement with the public. Applying sentiment analysis to the text of the Tweets, we also assess various levels of sentiment associated with particular concepts or individuals or countries. Finally, by looking at the associations of message content with external policy measures of candidate parties, we are able to map content and associations within the text to get a picture of the dialogue across the Euro-

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Section: A C C E P T E D Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2016

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“…If targeted messages toward specific groups and therefore ambiguous positions can attract votes from different groups, parties have incentives to present ambiguous rather than clear-cut policy platforms. In fact, there is an evolving empirical literature suggesting that ambiguous policy platforms can help parties win votes (Rovny 2012;Somer-Topcu 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Under such circumstances, an incumbent (unambiguously) positioned at the median can be defeated by a challenger announcing a lottery of positions in that environment with expectation at the median. A different perspective is offered by Page (1976) and more recently by Rovny (2012), who argue that ambiguity eventually means avoiding talking about divisive issues. Candidates highlight and take a clear stance on consensus issues while blurring positions on issues where the constituency is divided to attract broader support or to not deter voters.…”

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confidence: 99%

Strategic Ambiguity of Party Positions in Multi-Party Competition

Bräuninger¹,

Giger²

2016

PSRM

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Party competition is largely about making policy promises to voters. We argue that the clarity of the expressed policy position may be equally important. If blurred messages toward different audiences and therefore ambiguous positions can attract votes from different groups, parties have incentives to present ambiguous rather than clear-cut policy platforms. We present a formal model of multi-party competition with stochastic voting where party leaders make strategic choices on both the position and the level of ambiguity of their platforms. Leaders respond to the demands of two principals, the general public and party core constituencies. We derive two hypothesis on the location and ambiguity of party platforms and provide initial tests of these hypotheses in a comparative setting in 14 Western European democracies gathering data on voter and party left-right positions from Eurobarometer surveys and electoral manifestos. Ambiguity of party profiles is estimated using a variant of Wordscores on a newly established data set of electoral manifestos. We find that platforms become more ambiguous as the preferences of the two principals diverge. Our findings imply that ambiguity can be a winning strategy for parties, especially in settings with strong partisan lines.

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“…Jedna z mála studií na toto téma například ukázala, že mezi rakouskými stranami existují poměrně malé rozdíly ve významnosti, kterou přikládají jednotlivým tématům [Dolezal et al 2014]. Rovný [2012] proto zmiňuje další strategii stran, propojující významnost a poziční kritérium: tzv. znejasňování či rozmazání (blurring) své pozice v tématech, která strana nechce akcentovat a v nichž by nejraději ani nesoutěžila.…”

Section: "Soutěž" Ve Stranické Soutěžiunclassified