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Multidimensional Party Competition: Stability and Change in European Party Systems
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Multidimensional Party Competition: Stability and Change in European Party Systems
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Dissertation
Multidimensional Party Competition: Stability and Change in European Party Systems
2019
Overview
This dissertation develops a unified framework for studying political contestation in advanced industrial democracies. It contests a notion widely held in the literature that political parties continuously change their policy positions, arguing instead that parties are ideologically quite constrained at the dimensional level. Building on insights from a variety of literatures, including spatial modeling and sociology, it advances a novel theory that accounts for the role of salience for party change by distinguishing between a party's primary and secondary dimension.The first study shows that a party's reputation and long-term ideological commitments limit positional flexibility on its more salient dimension, while short-term strategic policy shifts are possible on issues outside of its core agenda. The second study explores a party's incentives to obscure its policy preferences on certain issues. It analyzes how party leaders deliberately create uncertainty about where their party stands on the issue of European integration. It shows that three distinct blurring strategies—avoidance, ambiguity, and alternation—all increase expert uncertainty about party positions, but that their effectiveness is conditioned by party-level characteristics. The third study further enhances our understanding of second dimension politics by examining the variation in the economic positions of European regionalist parties. It uses a combination of public opinion and expert-level data on voter and party positions to analyze the constraints on the strategic behavior of these parties on the left-right dimension.
