Foreign policy and domestic politics: a study of the 2002 election in the Republic of Ireland

This article examines the extent to which foreign policy featured in the 2002 general election campaign in the Republic of Ireland. It began with the premise that although foreign policy had not featured prominently in previous elections campaigns the evolving crisis in the peace process in Northern Ireland, coupled with the ongoing debate over the Nice treaty may make foreign policy more likely to be part of the campaign debate and also the subject of party differentiation in 2002. The study reviewed party manifestos, press statements and other aspects of the media campaign. It found clear party differentiation in foreign policy between the parties in their manifestos, however the campaign in the national media was almost devoid of debate on these issues. In analysing the reasons for the absence of debate, the dull and static nature of the campaign is contrasted with the surprising election results. In concludes that although on the surface the absence of engagement on foreign policy in the media appears to concur with the dominant view in the literature that foreign policy in not significant in first order elections inferences can be made that leave the impact of foreign policy on voter behaviour a more open question

The 2014 European electoral manifestos a preliminary analysis of the main competition dimensions

The European project has enjoyed considerable support from both elite and masses in Portugal. Since the country joined the EEC in 1986, the main political parties have been strong supporters of the Europe project. In recent years, however, this has been undermined by both political and economic crises. In this paper, we produce a preliminary analysis of the competition dimensions in the forthcoming 2014 European elections. We make an empirical analysis of the position held by the five most important Portuguese political parties in relation to European integration, the Euro, debt renegotiation, Eurobonds, and changes in pensions in a context that fosters contestation of European integration and its outputs.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Setting the agenda or responding to voters? Political parties, voters and issue attention

Why do political parties prioritise some policy issues over others? While the issue ownership theory suggests that parties emphasise policy issues on which they have an advantage in order to increase the salience of these issues among voters, the riding the wave theory argues instead that parties respond to voters by highlighting policy issues that are salient in the minds of citizens. This study sheds new light on the selective issue emphasis of political parties by analysing issue attention throughout the entire electoral cycle. On the basis of a quantitative text analysis of more than 40,000 press releases published by German parties from 2000 until 2010, this article provides empirical support for the riding the wave theory. It shows that political parties take their cues from voters by responding to the issue priorities of their electorate. The results have important implications for political representation and the role that parties play in democracies

Text Mining from Party Manifestos to Support the Design of Online Voting Advice Applications

Voting advice applications (VAA) allow potential voters to compare their own policy positions to political parties running for an election. One of the key design elements of a VAA are the policy statements representing the political space covered by political parties. VAA designers face the challenge of coming up with policy statements in a short time frame. Even with medium-sized corpora of texts such as party manifestos, the formulation and selection of policy statements serving as a stimulus in the VAA is a tedious and time-consuming task. In addition, there is the risk of human selection bias. This study proposes a system to aid VAA designers in policy statement selection and formulation. The system uses the BERT language model with semantic similarity calculation to mine party manifesto sentences that are relevant to already existing VAA statements. For the experiments, VAA statements stemming from the 2021 elections and party manifestos issued for the previous two Japanese elections were used. To expand the policy space, VAA statements from the 2019 European Parliament elections were added. Results show that the proposed system is able to analyze large amounts of text in a short time, and mines text that provides practical support for designing and improving VAAs

Who Cares about Democracy? And Why? European Citizens’ and Parties’ Attitudes towards Democracy

This cumulative dissertation addresses the question when and why citizens and political elites politicise, defend or undermine democratic institutions. It is the first to show that citizens have different preferences for political institutions, that these preferences affect in how far citizens are willing to defend the institutions in place and that democracy, in fact, is an issue of electoral competition at least in Germany. The first chapter of this dissertation uses a survey experiment (list experiment) and quantitative text analysis of open-ended survey responses to elicit citizens’ support for and understandings of democracy in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. It shows that authoritarian attitudes correlate strongly with citizens’ lack of support for democracy, while populist attitudes correlate strongly with their understanding of democracy. These are novel findings that contribute to the discussion on the explanatory factors for the lack of support for liberal democracy among some citizens, strongly pointing to the relevance of authoritarianism. The second chapter of this dissertation uses survey data from Germany and Poland that includes another type of survey experiments called vignette experiments. Together with Theresa Gessler, we show that citizens’ understandings of democracy significantly affect their willingness to tolerate different types of democratic backsliding. In contrast to the previous literature, it shows that citizens do not necessarily not care about democracy and thus trade it for their preferred policy, but that citizens have different preferences for political institutions that explain whether they support or punish governments who infringe on democratic institutions in place. The third chapter of this dissertation combines pre-existing survey data and manifesto data for German citizens and parties. By combining these different data sources, it shows that democracy per se as well as liberal democracy, social democracy and direct democracy are issues of party competition in Germany. Challenger parties refer to democracy more often than established parties and parties of different party families emphasise different conceptions of democracy in their election campaigns. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first article that conceptualises democracy as electoral issue and thus leads to a significant number of further questions regarding the role of elections in stabilizing or destabilizing democracy

(When) do electoral mandates set the agenda? Government capacity and mandate responsiveness in Germany

In democracies, electoral mandates are meant to shape public policy. But how much leeway do elected representatives actually have to implement it? Influential scholars think that (horizontal and vertical) institutional hurdles, budget constraints and political pressure dilute mandate responsiveness, but empirical evidence for this important claim remains scarce. This article provides a theoretical model and an empirical account of the extent to which different types of constraints limit the capacity of governing parties to set their electoral priorities on the agenda. Using fixed-effects Poisson regression on German electoral and legislative priorities over a period of over three decades (1983-2016), we conclude that policies reflect electoral priorities to a greater extent than scholarship has acknowledged so far. We do confirm, however, the constraining effects of Europeanization, shrinking budget leeway, intra-coalition disagreement and low executive popularity. We elaborate on the implications for theories of public policy, democratic representation and comparative politics

Manifestos, salience and junior ministerial appointments

We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporating a novel theory of strategic changes in the issues covered in party manifestos. We argue that parties use junior ministerial appointments to oversee their coalition partners on portfolios that correspond to issues emphasized by the parties' activists when the coalition partner's preferences deviate from the party's. The findings, based on a data set of more than 2800 party-portfolio dyads in 10 countries, show significant support for these expectations. We find that party leaders who successfully negotiate for junior ministers to particular portfolios are most concerned about checking ideologically contentious coalition partners in areas of concern to activists. The results also illustrate the usefulness of our dyadic approach for the study of junior minister allocation

Ideological Clarity in Multiparty Competition: A New Measure and Test Using Election Manifestos

Parties in advanced democracies take ideological positions as part of electoral competition, but some parties communicate their position more clearly than others. Existing research on democratic party competition has paid much attention to assessing partisan position taking in electoral manifestos, but it has largely overlooked how manifestos reflect the clarity of these positions. This article presents a scaling procedure that better reflects the data-generating process of party manifestos. This new estimator allows us to recover not only positional estimates, but also estimates for the ideological clarity or ambiguity of parties. The study validates its results using Monte Carlo tests, a manifesto-drafting simulation and a human coding exercise. Finally, the article applies the estimator to party manifestos in four multiparty democracies and demonstrates that ambiguity can enhance the appeal of parties with platforms that become more moderate, and lessen the appeal of parties with platforms that become more extreme