The power of the loser: why governments may be inclined to do what the opposition says

Henrik Bech Seeberg writes that a government is likely to adopt legislation covering the opposition’s position in order to silence opposition agenda-setting. The model is tested on the manual coding of 316 Acts of Parliament adopted by the government and 26,533 Prime Minister’s Questions from the opposition across six issues between 1979 and 2015

Supplemental Material, pp-2017-0079-File008 - The impact of opposition criticism on the public’s evaluation of government competence

<p>Supplemental Material, pp-2017-0079-File008 for The impact of opposition criticism on the public’s evaluation of government competence by Henrik Bech Seeberg in Party Politics</p

Supplemental Material, pp-2017-0079-File009 - The impact of opposition criticism on the public’s evaluation of government competence

<p>Supplemental Material, pp-2017-0079-File009 for The impact of opposition criticism on the public’s evaluation of government competence by Henrik Bech Seeberg in Party Politics</p

Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions

<p>A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011–2013. Two key findings extend previous work. First, voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a ‘coalition heuristic’ as a rule-of-thumb. These findings imply that under some conditions voters are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.</p