Parties’ Policy Programmes and the Dog that Didn't Bark: No Evidence that Proportional Systems Promote Extreme Party Positioning

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 479-497

  Ezrow, Lawrence ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69649107706     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000240     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Ian Budge and Michael McDonald, ‘Choices Parties Define: Policy Alternatives in Representative Elections-17 Countries 1945-1998’, Party Politics, 12 (2006), 451-66; see also Michael McDonald and Ian Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
2. These factors include (but are not limited to): the electoral salience of policies relative to unmeasured sources of voters’ party evaluations, the importance of ‘valence’ dimensions of voters’ party evaluations relative to policy dimensions of evaluation, the spatial distribution of voters’ partisan affiliations, and the strategic effects of voter abstention. See, for example, Tse-Min Lin, James Enelow and Han Dorussen, ‘Equilibrium in Multicandidate Probabilistic Spatial Voting’, Public Choice, 98 (1999), 59-82; Norman Schofield, ‘Valence Competition in the Spatial Stochastic Model’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 15 (2003), 371-83; Norman Schofield and Itai Sened, Multiparty Democracy: Elections and Legislative Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); James Adams and Samuel Merrill III, ‘Party Policy Equilibrium for Alternative Spatial Voting Models: An Application to the Norwegian Storting’, European Journal of Political Research, 36 (1999), 35-55; Melvin Hinich and Peter Ordeshook, ‘Plurality Maximization vs. Vote Maximization: A Spatial Analysis with Variable Participation’, American Political Science Review, 64 (1970), 772-91.
3. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (New York: Wiley, 1954).
4. See also Douglas Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967); William H. Riker, ‘The Two-Party System and Duverger's Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science’, American Political Science Review, 76 (1982), 753-66; Rein Taagepera and Matthew Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); Gary Cox, Making Votes Count (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
5. F. A. Hermens, Democracy or Anarchy? (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1941), p. 19.
6. For examples of spatial mappings on more than one dimension, see Norman Schofield, ‘A Comparison of Majoritarian and Proportional Electoral Systems Based on Spatial Modeling and “Rational” Politicians’ (paper presented at the Conference on Constitutional Issues in Modern Democracies, Messina, 1997); Jay K. Dow, ‘A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Elections’, Electoral Studies, 20 (2001), 109-25.
7. Budge and McDonald, ‘Choices Parties Define’, p. 453.
8. See, for example, G. Bingham Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); John Huber and G. Bingham Powell, ‘Congruence between Citizens and Policymakers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy’, World Politics, 46 (1994), 291-326; G. Bingham Powell and Georg S. Vanberg, ‘Election Laws, Disproportionality, and Median Correspondence: Implications for Two Visions of Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 383-411; John Huber, ‘Values and Partisanship in Left-Right Orientations: Measuring Ideology’, European Journal of Political Research, 17 (1989), 599-621; McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy.
9. Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics, 2nd edn (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House Publishers, 1996).
10. Elisabeth Carter, ‘Does PR Promote Political Extremism? Evidence from the West European Parties of the Extreme Right’, Representation, 40 (2004), 82-100.
11. R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, ‘Party System Compactness: Consequences and Measures’, Political Analysis, 12 (2004), 46-62.
12. Gary Cox, ‘Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems’, American Journal of Political Science, 34 (1990), 905-35.
13. Cox, ‘Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems’.
14. Dow, ‘A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Elections’.
15. There is both a theoretical and empirically-based literature suggesting that parties in multiparty elections (i.e. elections involving at least three parties) maximize votes by presenting centrist positions. Theoretically, when voting is probabilistic and voters do not attach too much salience to policy distance compared with unmeasured, non-policy motivations, then a unique vote-maximizing equilibrium exists in which all parties in a multiparty election locate at the mean voter position (Lin, Enelow and Dorussen, ‘Equilibrium in Multicandidate Probabilistic Spatial Voting'; but see Schofield, ‘Valence Competition in the Spatial Stochastic Model'). Empirically, scholars report computations on survey data from real world elections which suggest that the non-centrist parties that contested these elections could have increased their support in elections held in Britain, France, The Netherlands, Germany and Canada (see R. Michael Alvarez, Jonathan Nagler and Jennifer Willette, ‘Measuring the Relative Impact of Issues and the Economy in Democratic Elections’, Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 237-53; R. Michael Alvarez, Jonathan Nagler and Shaun Bowler, ‘Issues, Economics, and the Dynamics of Multiparty Elections: The 1997 British General Election’, American Political Science Review, 42 (2000), 55-96; James Adams and Samuel Merrill III, ‘Spatial Models of Candidate Competition and the 1988 French Presidential Election: Are Presidential Candidates Vote-Maximizers?’ Journal of Politics, 62 (2000), 729-56; James Adams, Samuel Merrill III and Bernard Grofman, A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For static analyses, see also Lawrence Ezrow, ‘Are Moderate Parties Rewarded in Multiparty Systems? A Pooled Analysis of Western European Elections, 1984-98’, European Journal of Political Research, 44 (2005), 881-98.
16. In addition, votes are less directly tied to office in proportional systems-i.e., parties with smaller vote shares can still participate in governing coalitions in PR systems. By contrast disproportional, plurality-based voting systems frequently manufacture single-party parliamentary majorities, as is the case in Britain, as well as in New Zealand prior to its switch to proportional representation for the 1996 election (for a review of evidence on this issue, see Michael McDonald, Sylvie Mendes and Ian Budge, ‘What are Elections For? Conferring the Median Mandate’, British Journal of Political Science, 34 (2004), 1-26). In these cases, ‘losing’ parties have no chance of becoming part of the government. Alternatively, proportional systems give small parties the opportunity to coalesce with larger parties and take part in the governing coalition (e.g., the Free Democratic Party (FDP) throughout most of the post-war period in Germany).
17. Cox, ‘Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems’.
18. See also Curtis B. Eaton and Richard G. Lipsey, ‘The Principle of Minimum Differentiation Reconsidered: Some New Developments in the Theory of Spatial Competition’, Review of Economic Studies, 42 (1975), 27-49.
19. Samuel Merrill III and James Adams, ‘Centrifugal Incentives in Multi-Candidate Elections’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 14 (2002), 275-300.
20. Duverger, Political Parties.
21. Related to this is Duverger's Hypothesis, that proportional voting systems are associated with multipartism (Duverger, Political Parties).
22. See Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Taagepera and Shugart, Seats and Votes; Cox, Making Votes Count.
23. Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy.
24. Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945-1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 27.
25. Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera, ‘ “Effective” Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to West Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, 12 (1979), 3-27; Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy.
26. John Huber and Ronald Inglehart, ‘Expert Interpretations of Party Space and Party Locations in 42 Societies’, Party Politics, 1 (1995), 73-111; Francis Castles and Peter Mair, ‘Left-Right Political Scales: Some Expert Judgments’, European Journal of Political Research, 12 (1984), 73-88.
27. Alvarez, Nagler and Bowler, ‘Issues, Economics, and the Dynamics of Multiparty Elections'; Adams and Merrill, ‘Party Policy Equilibrium for Alternative Spatial Voting Models'; Adams and Merrill, ‘Spatial Models of Candidate Competition and the 1988 French Presidential Election?’
28. Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and Eric Tanenbaum, Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). In addition, scholars have employed the technique of multidimensional scaling, which involves estimating the parties’ positions relative to voters’ positions via analyses of voters’ policy preferences in combination with their party evaluations (see Dow, ‘A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Elections'; Schofield and Sened, Multiparty Democracy).
29. Alvarez and Nagler, ‘Party System Compactness'; Dow, ‘A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Elections'; Ken Kollman, John H. Miller, and Scott E. Page, ‘Political Parties and Electoral Landscapes’, British Journal of Political Science, 28 (1998), 139-58. The argument for weighting average party policy extremism by party size is that such weighting accounts for the fact that the small parties in some countries (e.g., the American Green party, the British Socialist party, and so on) have virtually no political influence, so that their policy proposals do not enlarge the menu of policy choices available to voters in any meaningful sense. The arguments for relying on an unweighted measure of party policy extremism are, first, that any weighting system is unavoidably arbitrary given that parties’ policy influence does not necessarily correlate with vote (or seat) share, and, secondly, that small parties provide a vehicle through which voters can express their policy preferences, regardless of whether or not such parties significantly influence government policy outputs.
30. Aspecial issue of Electoral Studies presents several articles which analyse the tradeoffs that accompany each approach used to estimate parties’ policy positions (Gary Marks, ed., ‘Special Symposium: Comparing Measures of Party Positioning: Expert Manifesto, and Survey Data’, Electoral Studies, 26 (2007), 1-141).
31. Alvarez and Nagler, ‘Party System Compactness'; Kollman, Miller and Page, ‘Political Parties and Electoral Landscapes’.
32. Alvarez and Nagler, ‘Party System Compactness’.
33. See Donald Stokes, ‘Spatial Models of Party Competition’, American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 368-77.
34. See Norman Schofield and Itai Sened, ‘Modeling the Interaction of Parties, Activists and Voters: Why Is the Political Centre so Empty?’ European Journal of Political Research, 44 (2005), 355-90; Schofield, ‘Valence Competition in the Spatial Stochastic Model'; James Adams, ‘Policy Divergence in Multiparty Probabilistic Spatial Voting’, Public Choice, 100 (1999), 103-22. See also Stuart Elaine Macdonald and George Rabinowitz, ‘Solving the Paradox of Nonconvergence: Valence, Position, and Direction in Democratic Politics’, Electoral Studies, 17 (1998), 281-300.
35. Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, ‘Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States’, American Political Science Review, 97 (2003), 245-60; John Aldrich, ‘A Downsian Spatial Model with Party Activists’, American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), 974-90; John Aldrich, ‘A Spatial Model with Party Activists: Implications for Electoral Dynamics’, Public Choice, 41 (1983), 63-100; John Aldrich, Why Parties? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
36. Norman Schofield, Andrew Martin, Kevin Quinn and David Nixon, ‘Multiparty Electoral Competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A Model Based on Multinomial Probit’, Public Choice, 97 (1999), 257-93.
37. See Robert Axelrod, Conflict of Interest (Chicago: Markham, 1970); Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy; Huber and Powell, ‘Congruence between Citizens and Policymakers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy’.
38. Schofield and Sened, Multiparty Democrcacy.