Gijs Schumacher

Why do parties change position? Party organization and environmental incentives

What motivates parties to change their positions? Earlier studies demonstrate that parties change their position in response to environmental incentives, such as voter shifts. Yet, this work also suggests that parties differ in their responses. What accounts for this variation? We argue and empirically substantiate that differences in party organization explain the divergent responses of parties to environmental incentives. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of 55 parties in 10 European democracies between 1977 and 2003, this study demonstrates how the party organizational balance-of-power between party activists and party leaders conditions the extent to which environmental incentives (mean voter change, party voter change, and office exclusion) drive party-position change. The study’s findings have important implications for our understanding of parties’ electoral strategies as well as for models of representation.

Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data

This article addresses the variation of anti-corruption and anti-elite salience in party positioning across Europe. It demonstrates that while anti-corruption salience is primarily related to the (regional) context in which a party operates, anti-elite salience is primarily a function of party ideology. Extreme left and extreme conservative (TAN) parties are significantly more likely to emphasize anti-elite views. Through its use of the new 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey wave, this article also introduces the dataset.

Do mainstream parties adapt to the welfare chauvinism of populist parties

Populist parties increasingly take a welfare chauvinistic position. They criticize mainstream parties for cutting and slashing welfare at the expense of the ‘native’ population and to the benefit of the ‘undeserving’ immigrant. Given the electoral success of populist parties, we investigate whether and when mainstream parties ignore, attack or accommodate welfare chauvinism. Using key theories of party behaviour, we test whether mainstream parties (1) respond immediately to populist parties, (2) respond with a time lag, or (3) respond only when they lose elections or are in opposition. Our quantitative analyses of party manifestos, speeches and policies of European mainstream and populist parties (1980–2012) show that mainstream parties adapt to populist parties on welfare chauvinism, but which parties adapt and when varies significantly. In our in-depth examinations of the Dutch and Danish cases, we highlight important cross-country and cross-party differences.

The psychological roots of populist voting: Evidence from the United States, the Netherlands and Germany

What are the psychological roots of support for populist parties or outfits such as the Tea Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Germanys Left Party? Populist parties have as a common denominator that they employ an anti-establishment message, which they combine with some ‘host’ ideology. Building on the congruency model of political preference, it is to be expected that a voters personality should match with the message and position of his or her party. This article theorises that a low score on the personality trait Agreeableness matches the anti-establishment message and should predict voting for populist parties. Evidence is found for this hypothesis in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. The relationship between low Agreeableness and voting for populist parties is robust, controlling for other personality traits, authoritarianism, sociodemographic characteristics and ideology. Thus, explanations of the success of populism should take personality traits into account.

When does the left do the right thing? A study of party position change on welfare policies

Why did pro-welfare Social Democrats and Christian Democrats cease to support the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s, and support measures such as tighter welfare programme conditionality rules and lower social security benefits instead? Building on the party position change literature, I argue and empirically demonstrate that parties with an activist-dominated party organization adapt their position to shifts in the party voter position. Parties with a leadership-dominated party organization adapt their position to shifts in the median voter position. Parties in which neither leaders nor activists dictate party policy shift in the opposite direction of the previous policy shift if they are excluded from office. Using a cross-sectional time-series regression analysis of 181 position shifts of European Socialist, Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties in the period 1977–2003, I find strong evidence that party organization is a crucial mediating variable in explaining when these parties shift to the right or left. Demonstrating that differences in party organizations motivate parties to respond to different incentives, this study has implications for the relationship between party behaviour and welfare state policy-making.

‘Marx’ or the Market? Intra-party Power and Social Democratic Welfare State Retrenchment

Differences in the intra-party balance of power explain variation in social democratic responses to the economic crisis of the late 1970s. This article evidences this claim by analysing the case of welfare state retrenchment by social democratic parties. Welfare state retrenchment is electorally risky for social democrats and often contrary to their principles. Therefore cases of welfare state retrenchment by social democrats provide an excellent case study of the difficult trade-offs parties have to make between office, policy and vote pay-offs. The article claims that leadership-dominated parties advance office-seeking strategies and are therefore responsive to economic conditions and public opinion. Conversely, activist-dominated parties advance policy-seeking strategies and therefore support traditional social democratic policy platforms or seek more radical solutions. By comparing seven social democratic parties (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK) between 1980 and 2005, this article explains variation in when social democrats introduced welfare state retrenchment.

What wins public support? Communicating or obfuscating welfare state retrenchment

Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to evaluate the impact of welfare state retrenchment on government popularity. We hypothesize that communicating retrenchment is a better strategy than obfuscating retrenchment measures. In addition, we hypothesize that the opposition’s choice between arguing against the retrenchment measure, or staying silent on the issue, affects the government’s popularity. Thus, the study presents a novel theoretical model of the popularity effects of welfare state retrenchment. In order to evaluate our propositions, we move beyond the standard measure in the literature and use monthly opinion polls to reduce the number of other factors that might affect government popularity. We demonstrate that governments can evade popular punishment by communication. They can even gain popularity if the opposition chooses not to attack. On the other hand, government popularity declines if the government obfuscates - and the decline is even larger if the opposition chooses to attack.

The partisan politics of institutional welfare state reform

ABSTRACT We propose theoretically that the government partisan effect on institutional welfare state reforms is significantly stronger than on policy reforms. Policy reforms impose losses or gains on electoral sub-constituencies and therefore are driven by an electoral logic. Institutional reforms redistribute institutional power resources between political actors, but are inconsequential for voters in the short run. Without clear electoral repercussions, partisan governments are relatively free to seek long-term policy goals through institutional re-arrangements. We evaluate these propositions in a cross-country comparative analysis of all major policy and institutional reforms in labour market policy in Sweden, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands in the period between 1982 and 2011. We find the expected pattern of especially strong partisan effects in institutional welfare state reforms.

Who leads the party? On membership size, selectorates and party oligarchy

We examine the degree to which party leaders dominate their parties over time and across countries and analyse how leadership domination relates to formal aspects of party organisation. Moreover, we analyse whether antidotes against leadership domination – widening the selectorate and increasing the membership – explain change in leadership domination. For this purpose, we use a new dataset that brings together different sources of party data over time and between countries. We find that leadership domination indeed has increased over time, but still a lot of variation exists between parties. We also demonstrate that widening the selectorate – for example, letting members elect the party leader – and increasing membership boosts leadership domination. In other words, the antidotes against leadership domination do not work.

The effect of economic change and elite framing on support for welfare state retrenchment:: a survey experiment

How do economic downturns affect citizens’ support for welfare state retrenchment? Existing observational studies fail to isolate the effect of economic conditions and the effect of elite framing of these conditions. We therefore designed a survey experiment to evaluate how economic change in conjunction with different elite frames impact citizens’ support for welfare state retrenchment. We hypothesise and demonstrate that the effects of these frames differ by income group and partisanship. Our survey experiment – carried out in the United Kingdom – demonstrates that poor economic prospects generally motivate support for unemployment benefits vis-à-vis deficit reduction. Emphasis on inequality does not change this picture. Emphasis on government debt and deficits increases support for retrenchment compared with objective information. We find support for the hypothesis that partisans are less responsive to the economy than independents. However, income differences are a surprisingly weak moderator of our treatments. We derive two main conclusions: first, elite frames significantly influence the effect of economic change on welfare state preferences. Second, party identification is crucial to understand individual differences in welfare state preferences and should receive more attention in future research.