Jan Rovny

Measuring party positions in Europe The Chapel Hill expert survey trend file, 1999–2010

This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999−2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and the 2009 European Elections Studies survey, and explore basic trends on party positioning since 1999. The dataset is available at the CHES website.

Who emphasizes and who blurs? Party strategies in multidimensional competition

Most studies of party competition consider the presentation of ambiguous positions a costly strategy. This literature, however, does not study party strategies in multiple issue dimensions. Yet multidimensionality may play an important role in parties’ strategic calculus. Although it may be rational for a party to emphasize a certain issue dimension, it may be equally rational to disguise its stance on other dimensions by blurring its position. This article argues that parties employ strategies of issue emphasis and position blurring in various dimensional contexts. Who emphasizes and who blurs thus depends on the actors’ relative stakes in different issue dimensions. The paper makes its case by performing cross-sectional analyses of 132 political parties in 14 West European party systems using Comparative Manifesto Project data, the 2006 Chapel Hill expert survey and the 2009 European Election Study.

Where do radical right parties stand? Position blurring in multidimensional competition

This article questions the utility of assessing radical right party placement on economic issues, which has been extensively analyzed in academic literature. Starting from the premise that political parties have varying strategic stakes in different political issues, the article considers political competition in multiple issue dimensions. It suggests that political competition is not simply a matter of taking positions on political issues, but rather centers on manipulating the dimensional structure of politics. The core argument is that certain political parties, such as those of the radical right, seek to compete on neglected, secondary issues while simultaneously blurring their positions on established issues in order to attract broader support. Deliberate position blurring – considered costly by the literature – may thus be an effective strategy in multidimensional competition. The article combines quantitative analyses of electoral manifestos, expert placement of political parties, and voter preferences, by studying seventeen radical right parties in nine Western European party systems.

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.

Struggle over Dimensionality Party Competition in Western and Eastern Europe

This article analyzes the impact of party strategies on the issue structure, and consequently the dimensional structure, of party systems across Europe. Conceptualizing political competition in two dimensions (economic left-right and social traditionalism versus liberalism), the authors demonstrate that political parties in both Eastern and Western Europe contest the issue composition of political space. The authors argue that large, mainstream parties are invested in the dimensional status quo, preferring to compete on the primary dimension by emphasizing economic issues. Systematically disadvantaged niche parties, conversely, prefer to compete along a secondary dimension by stressing social issues. Adopting such a strategy enables niche parties to divert voter attention and challenge the structure of conflict between the major partisan competitors. The authors test these propositions using the 2006 iteration of the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on Party Positions. Findings indicate that while the structure of political conflict in Eastern versus Western Europe could not be more different, the logic with which parties compete in their respective systems is the same. The authors conclude that political competition is primarily a struggle over dimensionality; it does not merely occur along issue dimensions but also over their content.

Communism, Federalism, and Ethnic Minorities: Explaining Party Competition Patterns in Eastern Europe

Scholarship on East European politics expects that party competition in the region is determined by various communist legacies, juxtaposing state-centric authoritarianism to a liberal market economy. Recent empirical evidence, however, uncovers significant variance of party competition patterns across East European countries. To explain this variance, this article argues that an interaction between communist institutional framework and partisan responses to ethnic minorities determines party competition structure in the region. While experience with communist federalism determines partisan affinities with ethnic minorities, tolerance or support for ethnic minorities leads the political actors associated with those minorities to general socially liberal positions. Consequently—and contrary to received knowledge—ethnic politics influence the ideological content of party competition and structure party systems in Eastern Europe.

Anchoring the experts: Using vignettes to compare party ideology across countries

Expert surveys are a valuable, commonly used instrument to measure party positions. Some critics question the cross-national comparability of these measures, though, suggesting that experts may lack a common anchor for fundamental concepts such as economic left–right. Using anchoring vignettes in the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we examine the extent of cross-national difference in expert ideological placements. We find limited evidence of cross-national differences; on the whole, our findings further establish expert surveys as a rigorous instrument for measuring party positions in a cross-national context.

Riker and Rokkan Remarks on the strategy and structure of party competition

This special issue studies the strategic interaction between major state-wide and regional parties in a political setting defined by multiple, potentially cross-cutting, political issues pertaining to the economy and the territorial organization of multi-national states. Through this framework, this special issue locates itself decisively in the behaviorist tradition of studying political competition. Stemming from the classical works of Riker and the Rochester school, and focusing on rational choice models, this tradition has influenced a lively literature on party strategies. This concluding article of the special issue argues that the findings of the substantive contributions create a bridge between the strategic, Rikerian literature they stem from and seek to engage with, and more sociological approaches to the study of political parties that focus on the structural features of politics reaching back to the works of Lipset and Rokkan. I suggest that, ultimately, this special issue demonstrates the socially, historically, and institutionally bounded opportunities of political parties. Fundamentally, the special issue makes a significant contribution to the strategic literature by suggesting structural limits to strategic behavior.

Party Competition Structure in Eastern Europe Aggregate Uniformity versus Idiosyncratic Diversity

The literature on party competition structure in eastern Europe varies between aggregated large-N studies that propose uniform patterns of party competition across the region on the one hand, and disaggregated, case-focused studies identifying a plurality of country-specific patterns on the other. This article finds that both suffer from theoretical weaknesses. The aggregated works, arguing for common unidimensionality of party competition in the region, overlook significant cross-national differences, while the case-focused works, suggesting country-specific multidimensionality, do not identify commonalities. In effect, both sets of research fall short in explaining the variance of party competition in eastern Europe. This article consequently argues for the importance of bridging these findings of aggregate uniformity and idiosyncratic diversity through the use of refined theoretical explanations of party competition patterns in the region. To demonstrate the plausibility and utility of such an approach, the article builds a theoretical model of party competition in eastern Europe, and tests it by estimating the vote for left-wing parties across ten eastern European countries using the 2009 European Election Study.

Stepping in the same river twice: Stability amidst change in Eastern European party competition

Party competition in Eastern Europe faces a seeming paradox. On the one hand, research finds increased political volatility in these countries, while, on the other, some authors demonstrate inherent ideological stability in the region. This research note presents a new methodological approach to adjudicating between these two findings, and suggests that while political organisations come and go, the ideological structure of party competition in Eastern Europe is strikingly steady. By developing a number of different measures of the dimensional structure of party competition, the consistency of the measures across countries, as well as their relative stability within countries over time, is demonstrated. The findings speak to current developments in Eastern Europe, and have implications beyond the region. The conclusion that even volatile party systems can be underpinned by stable ideological oppositions points to two different types of party system structure: one related to parties as organisations, and the other related to parties as expressions of political divides.