Zachary Greene

Competing on the issues: how experience in government and economic conditions influence the scope of parties' policy messages

Parties campaign on a range of topics to attract diverse support. Little research, however, looks at why parties narrow or expand the scope of their campaign or shift attention across issues. Focusing only on a single dimension or topic may lead scholars to estimate wrongly the magnitude of the effect of parties’ experiences in a government or economic context. I propose that electoral conditions influence the scope of parties’ manifestos. I test hypotheses using a measure of issue diversity: the Effective Number of Manifesto Issues (ENMI). Based on analysis of 1662 manifestos in 24 OECD countries from 1951 to 2010, the results support the theory. Government parties have higher ENMI. Opposition parties and governments expecting a reward for the economy limit their issue appeals. Tests of the underlying mechanism using data on issue dimensions and policy data provide additional support. These findings have important implications for the study of election strategy and democratic accountability.

Should we measure professionalism with an index? A note on theory and practice in state legislative professionalism research

Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. Despite the attention paid to its causes and consequences, recent research has largely set aside questions about professionalism’s conceptualization and operationalization. Usually measuring it as an aggregate index, scholars theoretically and empirically treat professionalism as a unidimensional concept. In this article, we argue that exclusive use of aggregate indices can limit state politics research. Using a new dataset with almost 40 years of data on state legislative resources, salary, and session length, we reconsider the validity of using an index to study professionalism across the states. We evaluate the internal consistency of professionalism components over time, the relationship between components and the Squire Index, and the degree to which professionalism components are unidimensional using classical multidimensional scaling. We find enough commonality and enough variation between professionalism components to support a range of measurement strategies like the use of unidimensional indices (such as the Squire Index), disaggregating the components and analyzing their effects individually, or formulating multidimensional measures. Scholars should take care to choose the appropriate measure of the concept that best fits the causal relationships under examination.

Diverse parties, diverse agendas? Female politicians and the parliamentary party’s role in platform formation

Parties’ parliamentary delegations contain a multitude of interests. While scholars suspect that this variation affects party behavior, most work on parties’ policy statements treats parties as unitary actors. This reflects the absence of strong expectations concerning when (and how) the parliamentary caucus matters for platform construction, as well as the difficulties inherent in testing such claims. Drawing on the literature on women’s descriptive representation, we argue that the makeup of the parliamentary party likely has important consequences for issue entrepreneurship, the scope of issues represented on the manifesto, and even the left-right position of election platforms. With the most comprehensive party-level study of women’s representation ever conducted, we test our three diversity hypotheses using data on the gender makeup of parties’ parliamentary delegations and the content of their manifestos for 110 parties in 20 democracies between 1952 and 2011. We show that as the percentage of women in the parliamentary party increases, parties address a greater diversity of issues in their election campaigns. Women’s presence is also associated with more left-leaning manifestos, even when controlling for parties’ prior ideological positions. Together, these findings illustrate a previously overlooked consequence of descriptive representation and provide a framework for understanding when and why the parliamentary party influences manifesto formation. They show that diversity—or lack thereof—has important consequences for parties’ policy statements, and thus the overall quality of representation.

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.

Looking for the party? The effects of partisan change on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament

Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament, this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’ organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.

Maintaining partisan ties : preference divergence and partisan collaboration in Western Europe

Parties coordinate on a range of activities. They invite leaders from other parties to their national meetings, run joint electoral platforms and even form parliamentary factions and coalition governments. The implications of regular cooperation such as the case of pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) for party positioning are unexplored. Parties form PECs to reduce competition for voters with ideologically close competitors and to signal their ability to cohesively govern. Building on this logic, we argue that parties’ preferences converge in PECs to demonstrate their ability to govern together and diverge when parties observe that this tactic has failed to attract voter support in past elections. We demonstrate support for our approach using data on electoral coalition participation, party positions and parties’ internal speeches. Additional evidence from an extreme case of an enduring electoral coalition in Germany shows that PECs have dramatic effects on parties’ positions.

Working through the issues: how issue diversity and ideological disagreement influence coalition duration

Issue salience and diversity direct a range of outcomes such as voting behavior and public policy. Studies, however, have yet to fully integrate theoretical or empirical expectations for the effect of issue salience on coalition stability. By focusing on the mechanism linking parties’ preferences to policy-making, I propose that parties with more diverse platforms provide coalitions greater room to negotiate, whereas parties focusing on a small number of issues exacerbate ideological tensions. Issue diversity becomes important once parties exhaust opportunities to make the initial, easy policy compromises. Using evidence from 299 coalitions in 24 European countries, I find that issue diversity in parties’ platforms moderates the effect of disagreement. Using a non-proportional hazard analysis, I find that the effect of issue diversity varies over the coalition’s lifecycle. Governments with parties willing to negotiate over a larger range of issues decrease the risk that disagreements will result in coalition termination.

Cross-national partisan effects on agenda stability

ABSTRACT Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, the authors present a detailed investigation of parties’ effects on agenda stability in six advanced industrial democracies over time. The authors consider parties as dynamic organizations by arguing that parties’ organizational characteristics and goals interact with their electoral context to determine their impact on policy attention. The results show that parties’ influence on the policy agenda depends on economic conditions, the type of government, the government’s seat share, and the number of parties in the governing cabinet, particularly following a major transition in government.

Ruling divided : disagreement, issue salience and portfolio allocation

Issue salience and ideological disagreement often predict coalition government behavior. However, research on portfolio allocation has yet to fully specify the complex relationship between issue salience, disagreement, and coalition negotiations. Scholars treat issue salience and disagreement as distinct and disconnected, despite evidence that they work together and with conditional effects in a range of settings. Following a logic of portfolio trades or “logrolls,” we propose that the relative salience of issues and disagreements at the issue level within the coalition both moderate the effect of issue salience on portfolio allocation. Using data drawn from the Parliamentary Democracy Data Archive, we find compelling evidence for our theory that links party manifestos to portfolio allocation. Consistent with a story on the conditional effect of salience and disagreement, we find evidence that the effect of salience is mitigated by the extent of disagreement between coalition parties.

Symbols of priority? How the media selectively report on parties’ election campaigns

Leaders and members of parliament serve as a political partys public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers interpret policy statements. It is hypothesized in this article that media cover and voters understand policy messages through the lens of prominent party members’ characteristics. Easy‐to‐observe descriptive traits, such as gender or ethnicity, cue parties’ policy priorities. Media are more likely to emphasise party messages on issues historically related to these groups when they are visible in the partys public image. Hypotheses from this theory are tested using data on prominent party members’ descriptive characteristics, policy statements and media coverage of statements from the European Election Studies. Data from the 1999, 2004 and 2009 European elections evidence support for the theory. Parties with more female representatives signal stronger emphasis on gendered issues in media reports. The results hold implications for understanding the ways in which parties deliver and voters receive campaign messages. This research offers an explanation for voters’ limited knowledge of parties’ policy positions; media reinforce existing gender stereotypes and voters’ predispositions by selectively reporting policy statements.