![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Scholars, citizens and journalists alike question whether political parties keep their electoral promises. A growing body of literature provides empirical evidence that parties do indeed keep their electoral pledges. Yet little is known about the congruence between party rhetoric between elections and the policies delivered by them. Given the increasing influence of party rhetoric in the media with respect to voting decisions, it is highly relevant to understand if parties ‘walk like they talk’. The article suggests that due to electoral reasons parties face strong incentives to deliver policy outputs which are congruent to their daily rhetoric. Analysing data on 54 policy outputs on nuclear energy, drafted by 24 parties after the Fukushima accident, the analysis finds overwhelming evidence that parties deliver ideologically congruent policy outputs to their rhetoric (incongruent only in 7.89%). These findings have important implications for our understanding of the linkage between party communication and the masses in modern media democracies.
Acknowledgements
This article has strongly profited from comments by Zac Greene, Sara Hobolt, Roman Senninger, Stuart Soroka, Johanna Schönhöfer and Markus Wagner. Specifically Nils Redeker and Roman Senninger read several iterations of the paper and gave insightful feedback on all of them. Laura Morales, Maarja Lühiste and Luca Bernardi also gave helpful comments on previous presentations of the paper. Suggestions by two anonymous reviewers and the WEP editor helped to significantly improve this article. I am deeply thankful for all these comments. All remaining errors are my own.
Notes
1. While using the term ‘rhetoric’ throughout the manuscript, I want to emphasise that rhetoric is here not understood as a pure means of attention seeking. In contrast, in the very classical interpretation of the term, I understand rhetoric to be a means by which speakers/authors strive to inform and persuade their audience. Rhetoric, thus, is understood as having audience costs (Fearon Citation1997).
2. The countries studied are Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America.
3. Reliability of coding is high, with Krippendorf’s Alpha being 0.88 for the major variables used in this article. Reliability was judged by asking all coders to code the same sample of newswires. Care was taken to ensure that prior knowledge of the case was not affecting the reliability scores. To ensure this, all coders had to code the same sample of newswires in English for India.
4. To be precise, in the case of Italy, the government withdrew its plan to reinstate nuclear energy.
5. Given that data collection ultimately ends once a government decides to phase out nuclear energy, protest mobilisation can hardly depend on these policy decisions undertaken by governments. This provides the advantage that protest mobilisation is not endogenous to parties’ policy decisions, but shows protesters’ dissatisfaction with the status quo of the policy.
6. In the article I aim to approximate parties’ positions between elections. Therefore, the measure includes a range of channels which parties potentially can use to share their positions. The overwhelming majority of positions analysed here are shared via the media – e.g. interviews/statements to the press. Notice, however, that statements made in parliamentary debates are also included in the analysis. Notice also that the results reported in the analysis remain the same if I only include statements mediated through the press.
7. Log(0) is undefined. Therefore I chose to introduce ‘0.5’ into equation (1) – as other scholars did as well (e.g. Lowe et al. Citation2011). This ensures that in case a party did not talk at all, it is not undefined in the measurement but represents the middle of the scale with zero.
8. Notice that the results are robust if using public opinion measures for salience. I re-estimated the models using the answer ‘environment’ for the ‘most important issue’ question in each country. The advantage of the measure employed here is that the media salience (a) gets hold of the short-term shifts of the topical salience and (b) the answer category ‘environment’ not only covers the issue of nuclear energy but all kinds of environmental concerns.
9. Note, however, that green parties frequently lack the access to deliver and push for legislation in the cases analysed here.
10. To measure the nuclear usage in each country, I rely on the data provided by the World Nuclear Association https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figures/nuclear-generation-by-country.aspx.
