Partisan attachments in a multidimensional space

Abstract

How do party positions in a multidimensional space affect party identification? This article argues that when parties take consistent ideological positions across dimensions, they clarify their brand, fostering party identifications. An analysis that uses data from the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey provides evidence for this argument. The results also indicate that the effect particularly holds for the less educated and politically less interested. In addition, ideological inconsistency affects individual parties’ electoral appeal, as parties that take different positions on two dimensions tend to have a smaller partisan base. The results provide important insights into how multidimensional party competition shapes the development of party attachments.

Keywords:

• Partisanship
• party brands
• multidimensional space
• economic left-right
• GAL/TAN
• party system inconsistency

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Semih Çakır and Baowen Liang for research assistance. Previous versions of this article were presented at the Department of Politics and IR Research Seminar of the University of Reading and the Schuman Centre Seminar Series at the European University Institute. We thank the editors of this special issue, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions for revisions. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 That is, a dimension distinguishing green, alternative and libertarian positions from traditional, authoritarian and nationalist positions.

2 The idea that more ideological polarisation between parties clarifies the differences between them, and in this way helps voters to choose between parties, is also what motivated the APSA Committee on Political Parties (1950) to argue that political parties should take more distinct positions. Even though much empirical work provides evidence that supports this role of ideological polarisation (for an overview, see Dassonneville and Çakır 2021), it is important to acknowledge that ideological polarisation not only has beneficial effects on democracy. In particular, as parties take more extreme positions, there not only is a heightened risk of political gridlock, parties also alienate voters in the centre (Fiorina et al. 2008) and cause a decline in fundamental political attitudes—like political trust (Hetherington and Rudolph 2018).

3 It should be stressed that we think this theory complements the role of polarisation, which by itself also influences clarity and in that way partisanship. Empirically, we ensure to capture the independent effect of the consistency in parties’ positions by including controls for polarisation in the models.

4 Empirically, we account for differences in the structure of party systems between Central/Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and between countries more generally, by means of additional analyses that include country fixed effects. We also present the results of an additional test in which we include a dummy variable to distinguish between countries in Western Europe and countries in Central/Eastern Europe.

5 It should be stressed that our expectations relate to partisanship, not parties’ electoral success. To be sure, partisanship is a strong predictor of vote choice (Campbell et al. 1980), and parties that have more partisans on average will gain a larger share of the vote. However, partisanship is not the only determinant of electoral success. Newly emerging parties—that have not had the time to build a strong partisan base—can win elections too, sometimes benefiting from the saliency of an issue they own or perhaps the presence of a charismatic leader.

6 Details on the survey-years that are matched can be found in Online appendix B.

7 In the 2006 CHES survey, for example, the question wording used to ask experts about the positions of parties on a GAL/TAN dimension is the following: ‘Parties can be classified in terms of their views on democratic freedoms and rights. ‘Libertarian’ or ‘postmaterialist’ parties favour expanded personal freedoms—for example, access to abortion, active euthanasia, same-sex marriage or greater democratic participation. ‘Traditional’ or ‘authoritarian’ parties often reject these ideas; they value order, tradition and stability, and believe that the government should be a firm moral authority on social and cultural issues.’ (Hooghe et al. 2010: 14).

8 Because of the inclusion of the weights that add up to 1 within a country-year, there is no need to account for the number of parties that is present in a particular party system. Empirically, the index of party system inconsistency and the effective number of parties correlate only weakly (Pearson correlation of 0.115).

9 The equation to capture polarisation on a specific dimension is:

Polarisation = ${\sum }_{j=1}^n{\omega }_j{\left(p_j-\overline{p}\right)}^2$

where ${\omega }_j$ is the share of the vote received by party j, $p_j$is the position of party j on the dimension, and $\overline{p}$ is the vote-share weighted average position of all parties on the same dimension.

10 Information on the ENEP is retrieved from Gallagher’s website: https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/people/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/Docts/ElectionIndices.pdf.

11 In line with previous research, we define niche parties as parties belonging to the radical left, radical right and green party families (O’Grady and Abou-Chadi 2019). Information on the age of parties is retrieved from the Integrated Party Organization Database (Giger and Schumacher 2015), and was complemented with information from ParlGov. Information on the age of parties is only available for countries in Western Europe, restricting the sample for this additional analysis.

12 We also estimated models in which we include a dichotomous indicator to distinguish between countries in Western Europe and countries in Central/Eastern Europe. As can be seen from Online appendix H, the main effect of party system inconsistency is somewhat reduced when we account for differences between Central/Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and is no longer significant at the 0.05 level. However, the estimates of the models that examine the moderating role of individuals’ level of education and their political interest are substantively very similar to those of the main results.

13 We have also explored the possibility that the effect of party age is curvilinear but found no evidence of such a pattern.

14 As can be seen from additional analyses in Online appendix M, including a control for right-wing populist parties does not substantively change the results of the party-level models.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Dassonneville

Ruth Dassonneville is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science of the Université de Montréal. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy. Her research interests include voting behaviour, political parties, compulsory voting, as well as women and politics. [[email protected]]

Patrick Fournier

Patrick Fournier is a Professor in the Department of Political Science of the Université de Montréal. He studies political psychology, citizen competence, and opinion change. [[email protected]]

Zeynep Somer-Topcu

Zeynep Somer-Topcu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on the relationship between political parties’ strategies and voter behaviour. [[email protected]]