Competing on competence: the issue profiles of mainstream parties in Western Europe

Abstract

Despite a more volatile electoral landscape and in many countries also the electoral rise of niche parties, major mainstream parties continue to define the major political alternatives that citizens in Western Europe face when it comes to government alternatives. However, the voluminous literature on party competition in Western Europe mostly takes niche parties as the starting point to understand the consequences of the changing electoral landscape and also to understand the issue strategies of major mainstream parties. These parties should come to the centerstage. They pursue a common competence strategy which leads them to focus particularly on macroeconomics, health care, and education where they can document government competence to large parts of the electorate. This implies an increased overall similarity in their issue profiles. These findings are based on CAP coded party manifestos from seven countries since the early 1980s.

Keywords:

• Mainstream parties
• western europe
• health care
• education
• issue overlap

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2020 (2021) NOPSA conference, the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, the 2021 CAP Annual conference, and the meeting of the Comparative Politics Section at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. The authors would like to thank all the participants as well as Peter Bjerre Mortensen and Jim Adams for constructive criticism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is beyond the scope of this study to analyse all issues and we therefore focus on the overall issue overlap and leave out hypotheses on issues such as transportation and culture that are not the major issues of political contestation in general. Yet, to bolster our findings, we return to this residual group of issues in the analysis. We would expect increasing overlap in mainstream parties’ attention but no major changes in their modest level of mainstream party attention since these issues do not display particular nor increasing opportunities for major mainstream parties’ competence competition and no pressure from niche party issue politicization.

2 Our focus is on the typical two major mainstream parties that have dominated governments in Western Europe since the Second World War. In all seven countries included, prime ministers have almost exclusively come from these parties in the period covered here. In the Dutch case, three parties – PvdA, CDA, and VVD – have constituted the government alternatives in different combinations. We have included PvdA and VVD to secure the most comparability with the other countries included.

3 Below, niche parties will also be included in the analysis. We define niche parties as parties that were founded with a focus on one or two particular issues. The main group of parties are green parties and radical right-wing parties, the latter with a focus on either immigration or European integration. Further parties include parties for animal rights, pensioner parties, and feminist parties. We include 69 party manifestos for this group in total. See Online Appendix, Table A1 for a full list.

4 Additional analyses in the Online Appendix Figure A1 provide evidence that this is the case in each country.

5 The statistical estimations for each figure in the analysis are in Online Appendix Section IV.

6 The conclusion of diminished attention and diminished attention difference between mainstream left and right on the economy also applies for labor and business when not including macroeconomics.

7 In the Irish case, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have historically been so close in ideological terms that neither of them can be defined as either the left-wing or right-wing party. The results in the following are based on seeing Fine Gael as the mainstream left party and Fianna Fáil as the mainstream right party. However, reversing the two parties or leaving them out does not substantially change the conclusions in the analysis.

8 Additional analyses in the Online Appendix Figure A2 provide evidence that this overall conclusion applies to all countries. If we exclude a country, the overall trend only changes marginally.

9 Additional analyses in the Online Appendix Section II suggest that this is indeed the case that electoral vulnerability and niche party growth are key drivers of the increase in issue overlap among mainstream parties.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christoffer Green-Pedersen

Christoffer Green-Pedersen is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on party competition, agenda setting and public policy. His publications include The Reshaping of West European Party Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019). [[email protected]]

Henrik Bech Seeberg

Henrik Bech Seeberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on the causes and electoral and policy consequences of political agenda-setting in Western parliaments. He is currently a Sapere Aude research leader on a project ‘YOUTHPOL’ on youth representation and the political influence of political parties’ youth wings funded by the Danish Research Council (# 2065-00004B). [[email protected]]