https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0194-8405
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Abstract
Political parties frequently appeal broadly to different groups of voters with diverse preferences. However, the policy implications of this strategy are not yet understood. On the one hand, governments that appeal broadly may overextend their policy program and be unable to deliver on their promises. On the other hand, broad-appealing governments may focus on presenting different groups of voters with policy packages that are deliverable in order not to be punished by them in future elections. This article tests between these possibilities with data on social policy outputs, comparative manifesto data, and four different measures of government broad-appeals. The empirical analysis demonstrates that there is clear correspondence between what governments say they will do and what they actually do, regardless of how broadly they appeal. This suggests that the broad-appeal strategy does not undermine the democratic mandate theory’s vision of how democracy should work.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
2 The index is measured in the following way:
3 Using the perceptual disagreement variable allows us to analyze the following countries: Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
4 Using the expert disagreement variable allows us to analyze the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
5 The strongest correlation is for ENGA and ENMI (r = 0.31, p < .001) and only the voter disagreement measure correlates negatively with the other broad appeal variables.
6 The substantive effects are calculated from the baseline model (Model 1.1). The interaction term in the other four models means that the coefficient on the Gvt. welfare position variable refers to its effect on social policy outputs when the Gvt. broad-appeal variable takes the value 0, which is an out-of-sample prediction in all models except Model 1.2 (see Appendix A.1 for summary statistics).
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Mathias Wessel Tromborg
Mathias Wessel Tromborg is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on linkages between voters and their representatives in parliamentary democracies and has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review and British Journal of Political Science. [[email protected]]
Carsten Jensen
Carsten Jensen is a Professor in Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on democratic representation and socio-economic inequality. His work has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and by Oxford University Press. [[email protected]]