... with partisan theory, some are counter-indicative. Exploring the role of party and voter movements, we document a shifting political landscape in which the potential for traditional partisan influences has become smaller. partisan politics dimensionality party positions political cleavages...

... a considerable degree of convergence of party preferences after 1980, the rather broad-brush notion of a general ‘race to the right’ is overstated, as the processes of shifting ideological party positions vary hugely in different countries. More importantly, some of the identified processes of convergence seem...

... that the strategic configuration of parties influences the extent to which center-right parties modernize their family policy positions. The arguments are tested using data on attitudes toward gender roles and family policy from the European and World Values Survey and a new database on party positions on family...

... support than niche parties positioned nearer to the center of the Left–Right dimension. Thus, the relationship between party proximity and vote share for mainstream parties is completely opposite to that of niche parties. Policy centrism influences mainstream and niche party success in elections...

...This chapter explains the relationship between the four European worlds of welfare democracies (Nordic, continental, southern, and Anglo-Saxon) and multidimensional party competition. It systematically examines the variation of the relationship between party positions and salience on economic...

...The study of how party competition affects vote choices requires valid and reliable measures of the policy positions of political parties. This chapter compares the three most commonly used measures of party positions in comparative research, namely Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data, party...

... in the Netherlands can be interpreted by social and political factors. From the social perspective we focus on compositional changes, education, changes in the class structure, and religious integration. From the political perspective we examine the impact of merging political parties and changes in party positions...

... elections. Moreover, these results are strengthened by alternative specifications based on expert opinions of parties' positions from the Huber–Inglehart ( 1995 ) study. This is simply a first look at an important and complicated question; a question that I will return to throughout the study. For instance...

... and with the number of parties. This conclusion persists despite the fact that these hypotheses have been evaluated using alternative measures of party policy extremism (weighted and unweighted) and of party positions (expert placements, citizen placements, and party manifestos). I conclude that in the fifteen...

...Studies that explain class voting have often focused on ‘bottom-up” social factors, but paid little attention to ‘top-down’ political factors. In this chapter, we argue that party positions on left-right ideology affect the strength of class voting. We test this thesis by estimating the impact...