scholarly journals Learning at Home and Abroad: How Competition Conditions the Diffusion of Party Strategies

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Sebastian Juhl ◽  
Laron K. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Diffusion Mechanism ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Party Manifestos ◽  
Party Strategies ◽  
Electoral Campaign ◽  
Electoral Strategies ◽  
Learning At Home ◽  
Independent Decision ◽  
Issue Competition ◽  
Issue Emphasis

How do parties decide when to campaign on valence issues given high degrees of uncertainty? Although past studies have provided evidence of transnational emulation of parties' position-taking strategies, these findings do not directly apply to saliency strategies. Moreover, the exact diffusion mechanism remains largely elusive. Based on the issue saliency literature, this study develops novel theoretical propositions and argues that conscious learning enables parties to infer the relative utility of emphasizing consensual issues during an electoral campaign. The proposed theory gives rise to different expectations at the domestic and transnational levels because of the distinct logic of issue competition. By analyzing environmental issue emphasis in party manifestos, the authors find direct transnational dependencies and indirect spillover effects among the parties' saliency strategies. They identify conscious learning, rather than mere imitation or independent decision making, as the diffusion mechanism at work. Yet, in line with saliency-based theories, electoral competition mutes the diffusion of electoral strategies domestically.

Strategic issue emphasis in parties’ election campaign statements

2019 ◽  
pp. 135406881986409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Baumann ◽  
Marc Debus ◽  
Martin Gross
Keyword(s):  
Election Campaign ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Legislative Period ◽  
Electoral Campaign ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
Strategic Issue ◽  
Unemployment Policy ◽  
Issue Emphasis

Parties should develop a consistent issue profile during an electoral campaign. Yet, manifestos, which form the baseline for a party’s programmatic goals in the upcoming legislative period, are usually published months before Election Day. We argue that parties must emphasize policy issues that are of key relevance to their likely voters in the last weeks of the election campaign, in which an increasing share of citizens make up their minds in terms of which party they will choose. To test this notion empirically, we draw on a novel data set that covers information on party representatives’ statements made during the final weeks of an election campaign in nine European countries. Focusing on the campaign messages of social democratic and socialist parties, we find that these parties indeed intensify their emphasis of unemployment policy, which is a salient issue for their core voter clienteles, particularly in times of economic hardship.

On digital front-runners and late-comers: Analyzing issue competition over digitization in German subnational elections

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-265
Author(s):  
Markus B. Siewert ◽  
Pascal D. König
Keyword(s):  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
Party Manifestos ◽  
Subnational Elections ◽  
Issue Competition ◽  
Do So

AbstractDespite the sweeping societal and economic transformation brought about by digitization, it has remained a relatively marginal topic in elections, with parties having few incentives to signal commitment to digitization. Why then would parties start to do so? We address this question by examining party manifestos from German subnational elections in the period between 2010 and 2018. Our analysis contributes to the research on issue competition by looking at why parties engage with the topic of the digitization even though it has neither become politicized nor salient, at present. We find, first, that parties emphasize digitization more in regions belonging to the mid-tier in terms of their degree of digital modernization. Second, parties with more resources and greater ideological compatibility signal more commitment to digitization. Finally, electoral success of the Pirate Party as a credible challenger has been followed by greater emphasis on digitization, especially among the ideologically closest competitors.

Issue competition in five countries: snakes in a tunnel

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-112
Author(s):  
Emiliano Grossman ◽  
Isabelle Guinaudeau
Keyword(s):  
Party Competition ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
Electoral Campaigns ◽  
The Core ◽  
Party Manifestos ◽  
Issue Attention ◽  
Project Data ◽  
Issue Competition ◽  
Issue Content ◽  
The Way

What determines the issue content of party competition? The extant literature is torn between issue ownership theories predicting contrasted partisan profiles and more strategic views of electoral platforms emphasizing parties’ incentives to converge on the priorities with the greatest payoffs. This chapter argues that parties are like snakes in tunnels: this metaphor conceptualizes parties’ incentives to emphasize contrasted issues to stay true to their identity and past priorities (the ‘snake’ component) as well as constraints exerted on those efforts by political opponents and context (the ‘tunnel’). Parties need to accommodate emerging problems and their competitors’ strategies, resulting in considerable cross-partisan overlap. Utilizing analyses of Comparative Agendas Project data on issue attention in party manifestos, plus qualitative observations on single electoral campaigns and how parties ‘steal’ issues from each other, the chapter discusses the potential implications of our observations for the way elections influence policies, a topic at the core of the next chapter.

scholarly journals It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Crabtree ◽  
Matt Golder ◽  
Thomas Gschwend ◽  
Indridi H. Indridason
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Economic Voting ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Policy Position ◽  
Campaign Strategies ◽  
Party Manifestos ◽  
Electoral Campaign ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Positive Sentiment ◽  
New Perspective

What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspective on campaigns by focusing on the strategic use of emotive language. We argue that the level of positive sentiment parties adopt in their campaigns depends on their incumbency status, their policy position, and objective economic conditions. We test these claims with a novel dataset that captures the emotive language used in over 400 party manifestos across eight European countries. As predicted, we find that incumbent parties, particularly incumbent prime ministerial parties, use more positive sentiment than opposition parties. We find that ideologically moderate parties employ higher levels of positive sentiment than extremist parties. And we find that all parties exhibit lower levels of positive sentiment when the economy is performing poorly but that this negative effect is weaker for incumbents. Our analysis has important implications for research on campaign strategies and retrospective economic voting.

scholarly journals 2021 State Duma elections: blogs, social networks, and party Identity in the virtual space

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
David Iraklievich Gigauri
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Virtual Communication ◽  
Virtual Identity ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Electoral Campaign ◽  
Electoral Strategies

This article provides a comprehensive review of the modern Internet practices and virtual platforms in the sphere of politics aimed at promotion of different forms of voting technologies. The authors analyze public strategies of the political parties and candidates in the course of election campaign for the 2021 State Duma elections using the example of electoral constituency of St. Petersburg. The subject of this research is the use of digital means of communication that form virtual identity of the electorate during the 2021 State Duma elections. The object of this research is the representation of party ideologies and civic “symbolic politics”  on the Internet based on the example of the popular video platforms YouTube, Tik-Tok as well as the traditional social networks Vkontakte and Facebook. The goal lies in the analysis of interaction of public actors with the audience (followers) in the course of conducting the electoral campaign. The scientific novelty of this article is substantiated by systematic and structural analysis of the scarce elements of virtual identity of Internet users on the example of electoral strategies of representation. The conclusion is drawn on the growing trends of building the so-called symbolic politics “from the bottom” and emergence of numerous actors that create sociopolitical content in the virtual space. The research methodology employs the content analysis of virtual communication channels, relying on the classical theory of symbolic politics and political identity. This theory can be modified by separate aspects of digitalization of the political subfield, which the modern researchers consider as virtual reality.

Different emphases, same positions? The election manifestos of political parties in the EU multilevel electoral system compared

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 640-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Braun ◽  
Hermann Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Party Manifestos ◽  
Election Manifestos ◽  
Issue Emphasis ◽  
The Eu

Political parties increasingly operate at multiple political levels. Nevertheless, we do not yet know much about the consequences of these multilevel electoral systems (MLESs) on party behaviour. To fill this gap, we examine party manifestos for European Parliament (EP) elections and compare them with party manifestos for national elections. Using manifesto data and covering 15 European Union (EU) countries between 1979 and 2014, we focus on European issues and ask whether parties’ issue emphasis and the positions they take are the same in both kinds of documents and respectively at both levels of the MLES. We show that although parties put more emphasis on EU issues in EP than in national elections, they behave sincerely regarding their position towards the EU – these are very similar irrespective of the electoral context. As many elections take place in MLES environments, in Europe, in particular, but far beyond, this noteworthy finding is highly relevant for scholars of party competition in general and even more instructive for the so far fragmented literature exploring the implications of MLESs.

Direct observations of radiation-enhanced transformations in glass

1983 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 354-355
Author(s):  
J. F. DeNatale ◽  
D. G. Howitt
Keyword(s):  
Glass Matrix ◽  
Diffusion Mechanism ◽  
Bubble Formation ◽  
Silicate Glasses ◽  
Phase Decomposition ◽  
Direct Observations ◽  
Thin Foils ◽  
Oxygen Bubble ◽  
Electron Energy Loss ◽  
Kinetics Of

The electron irradiation of silicate glasses containing metal cations produces various types of phase separation and decomposition which includes oxygen bubble formation at intermediate temperatures figure I. The kinetics of bubble formation are too rapid to be accounted for by oxygen diffusion but the behavior is consistent with a cation diffusion mechanism if the amount of oxygen in the bubble is not significantly different from that in the same volume of silicate glass. The formation of oxygen bubbles is often accompanied by precipitation of crystalline phases and/or amorphous phase decomposition in the regions between the bubbles and the detection of differences in oxygen concentration between the bubble and matrix by electron energy loss spectroscopy cannot be discerned (figure 2) even when the bubble occupies the majority of the foil depth.The oxygen bubbles are stable, even in the thin foils, months after irradiation and if van der Waals behavior of the interior gas is assumed an oxygen pressure of about 4000 atmospheres must be sustained for a 100 bubble if the surface tension with the glass matrix is to balance against it at intermediate temperatures.

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