Call for Papers. Position, Salience and Issue Linkage: Party Strategies in Multinational Democracies

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1 Call for Papers Workshop and subsequent Special Issue Position, Salience and Issue Linkage: Party Strategies in Multinational Democracies Convenors/editors: Anwen Elias (University of Aberystwyth) Edina Szöcsik (UNC Chapel Hill/VU Amsterdam) Christina Isabel Zuber (University of Lucerne/University of Zurich) Introduction Recent developments in the field of party politics reject the assumption that political spaces are onedimensional, propose that position and salience theories of party competition are complementary (rather than competing) approaches, and treat the structure of the political space itself as endogenous to parties' strategic choices (Basile, 2012; Meguid, 2008; Wagner, 2011; Rovny and Edwards, 2012; Rovny, 2013). To date, however, this literature has paid minimal attention to multidimensional party competition arising from the presence of an ethnonational (Szöcsik and Zuber, 2012) or territorial (Alonso, 2012) dimension alongside the more commonly analysed economic and social value dimensions which together constitute a left/right axis of party competition. At the same time, whilst scholars of territorial politics have documented the increasing salience and electoral/political implications of territorial issues in many places, scant attention has been paid to the consequences for established patterns of party competition. This workshop aims to link, and advance, these two bodies of work by examining patterns of party competition in multinational democracies. In contexts where the left-right and territorial dimensions have varying importance for state-wide parties on the one hand, and ethno-regionalist parties on the other hand, the theoretical and empirical focus is on the strategic choices of these actors in competition with each other. The workshop thus aims to answer the following two research questions: 1. What kinds of strategies are available to state-wide and ethno-regionalist parties in multidimensional competition? 2. When and why do parties choose which strategies? This Call for Papers provides a preliminary answer to the first question by presenting a set of possible strategies available to parties in multinational contexts. Individual contributions are invited to apply the set of strategies and explore the conditions under which they are chosen. 1

2 Theoretical framework: Position, salience and issue linkage In the following, we lay out the key assumptions of the theoretical framework that should be shared by all contributions. A1: Parties as strategic actors The basic assumption behind the framework is that political parties are rational, strategic actors. This may seem an obvious assumption to make, and indeed it is taken as granted in much of the party competition literature. Initial work on the conceptualisation of niche parties, however, has asserted that such actors (including ethno-regionalist parties) are fundamentally different from established mainstream parties because they only advance a very narrow set of issues and receive electoral support exclusively on this basis; niche parties cannot thus boost their electoral support by emphasising non-niche issues in their programmes (Meguid, 2008: 14-15). More recent work has challenged this proposition, and has provided substantial empirical evidence of the strategic capacity of ethno-regionalist parties (Gómez-Reino, 2006; Elias, 2009; Hepburn, 2009; Alonso, 2012). In this workshop, therefore, it is assumed that both state-wide and ethno-regionalist parties are strategic actors. This implies that they will choose those strategies that best further their goals which, following Strøm (1990), are three-fold: parties can prioritise vote-maximisation, policy impact, or office incumbency (although the pursuit of one goal may undermine another goal, and hence there are trade-offs involved that parties often cannot avoid). In this regard, even pure niche party behaviour can also be strategic, as parties may consider it in their best interest electorally to focus exclusively on one niche issue in order to not divide their voters (Rovny, 2013). A2: Party strategies: position, salience and issue linkage Which strategies are available to parties seeking to advance their goals? In the classical spatial model of party competition (Downs, 1957), voter preferences are exogenous and parties merely have to choose a position on - in the standard model - a single dimension of competition. Whereas this view of exogenous voter preferences and party competition as mere positioning has long been challenged by the saliency model of party competition (Budge and Farlie, 1983; Budge et al., 1987), it is only recently that scholars have begun to link the formerly competing theoretical accounts, drawing attention to the fact that at any given point in time, parties position themselves on already defined, existing dimensions of competition, but may also choose to alter the dimensionality of the space itself in the long run, by emphasising certain issues over others and by linking issues associated with certain dimensions in new ways. Parties thereby choose not only which dimensions to compete on (positioning), but also how much emphasis they place on each dimension (salience) and how they define these dimensions in terms of the 'issue package' (Alonso, 2012: 28) they put together (issue linkage). In short, parties have access to a complex strategic tool box in pursuit of their policy, office and vote goals and this tool box consists of position, salience and issue linkage. A3: Dimensionality of the policy space: economic and territorial dimension In principle, the political space is n-dimensional once we allow for the capacity of parties to compete not only within, but also about the definition of the political space that can change its structure as a result of strategic interaction between political parties. For ease of presentation of parties' strategies, the framework assumes a 2-dimensional space, consisting of an economic leftright and an ethno-national/territorial dimension. This assumption acknowledges that left-right may have a different meaning in different contexts and be variably composed of an economic and a noneconomic/social value/cultural component, but that the economic dimension is cross-contextually meaningful and is also the most important dimension of competition in contemporary democracies 2

3 (Wagner, 2011). We do, however, not a priori preclude individual contributions from exploring how these dimensions are defined and manifest themselves in each context, or analysing more than two dimensions if relevant to understanding party strategies in a given context. A4: Actors: Two types of parties: state-wide and ethno-regionalist parties In multinational contexts, we assume that there will be two main types of parties engaged in competition with each other: state-wide/non-ethnic/major/mainstream parties and ethnic/ethnic minority/regionalist/ethno-regionalist/autonomist/minority nationalist parties. The exact terminology used to refer to these parties may differ depending on the meaning of the label in a given context and the definition preferred by contributors. Of most importance is that contributions should deal with one type of party for which the primary dimension of competition is the economic dimension and one type of party for which the primary dimension of competition is the territorial/ethno-national dimension. Party strategies in multinational democracies Following these assumptions, we can now more clearly lay out the strategies that are available to both mainstream and ethno-regionalist parties in competition. Assuming a two-dimensional space, we suggest a repertoire of four strategies: Firstly, parties may position themselves on the dimension they are most invested in and that is associated with their core issues; at the same time they dismiss the dimension that is of secondary importance to them. We refer to this as the core dimension strategy in Figure 1. For mainstream parties, this would mean exclusive positioning on the economic dimension, whilst for ethnoregionalist parties this would involve exclusive positioning on the territorial dimension. In the case of the latter, this would resemble the niche party behaviour expected by Meguid (2008). In particular, small ethnic minority parties may resort to this strategy. For example, two Hungarian minority parties in Serbia (The Democratic Community of Vojvodina Hungarians and the Movement of Hungarian Hope) demand territorial autonomy for the Hungarian minority in Northern Vojvodina (thereby clearly positioning themselves on the ethno-national/territorial dimension), but consider other issues such as economic development to be beyond the scope of what a Hungarian minority party can and should cover in its programme (Zuber 2012). Figure 1. The core dimension strategy: position on dimension 1 and dismissing dimension 2; Dimension 1 salient, dimension 2 not salient 3

4 Secondly, rather than completely dismissing or ignoring issues associated with the secondary (and hence less important) dimension, parties may deliberately blur their position on this axis in order to not divide the voters they seek to attract through an explicit and clear position on the first dimension (referred to as a blurring strategy in Figure 2). Blurring here means adopting contradictory, vague or ambiguous positions instead of a clear ideological stance (Rovny 2013: 5). Rovny (2013) shows that this strategy is particularly attractive for radical right parties. They blur their position on the economic dimension so that all voters who share their nationalistic, anti-cosmopolitan, and antiimmigrant values but have heterogeneous economic preferences can be simultaneously addressed. Figure 2. The blurring strategy: position on dimension 1 and blurring on dimension 2; Dimension 1 more salient than dimension 2 Thirdly, parties may decide to take clear, distinguishable stances on issues that belong to both dimensions. Following Alonso (2012: 36) we refer to this strategy as the diversification strategy, as shown in Figure 3 below. Massetti (2009) provides a host of examples for this strategy when he classifies the positions of ethno-regionalist parties in a two-dimensional space. The classification shows that ethno-regionalist parties in Western Europe combine their pro-autonomy stances on the territorial dimension with centre, left or right stances on the economic dimension. For state-wide parties, the implication is that they assume positions on both the left-right and territorial dimensions simultaneously. Figure 3. The diversification strategy: position on dimension 1 and 2 without a linkage between them; Both dimension 1 and dimension 2 salient Finally, parties may seek to link issues belonging to the second dimension to their preferred primary dimension (Rovny and Edwards, 2012). The linking strategy is illustrated in Figure 4. An empirical implication of this strategy is that parties will try to frame issues in terms of the first dimension (Basile, 2012). State-wide parties, for example, may frame decentralisation in economic terms, thereby seeking to link it to the economic dimension of competition. In contrast, ethnoregionalist 4

5 parties will frame the economic dimension in terms of a national identity discourse, thereby seeking to link it to the ethnonational dimension of competition. A similar logic is suggested in Rabushka and Shepsle's (1972) famous ethnic outbidding model of party competition in plural societies that assumes that ethnic parties will interpret all issues in communal/ethnic terms, once the ethnic dimension becomes salient. Consequently, they model competition between ethnic parties in a onedimensional space. Figure 4: The linking strategy: position on dimension 1 linked with position on dimension 2; Both dimension 1 and dimension 2 salient Contributions As stated in the introduction, the workshop aims to answer the following two research questions: 1. What kinds of strategies are available to state-wide and ethno-regionalist parties in multidimensional competition? 2. When and why do parties choose which strategies? The workshop organizers will contribute to the Special Issue by providing a theoretical paper identifying the strategies available to mainstream and ethno-regionalist parties. We ask contributors to use our theoretical framework and to investigate the determinants of the strategic choices made by, and the strategic interaction between, mainstream and ethno-regionalist parties. Some of the questions that contributions may address include the following (although these are certainly not exhaustive): Under which conditions do ethno-regionalist parties emphasize also economic issues in competition? When and why do mainstream parties blur their position on the territorial dimension? To what extent does interaction between mainstream and ethno-regional parties shape the structure of political competition in multinational states? How do parties in multi-national states link their positions on different dimensions? How are these strategic choices affected by multi-level competition? We encourage contributors to engage with and go beyond existing explanations of parties' strategic choices (such as Meguid's (2008) explanation of why mainstream parties begin to address territorial issues, for example). Empirical cases from different political systems and regions are encouraged. Quantitative and qualitative studies are equally welcome. Importantly, however, all contributions should share the assumptions listed above and be willing to explore the strategies outlined in this call for papers to guarantee a coherent publication that rests on a common conceptual foundation in the aftermath of the workshop. 5

6 Application and time schedule If you would like to participate, please send us an abstract of around 500 words by June 4 (awe@aber.ac.uk, eszoecsik@gmail.com, mail@christinazuber.com). We aim to select 6 to 8 contributions and will notify people by June 14. Please see the time schedule for the project below: 4 June 2013 Deadline for paper proposals 14 June 2013 Selection and notification of participants 30 November 2013 Deadline for sending papers for the workshop December 2013 Workshop in Aberystwyth, UK 14 December February 2014 Revise papers according to workshop comments 20 February 2014 Deadline for sending revised versions of the papers 15 March 2014 Editors send papers back to contributors, suggesting final revisions 15 April 2014 Submit papers to journal for a Special Issue 6

7 References Alonso, S. (2012) Challenging the State: Devolution and the Battle for Partisan Credibility. Oxford: OUP. Basile, L. (2012) Party Competition on the Issue of Decentralisation. Sharp Conflict or Shared Consensus? Empirical Evidences from the Italian Case ( ). Paper presented at the biennial conference of the PSA Territorial Politics Specialist Group, September, Brussels. Budge, I. and Farlie, D.J. (1983) Explaining and Predicting Elections: Issue Effects and Party Strategies in Twenty-Three Democracies. London: Allen and Unwin. Budge, I., Robertson, D. and Hearl, D. (eds) (1987) Ideology, Strategy and Party Choice. Spatial Analyses of Post-War Election Programmes in 19 Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Downs, Anthony (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper Collins. Elias, A. (2009) 'From marginality to opposition to government: Mapping the ideological evolution of Plaid Cymru and the Bloque Nacionalista Galego', Regional and Federal Studies, 19(4/5), Hepburn, E. (2009), 'Introduction: Re-conceptualizing sub-state mobilization, Regional & Federal Studies, 19(4/5), Gómez-Reino, M. (2006) The Bloque Nacionalista Galego: from political outcast to success, in L. De Winter, M. Gómez-Reino and P. Lynch (eds) Autonomist Parties in Europe Volume I, Barcelona: ICPS, Massetti, E. (2009) Explaining Regionalist Party Positioning in a Multi-dimensional Ideological Space: A Framework for Analysis, Regional and Federal Studies 19(4/5), Meguid, B. (2008) Party Competition Between Unequals: Strategies and Electoral Fortunes in Western Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rabushka, A. & Shepsle, K.A. (1972). Politics in plural societies: a theory of democratic instability. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company. Rovny, J. (2013) 'Where do radical right parties stand? Position blurring in multidimensional competition', European Political Science Review, 5 (1), Rovny, J. and Edwards, E. (2012), 'Struggle over dimensionality: Party competition in Western and Eastern Europe', East European Politics and Societies, 26(1), Szöcsik, E. and Zuber, C. (2012) 'EPAC a new dataset on ethnonationalism in party competition in 22 European democracies', Party Politics, published online 1 November Strøm, K. (1990) 'A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties', American Journal of Political Science 34(2), Wagner, M. (2011) 'Defining and measuring niche parties', Party Politics, published online 18 May Zuber, C.I., (2012). 'Ethnic party competition beyond the segmented market', Nationalities Papers, 40(6),