Controlling the Electoral Marketplace

How Established Parties Ward Off Competition

Joost van Spanje

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319582016
• eBook ISBN: 9783319582023
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book studies how established political parties react to the far left and far right parties that have surged in many democracies worldwide. While some of the extremist parties are being imitated in response, established parties can also choose to systematically rule out all political cooperation with them, imposing a cordon sanitaire. A third response by established parties combines these two reactions. How common are these three responses, and how do they affect far left and far right parties' electoral support? This book addresses these questions by analyzing experimental and non-experimental data from fifteen European countries since 1944. In doing so, it informs scientific and public debates about challenges to established parties, how these parties deal with these challenges, and what the consequences are for the quality of democracy in contemporary democratic societies.

© The Author(s) 2018

Joost van SpanjeControlling the Electoral MarketplacePolitical Campaigning and Communicationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58202-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Joost van Spanje¹

(1)

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Joost van Spanje

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

One of the world’s most widely known political parties is Front national (FN) in France. In 2007, something remarkable happened to this party. FN’s vote share, which had been well over 10% at each national election since 1993, fell to 4%. What caused this sudden decline? This, we claim, was largely due to established parties’ behaviour. It is an example of what we call the Parroting the Pariah Effect. In this book, we argue and demonstrate empirically that established parties can trigger this effect by combining two specific reactions to a particular other party. First, treating that party as a pariah—i.e., systematically boycotting it. Second, parroting the party—i.e., co-opting its policies. Through boycotting a party while co-opting its key policy issue positions, established parties can damage that party electorally. This way, established parties control the electoral marketplace.

By 2007 FN had been treated as a pariah for many years. The established French parties’ decision to put the party in “republican quarantine” dates back to the 1980s (e.g., Mayer 2013). Since 1990 this agreement has been quite strictly enforced. Several centre-right regional leaders were even banished from their party because they had made deals with FN. On several occasions in the 1990s, the main parties repeated their refusal to cooperate with the party (e.g., Ivaldi 2007). Notwithstanding the republican quarantine FN flourished—except in the 2007 general election. In that election, the party lost many votes to the main centre-right party, whose leader, Nicolas Sarkozy , had policy stances similar to FN (Mayer 2007). In this study, we show that this Parroting the Pariah Effect has occurred in many other times and places as well, allowing established parties to ward off competition.

Indeed, the strategy is quite common. In this book, we identify 39 occasions in post-war Western Europe on which a country’s established parties have reacted in this way to a particular other party. Related to this, the strategy appears to be strikingly effective in the electoral arena. In 21 out of 39 cases, that party lost a quarter of its vote share or more. These cases include not only FN in France in 2007 but also Vlaams Belang (VB) in Flanders in 2010 as well as the Communist Parties of Switzerland in 1951 and Germany in 1953.

Despite its prevalence and effectiveness, the strategy has gone largely unnoticed in the relevant academic literature. This may be due to the lack of scholarly interest in established actors’ reactions to challenger parties until a dozen years ago (Eatwell and Mudde 2004; Van Spanje and Van der Brug 2004). Another reason might be that the Parroting the Pariah Effect involves two types of reaction that are seldom studied in concert : Issue-based responses (such as parroting a party) revolve around party competition in terms of policy issue appeals, whereas non-issue-based reactions (such as treating a party as a pariah) concern competition in terms of other appeals. Moreover, the literature has typically focused on established parties’ issue-based reactions only. The fact that non-issue-based responses, such as treating it as a pariah, have rarely been investigated is perhaps surprising, because they occur frequently, as we will see.

This study reinforces an existing trend toward taking into account the establishment’s reactions to anti-immigration parties (Art 2011; Eatwell and Mudde 2004; Ivaldi 2007; Minkenberg 2006; Van Spanje and Van der Brug 2004, 2007, 2009). It focuses on an issue-based and a non-issue-based response, and their interaction. That interaction, the Parroting the Pariah Effect, is where our main focus lies—although we acknowledge the wide variety of established parties’ responses to other parties. We concentrate on the consequences that this particular reaction has for the electoral performance of these other parties.

Which are these ‘other parties’ that established parties react to? Established parties typically respond to the emergence of parties that the political science literature often refers to as “anti-political-establishment parties” (Schedler 1996) or “niche parties” (Meguid 2005). These two party labels have in common that they mainly include communist and anti-immigration parties (e.g., Abedi 2004; Ezrow 2008). ¹ We follow this literature yet prefer to call these parties ‘challengers.’ This is because these parties are not necessarily anti-political-establishment, niche or single-issue (e.g., Mitra 1988; Mudde 1999) but they undeniably pose a challenge to the established parties in many ways. We define a challenger party as challenging the political status quo in ways that are widely considered beyond the pale. A challenger may be tiny but it may also attract many voters, receiving a substantial minority of the vote—as we will see. Obviously, challenger parties likely face strong reactions from other political actors. The larger the shares of the electorate of that time and place that feel the challenger’s issue policy positions and/or campaign style are out of bounds, the smaller the other political actors’ electoral risks of ostracising that party (cf. Van Spanje 2010). In this book, we concentrate on established parties’ responses to the existence of challenger parties in their party system.

In so doing we enhance the relevant literature in four respects. First, existing analytical frameworks, most importantly spatial voting theory, revolve around issue-based established party reactions to a challenger party, such as adopting its policies. We refine spatial voting models to encompass a non-issue-based response with which parroting can be combined. This non-issue-based response is to treat the party as a pariah. Second, we empirically test propositions derived from this refined framework. In doing so, we show that two core hypotheses from the literature, the Parrot Hypothesis and the Pariah Hypothesis, do not hold up. Only by combining the two behaviours do we arrive at a hypothesis—the Parroting the Pariah Hypothesis—that we actually find evidence for. Third, in this book we extend existing analyses to include an often-ignored challenger party subset, Cold War communists. These parties, many of which were treated as pariahs, have typically been excluded from studies of challenger parties. ² Fourth, compared to earlier work we expand the empirical analysis by analysing more data points. We take into account more parties as well as a longer time period, which provides us with more statistical leverage. The theoretical underpinnings, datasets, and analyses are all new .

The Parroting the Pariah Effect is also important beyond its scientific relevance. First, many challenger parties are controversial, accused of political extremism or violence. Second, parroting them is equally controversial, in so far as the policies that these parties advocate are at odds with core legal or democratic principles. Third, treating parties as pariahs is controversial as well. It may keep politicians from government participation, and from functioning effectively in bodies to which they were elected. It, therefore, implies a (justified or unjustified) restriction of political competition (cf. Fennema and Maussen 2000)—and such competition is widely considered a necessary condition for democracy (e.g., Dahl 1971). This calls for maximally informed decisions on whether or not to treat a specific party as a pariah, which requires knowledge about the electoral effects of such decisions. The findings reported in this book may inform public debates about how democratic systems should deal with an unsavoury party—and with unsavoury behaviour by established parties in response to such a party.

The Parrot Hypothesis

In all democracies across the world, challenger parties emerge every now and then. How do established parties react ? Although these parties respond in various ways, academic studies have mainly focused on their issue-based reactions. The dominant theory here is Spatial Theory of Electoral Competition (Downs 1957). This comes in two versions, Proximity Theory of Electoral Competition (e.g., Enelow and Hinich 1990) and Directional Theory of Electoral Competition (Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989). Proximity Theory proposes that voters and parties are lined up along some axis of political contestation. Along that axis, parties can position themselves either closer to or farther away from another party. When parties position themselves closer to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Parrot Parties: Established Parties’ Co-optation of Other Parties’ Policy Proposals
• 3. Pariah Parties: Established Parties’ Systematic Boycotting of Other Parties
• 4. The Parroting the Pariah Effect: Theoretical Framework
• 5. The Parroting the Pariah Effect: Aggregate-Level Evidence
• 6. The Parroting the Pariah Effect: Individual-Level Evidence
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter