13:10 - 14:50
P3
Room: South Room 221
Panel Session 3
Milena Rapp - The multidimensional structure of policy preferences as an opportunity for issue entrepreneurs? Evidence for West European electorates from 1990-2017
Henrik Seeberg - Do political parties’ issue emphasis influence voters’ issue priorities?
Quentin Borgeat - Potential voters as a redefinition of the issue yield strategy
Sarah Wagner - Gotta Catch ‘em All – Electoral Success of Radical Left Position Blurring on European Integration
The multidimensional structure of policy preferences as an opportunity for issue entrepreneurs? Evidence for West European electorates from 1990-2017
P3-01
Presented by: Milena Rapp
Anna-Sophie Kurella, Milena Rapp
Mannheim Centre for European Social Research University of Mannheim
While there is large agreement within the literature that West European policy spaces are well described by two latent dimensions, one socio-economic and one cultural conflict line, there is mixed evidence on the content of the latter. Following Riker’s (1982) work on heresthetics, we analyze situations in which shifts in the content of the cultural dimension really matter for political competition, such that they change the voter configuration.
A multidimensional structure of voter preferences provides ‘windows of opportunities’ for issue entrepreneurs: If there are stable, well-structured dimensions which are uncorrelated with old conflict lines, there is room for parties to increase their vote share by strategically pushing the salience of that dimension. We formulate three conditions for such windows of opportunities: (1) an issue constitutes a conflict line, (2) the preferences on this conflict line are distinct from other salient conflict lines and (3) the conflict becomes politically relevant to voters.
Based on Data from the European Values Study (1990-2019), factor analyses show that economic and moral issue preferences are well-structured in the West European electorate, while preferences on other cultural issues, such as gender, immigration, and environment, do not always constitute societal conflicts. However, if we detect an additional cultural conflict line, it is always sufficiently distinct from the moral conflict line. Salience parameters based on spatial vote choice models show if these conflict lines qualify for being exploited by issue entrepreneurs. We detect significant different patterns for Nordic, South and Central European countries over time.