11:00 - 13:15
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Sarah Wagner
Discussant/s:
Paul Cornelius Bauer
Meeting Room J

Leo Azzollini
The Scar Effects of Unemployment on Electoral Participation: Withdrawal and Mobilisation across European Societies

Sarah Wagner
Ambiguity as Strategy of Radical Left Party Leaders in Western Europe

Giovanni Angioni
Populist Swing: How Italy’s politicians are exploiting inequality rhetoric in their communication strategy

Stefan Müller, Sven-Oliver Proksch
Causes and Electoral Effects of Nostalgic Rhetoric: A Cross-National Analysis of Party Communication

Nelson Santos
Explaining the politicization of EU: Parties and media agendas across time and space
Causes and Electoral Effects of Nostalgic Rhetoric: A Cross-National Analysis of Party Communication
Stefan Müller 1, Sven-Oliver Proksch 2
1 University College Dublin
2 University of Cologne

Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of party communication. Instead, most research concentrates on electoral pledges, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising given recent evidence that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. Survey experiments show that a nostalgic appeal increases conservative voters’ support for liberal political positions. In this paper, we apply these findings from political psychology to party communication and party competition, and study the causes and consequences of nostalgia in elections. We present a novel textual measure of partisan nostalgia, and validate this measure with hand-coded extracts of party manifestos and political speech. We first explore the variation in policy-specific nostalgia in 1,648 party manifestos from 272 elections across 24 European democracies between 1946 and 2018. Subsequently, we investigate if changes to nostalgic language impact voter attitudes on selected policy issues. Finally, we discuss the implications of our approach to the study of political parties, party competition, and elections.