17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Lawrence Ezrow
Discussant/s:
Christian Breunig
Meeting Room K

Franziska Quoß, Lukas Rudolph, Thomas Däubler
How do policy positions of candidates affect vote choice under OLPR? Survey-experimental evidence using real candidates from Switzerland

Matthias Avina
Can the Accommodation Strategy be Effective? An Examination of Mainstream Party Shifts in Europe

Diane Bolet, Fergus Green
Is the Green New Deal a vote-winner? Evidence from the effect of Spain’s transición ecológica policy on national election results

Lawrence Ezrow, Werner Krause
Voter Turnout and Party Responsiveness
Can the Accommodation Strategy be Effective? An Examination of Mainstream Party Shifts in Europe
Matthias Avina
University of Pittsburgh

This paper aims to contribute to recent literature exploring whether the accommodation strategy is beneficial for mainstream political parties. The main theoretical proposition of the paper is that the effectiveness of the accommodation strategy is conditional on where in the policy space a mainstream party shifts to. In addition, I distinguish between two different types of shift. The first is when the mainstream party shifts to a position that is more ideologically extreme than the niche party, or an ‘over shift.’ The second is when the mainstream party shifts to a position that is less ideologically extreme than the niche party, or an ‘under shift.’ To test my argument, I analyze 64 mainstream political parties in 15 European countries from 1981-2018. My results indicate that over shifting increases mainstream party vote share but has no effect on niche party vote share, and under shifting has no effect on either mainstream party vote share nor niche party vote share. My findings have implications for how mainstream parties should compete with their niche party rivals.