National executives in Western democracies are not unilateral deciders: they lead parties with lo... more National executives in Western democracies are not unilateral deciders: they lead parties with long-term policy priorities and manage challenging multi-party coalitions. Leaders of donor states use foreign aid to pursue their goals, including enacting policy output consistent with party ideology or bargaining the ability to control aid policy away to a coalition partner. Because coalition governments empower partisan actors with distinct preferences and preferences for international engagement condition the effect of left-right ideology, we predict left-pro-internationalist governments prefer aiding the neediest recipients while right-internationalists emphasize trade opportunities. In particular, we find that the party preferences of the minister directly responsible for foreign aid, the Development Minister, predicts aid allocations. Our analysis contributes to a theory of foreign policy change as the outcome of complex domestic bargaining and negotiations.
Historical policy reputations influence voters’ perceptions of parties’ electoral campaigns. In t... more Historical policy reputations influence voters’ perceptions of parties’ electoral campaigns. In the face of their recent experiences in office, government parties’ thoughtfully crafted electoral messages likely compete for voters’ attention with a wealth of broader information about the government’s policy activities and priorities. For their message to be heard, incumbent parties must offer a focused policy message that draws voters’ attention to the issues they most prioritize. Considering the issue scope of parties’ electoral messages, I hypothesize that incumbency status determines the effect issue appeals have on the votes parties receive. Opposition parties may profit from including more issues, but incumbent parties’ policy reputations limit the potential benefits from diverse appeals. Using evidence from 25 OECD countries over a 60 year period, I find that parties’ incumbent status conditions the effect of issue diversity on parties’ aggregate electoral success. Voters reward incumbents for focusing their platforms, but reward opposition parties for diverse appeals. The results for incumbent parties are robust to extensive sensitivity analyses. The theory and evidence broadly suggest that incumbent parties with more focused policy messages can, at least partially, overcome the weight of their past policy reputations.
Intra-party groups influence parties’ policy priorities. However, scholars have yet to map the pa... more Intra-party groups influence parties’ policy priorities. However, scholars have yet to map the pathways with the greatest impact. We argue that party congresses serve as venues for decision-making, allowing speeches and motions to support differing priorities. Considering parties’ internal process, we propose that deliberations and alternate motions independently affect resulting policy statements. We examine this perspective focusing on meetings of the French Socialist Party. We use Structural Topic Models to analyze the issues included in 74 motions, 1439 speeches and 9 manifestos from congresses held between 1969 and 2015 to evaluate whether factional motions or individual speeches better reflect the content of manifestos and to assess the internal agenda-setting process. Results suggest that motions better predict the content of parties’ manifestos. However, when focusing solely on majority faction, we find that both motions and speeches predict manifestos’ contents. This supports a theory of intra-party decision-making and factional dominance.
Leaders and MPs serve as the party’s public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers i... more Leaders and MPs serve as the party’s public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers interpret policy statements. We hypothesize that media cover and voters understand policy messages through the lens of prominent party members’ characteristics. Easy-to-observe descriptive traits, such as gender or ethnicity, cue parties’ policy priorities. Media are more likely to emphasize party messages on issues historically related to these groups when they are visible in the party’s public image. We test hypotheses from our theory using data on prominent party members’ descriptive characteristics, policy statements, and media coverage of statements from the European Election Studies. Data from the 1999, 2004 and 2009 European elections evidence support for our theory. Parties with more female representatives signal stronger emphasis on gendered issues in media reports. The results hold implications for our understanding of the ways in which parties deliver and voters receive campaign messages. This research offers an explanation for voters’ limited knowledge of parties’ policy positions; media reinforce existing gender stereotypes and voters’ pre-dispositions by selectively reporting policy statements.
Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that p... more Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, we present a detailed investigation of parties' effect on agenda stability in six advanced industrial democracies over time. We consider parties as dynamic organizations by arguing that parties' organizational characteristics and goals interact with their electoral context to determine their impact on policy attention. The results show that parties' influence on the policy agenda depends on economic conditions, the type of government, the government's seat share, and the number of parties in the governing cabinet, particularly following a major transition in government.
Please cite: Greene, Zachary. "Competing on the Issues: How experience in government and economic... more Please cite: Greene, Zachary. "Competing on the Issues: How experience in government and economic conditions influence the scope of parties' policy message." Party Politics (forthcoming). Parties campaign on a range of topics to attract diverse support. Little research, however, looks at why parties narrow or expand the scope of their campaign or shift attention across issues. Focusing only on a single dimension or topic may lead scholars to miss-estimate the magnitude of the effect of parties' experiences in government or economic context. I propose that electoral conditions influence the scope of parties' manifestos. I test hypotheses using a measure of issue diversity: the Effective Number of Manifesto Issues (ENMI). Based on analysis of 1662 manifestos in 24 OECD countries from 1951 to 2010, the results support the theory. Government parties have higher ENMI. Opposition parties and governments expecting a reward for the economy limit their issue appeals. Tests of the underlying mechanism using data on issue dimensions
Political parties matter for government outcomes.Despite this general finding for political scien... more Political parties matter for government outcomes.Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the
common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect
parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’
organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.
British Journal of Political Science (Forthcoming)
Theories often explain intra-party competition based on electoral conditions and intra-party rule... more Theories often explain intra-party competition based on electoral conditions and intra-party rules. We further open this black box by considering intra-party statements of preferences. In particular, we predict that intra-party preference heterogeneity increases after electoral losses, but candidates deviating from the party's median receive fewer intra-party votes. Party members grant candidates greater leeway to accommodate competing policy demands when in government. We test our hypotheses with a new database of party congress speeches from Germany and France and use automated text classification to estimate speakers' relative preferences. The results demonstrate that speeches at party meetings provide valuable insights into actors' preferences and intra-party politics. We find evidence of a complex relationship between governing context, the economy and intra-party disagreement.
Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. D... more Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. Despite the attention paid to its causes and consequences, recent research has largely set aside questions about professionalism's conceptualization and operationalization. Usually measuring it as an aggregate index, scholars theoretically and empirically treat professionalism as a unidimensional concept. In this paper, we argue that exclusive use of aggregate indices can limit state politics research. Using a new dataset with almost 40 years of data on state legislative resources, salary and session length, we reconsider the validity of using an index to study professionalism across the states. We evaluate the internal consistency of professionalism components over time, the relationship between components and the Squire Index , and the degree to which professionalism components are unidimensional using classical multidimensional scaling (MDS). We find enough commonality and enough variation between professionalism components to support a range of measurement strategies like the use of unidimensional indices (such as the Squire Index), disaggregating the components and analyzing their effects individually, or formulating multidimensional measures. Scholars should take care to choose the appropriate measure of the concept that best fits the causal relationships under examination.
We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporat... more We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporating a novel theory of strategic changes in the issues covered in party manifestos. We argue that parties use junior ministerial appointments to oversee their coalition partners on portfolios that correspond to issues emphasized by the parties' activists when the coalition partner's preferences deviate from the party's. The findings, based on a data set of more than 2800 party portfolio dyads in ten countries, show significant support for these expectations. We find that party leaders that successfully negotiate for junior ministers to particular portfolios are most concerned about checking ideologically contentious coalition partners in areas of concern to activists. The results also illustrate the usefulness of our dyadic approach for the study of junior minister allocation.
Parties craft their campaign messages to mobilize diverse constituencies. Theories of election st... more Parties craft their campaign messages to mobilize diverse constituencies. Theories of election strategy find that parties choose their tactics dependent on their electoral context. However, analyses on the electoral consequences of party competition have only begun to explore the dependency between context and tactic. Building on theories of party competition, I predict that the broad electoral context, such as incumbent status or the state of the economy, decides the effect of electoral tactics on the votes parties receive. Parties benefit from branching out to a wider range of issues when they are in the opposition. Instead, government parties have less control of their reputation. Economic conditions limit the incumbent's ability to selectively construct its policy message. However, these parties profit from pairing down their policy appeals when the economy grows. Using evidence from the Comparative Manifestos Project for 24 OECD countries over a 60 year period, I find that conditioning party campaign messages on their economic environment demonstrates a clear and strong electoral impact. Individual level evidence from 12 OECD countries in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems adds evidence consistent with the underlying mechanism. Governing parties earn a reward for focusing their platforms when the economy grows more than the economy alone would predict. The results from this analysis complement a growing literature on the effect of parties' election tactics and help explain evidence that voters only respond to parties' election strategies.
Issue salience and ideological disagreement often predict coalition government behavior. However,... more Issue salience and ideological disagreement often predict coalition government behavior. However, prominent research on portfolio allocation has yet to fully specify the complex relationship between issue salience, disagreement and coalition negotiations. We propose that the relative salience of issues and disagreement within the coalition both moderate the effect of issue salience on portfolio allocation. Using data drawn from the Parliamentary Democracy Data Archive, we find compelling evidence for our theory that links party manifestos to portfolio allocation. Furthermore, we find evidence that the effect of salience is mitigated by the extent of disagreement between coalition parties.
The Effective Number of Parties measure has had a pronounced influence on political science resea... more The Effective Number of Parties measure has had a pronounced influence on political science research. This measure, based on an economic measure of market concentration (the Herfindahl index), calculates the probability that two parties selected at random represent the same type. However, measures of diversity using this index are insensitive to rare categories (such as small parties) leading to the implication that studies may under predict the degree of variability or instability in party systems. Importantly, we argue that this measure may bias analyses towards finding stability. To adjust for this insensitivity, we propose an easy to calculate measure of diversity based on Shannon's H, a measure from information science with recent applications to the study of public policy and agenda-setting. Through simulations, real world examples and a replication of Clark and Golder's (2006) reanalysis of Duverger's Law we show that a measure of the effective number of parties calculated from Shannon's H better reflects the diversity of parties within a system. Overall, our findings demonstrate that studies interested in the number and relative strength of parties in a system should use a measure of diversity based on Shannon's H rather than a Herfindahl index.
Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of ... more Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of parties’ competencies in response to parties’ experiences in government. We add that parties’ evaluations depend on their success in fostering a cohesive image by managing diverse intra-party interests. We predict that voters’ impressions of parties’ internal discord negatively affect their assessments of parties’ policy competencies. Furthermore, voters’ choice of parties will also depend on perceptions of the parties’ coherence and competence. Using individual-level analysis of party evaluations in Germany, we test predictions from our theory using a new survey that contains questions on parties’ policy coherence and issue competence. The results hold important implications for the study of intra-party politics, issue competition and vote choice.
Issue salience and diversity direct a range of outcomes such as voting behavior and public policy... more Issue salience and diversity direct a range of outcomes such as voting behavior and public policy. Studies, however, have yet to fully integrate theoretical or empirical expectations for the effect of issue salience on coalition stability. By focusing on the mechanism linking parties’ preferences to policy-making, I propose that parties with more diverse platforms provide coalitions greater room to negotiate, whereas parties focusing on a small number of issues exacerbate ideological tensions. Issue diversity becomes important once parties exhaust opportunities to make the initial, easy policy compromises. Using evidence from 299 coalitions in 24 European countries, I find that issue diversity in parties’ platforms moderates the effect of disagreement. Using a non-proportional hazard analysis, I find that the effect of issue diversity varies over the coalition’s lifecycle. Governments with parties willing to negotiate over a larger range of issues decrease the risk that disagreements will result in coalition termination.
Scotland's future within the EU played a prominent role in the 2014 independence referendum. The ... more Scotland's future within the EU played a prominent role in the 2014 independence referendum. The story goes that latent supporters of independence voted to stay within the UK to maintain EU access. Defeated, Scottish leaders declared the referendum a once-in-a-lifetime event only repeated if conditions substantially changed. With the UK now facing a chaotic exit from the EU, the conditions seem ripe for a renewed independence campaign. Scots voted overwhelmingly to " Remain " within the EU, but the story is more complex. We argue that those hoping for a second independence referendum saw Brexit as an opportunity to create the conditions that would spur a second referendum. Using panel data from the British Election Study, we examine whether Scottish voters voted tactically to leave the EU. We argue that SNP voters were likely to interpret statements on the conditions for a second independence referendum as an implicit signal to vote " Leave ". The results have important implications for the role of referendums in representative democracy, strategic voting, and the importance of intra-party division on individual vote choices.
National executives in Western democracies are not unilateral deciders: they lead parties with lo... more National executives in Western democracies are not unilateral deciders: they lead parties with long-term policy priorities and manage challenging multi-party coalitions. Leaders of donor states use foreign aid to pursue their goals, including enacting policy output consistent with party ideology or bargaining the ability to control aid policy away to a coalition partner. Because coalition governments empower partisan actors with distinct preferences and preferences for international engagement condition the effect of left-right ideology, we predict left-pro-internationalist governments prefer aiding the neediest recipients while right-internationalists emphasize trade opportunities. In particular, we find that the party preferences of the minister directly responsible for foreign aid, the Development Minister, predicts aid allocations. Our analysis contributes to a theory of foreign policy change as the outcome of complex domestic bargaining and negotiations.
Historical policy reputations influence voters’ perceptions of parties’ electoral campaigns. In t... more Historical policy reputations influence voters’ perceptions of parties’ electoral campaigns. In the face of their recent experiences in office, government parties’ thoughtfully crafted electoral messages likely compete for voters’ attention with a wealth of broader information about the government’s policy activities and priorities. For their message to be heard, incumbent parties must offer a focused policy message that draws voters’ attention to the issues they most prioritize. Considering the issue scope of parties’ electoral messages, I hypothesize that incumbency status determines the effect issue appeals have on the votes parties receive. Opposition parties may profit from including more issues, but incumbent parties’ policy reputations limit the potential benefits from diverse appeals. Using evidence from 25 OECD countries over a 60 year period, I find that parties’ incumbent status conditions the effect of issue diversity on parties’ aggregate electoral success. Voters reward incumbents for focusing their platforms, but reward opposition parties for diverse appeals. The results for incumbent parties are robust to extensive sensitivity analyses. The theory and evidence broadly suggest that incumbent parties with more focused policy messages can, at least partially, overcome the weight of their past policy reputations.
Intra-party groups influence parties’ policy priorities. However, scholars have yet to map the pa... more Intra-party groups influence parties’ policy priorities. However, scholars have yet to map the pathways with the greatest impact. We argue that party congresses serve as venues for decision-making, allowing speeches and motions to support differing priorities. Considering parties’ internal process, we propose that deliberations and alternate motions independently affect resulting policy statements. We examine this perspective focusing on meetings of the French Socialist Party. We use Structural Topic Models to analyze the issues included in 74 motions, 1439 speeches and 9 manifestos from congresses held between 1969 and 2015 to evaluate whether factional motions or individual speeches better reflect the content of manifestos and to assess the internal agenda-setting process. Results suggest that motions better predict the content of parties’ manifestos. However, when focusing solely on majority faction, we find that both motions and speeches predict manifestos’ contents. This supports a theory of intra-party decision-making and factional dominance.
Leaders and MPs serve as the party’s public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers i... more Leaders and MPs serve as the party’s public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers interpret policy statements. We hypothesize that media cover and voters understand policy messages through the lens of prominent party members’ characteristics. Easy-to-observe descriptive traits, such as gender or ethnicity, cue parties’ policy priorities. Media are more likely to emphasize party messages on issues historically related to these groups when they are visible in the party’s public image. We test hypotheses from our theory using data on prominent party members’ descriptive characteristics, policy statements, and media coverage of statements from the European Election Studies. Data from the 1999, 2004 and 2009 European elections evidence support for our theory. Parties with more female representatives signal stronger emphasis on gendered issues in media reports. The results hold implications for our understanding of the ways in which parties deliver and voters receive campaign messages. This research offers an explanation for voters’ limited knowledge of parties’ policy positions; media reinforce existing gender stereotypes and voters’ pre-dispositions by selectively reporting policy statements.
Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that p... more Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, we present a detailed investigation of parties' effect on agenda stability in six advanced industrial democracies over time. We consider parties as dynamic organizations by arguing that parties' organizational characteristics and goals interact with their electoral context to determine their impact on policy attention. The results show that parties' influence on the policy agenda depends on economic conditions, the type of government, the government's seat share, and the number of parties in the governing cabinet, particularly following a major transition in government.
Please cite: Greene, Zachary. "Competing on the Issues: How experience in government and economic... more Please cite: Greene, Zachary. "Competing on the Issues: How experience in government and economic conditions influence the scope of parties' policy message." Party Politics (forthcoming). Parties campaign on a range of topics to attract diverse support. Little research, however, looks at why parties narrow or expand the scope of their campaign or shift attention across issues. Focusing only on a single dimension or topic may lead scholars to miss-estimate the magnitude of the effect of parties' experiences in government or economic context. I propose that electoral conditions influence the scope of parties' manifestos. I test hypotheses using a measure of issue diversity: the Effective Number of Manifesto Issues (ENMI). Based on analysis of 1662 manifestos in 24 OECD countries from 1951 to 2010, the results support the theory. Government parties have higher ENMI. Opposition parties and governments expecting a reward for the economy limit their issue appeals. Tests of the underlying mechanism using data on issue dimensions
Political parties matter for government outcomes.Despite this general finding for political scien... more Political parties matter for government outcomes.Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the
common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect
parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’
organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.
British Journal of Political Science (Forthcoming)
Theories often explain intra-party competition based on electoral conditions and intra-party rule... more Theories often explain intra-party competition based on electoral conditions and intra-party rules. We further open this black box by considering intra-party statements of preferences. In particular, we predict that intra-party preference heterogeneity increases after electoral losses, but candidates deviating from the party's median receive fewer intra-party votes. Party members grant candidates greater leeway to accommodate competing policy demands when in government. We test our hypotheses with a new database of party congress speeches from Germany and France and use automated text classification to estimate speakers' relative preferences. The results demonstrate that speeches at party meetings provide valuable insights into actors' preferences and intra-party politics. We find evidence of a complex relationship between governing context, the economy and intra-party disagreement.
Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. D... more Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. Despite the attention paid to its causes and consequences, recent research has largely set aside questions about professionalism's conceptualization and operationalization. Usually measuring it as an aggregate index, scholars theoretically and empirically treat professionalism as a unidimensional concept. In this paper, we argue that exclusive use of aggregate indices can limit state politics research. Using a new dataset with almost 40 years of data on state legislative resources, salary and session length, we reconsider the validity of using an index to study professionalism across the states. We evaluate the internal consistency of professionalism components over time, the relationship between components and the Squire Index , and the degree to which professionalism components are unidimensional using classical multidimensional scaling (MDS). We find enough commonality and enough variation between professionalism components to support a range of measurement strategies like the use of unidimensional indices (such as the Squire Index), disaggregating the components and analyzing their effects individually, or formulating multidimensional measures. Scholars should take care to choose the appropriate measure of the concept that best fits the causal relationships under examination.
We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporat... more We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporating a novel theory of strategic changes in the issues covered in party manifestos. We argue that parties use junior ministerial appointments to oversee their coalition partners on portfolios that correspond to issues emphasized by the parties' activists when the coalition partner's preferences deviate from the party's. The findings, based on a data set of more than 2800 party portfolio dyads in ten countries, show significant support for these expectations. We find that party leaders that successfully negotiate for junior ministers to particular portfolios are most concerned about checking ideologically contentious coalition partners in areas of concern to activists. The results also illustrate the usefulness of our dyadic approach for the study of junior minister allocation.
Parties craft their campaign messages to mobilize diverse constituencies. Theories of election st... more Parties craft their campaign messages to mobilize diverse constituencies. Theories of election strategy find that parties choose their tactics dependent on their electoral context. However, analyses on the electoral consequences of party competition have only begun to explore the dependency between context and tactic. Building on theories of party competition, I predict that the broad electoral context, such as incumbent status or the state of the economy, decides the effect of electoral tactics on the votes parties receive. Parties benefit from branching out to a wider range of issues when they are in the opposition. Instead, government parties have less control of their reputation. Economic conditions limit the incumbent's ability to selectively construct its policy message. However, these parties profit from pairing down their policy appeals when the economy grows. Using evidence from the Comparative Manifestos Project for 24 OECD countries over a 60 year period, I find that conditioning party campaign messages on their economic environment demonstrates a clear and strong electoral impact. Individual level evidence from 12 OECD countries in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems adds evidence consistent with the underlying mechanism. Governing parties earn a reward for focusing their platforms when the economy grows more than the economy alone would predict. The results from this analysis complement a growing literature on the effect of parties' election tactics and help explain evidence that voters only respond to parties' election strategies.
Issue salience and ideological disagreement often predict coalition government behavior. However,... more Issue salience and ideological disagreement often predict coalition government behavior. However, prominent research on portfolio allocation has yet to fully specify the complex relationship between issue salience, disagreement and coalition negotiations. We propose that the relative salience of issues and disagreement within the coalition both moderate the effect of issue salience on portfolio allocation. Using data drawn from the Parliamentary Democracy Data Archive, we find compelling evidence for our theory that links party manifestos to portfolio allocation. Furthermore, we find evidence that the effect of salience is mitigated by the extent of disagreement between coalition parties.
The Effective Number of Parties measure has had a pronounced influence on political science resea... more The Effective Number of Parties measure has had a pronounced influence on political science research. This measure, based on an economic measure of market concentration (the Herfindahl index), calculates the probability that two parties selected at random represent the same type. However, measures of diversity using this index are insensitive to rare categories (such as small parties) leading to the implication that studies may under predict the degree of variability or instability in party systems. Importantly, we argue that this measure may bias analyses towards finding stability. To adjust for this insensitivity, we propose an easy to calculate measure of diversity based on Shannon's H, a measure from information science with recent applications to the study of public policy and agenda-setting. Through simulations, real world examples and a replication of Clark and Golder's (2006) reanalysis of Duverger's Law we show that a measure of the effective number of parties calculated from Shannon's H better reflects the diversity of parties within a system. Overall, our findings demonstrate that studies interested in the number and relative strength of parties in a system should use a measure of diversity based on Shannon's H rather than a Herfindahl index.
Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of ... more Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of parties’ competencies in response to parties’ experiences in government. We add that parties’ evaluations depend on their success in fostering a cohesive image by managing diverse intra-party interests. We predict that voters’ impressions of parties’ internal discord negatively affect their assessments of parties’ policy competencies. Furthermore, voters’ choice of parties will also depend on perceptions of the parties’ coherence and competence. Using individual-level analysis of party evaluations in Germany, we test predictions from our theory using a new survey that contains questions on parties’ policy coherence and issue competence. The results hold important implications for the study of intra-party politics, issue competition and vote choice.
Issue salience and diversity direct a range of outcomes such as voting behavior and public policy... more Issue salience and diversity direct a range of outcomes such as voting behavior and public policy. Studies, however, have yet to fully integrate theoretical or empirical expectations for the effect of issue salience on coalition stability. By focusing on the mechanism linking parties’ preferences to policy-making, I propose that parties with more diverse platforms provide coalitions greater room to negotiate, whereas parties focusing on a small number of issues exacerbate ideological tensions. Issue diversity becomes important once parties exhaust opportunities to make the initial, easy policy compromises. Using evidence from 299 coalitions in 24 European countries, I find that issue diversity in parties’ platforms moderates the effect of disagreement. Using a non-proportional hazard analysis, I find that the effect of issue diversity varies over the coalition’s lifecycle. Governments with parties willing to negotiate over a larger range of issues decrease the risk that disagreements will result in coalition termination.
Scotland's future within the EU played a prominent role in the 2014 independence referendum. The ... more Scotland's future within the EU played a prominent role in the 2014 independence referendum. The story goes that latent supporters of independence voted to stay within the UK to maintain EU access. Defeated, Scottish leaders declared the referendum a once-in-a-lifetime event only repeated if conditions substantially changed. With the UK now facing a chaotic exit from the EU, the conditions seem ripe for a renewed independence campaign. Scots voted overwhelmingly to " Remain " within the EU, but the story is more complex. We argue that those hoping for a second independence referendum saw Brexit as an opportunity to create the conditions that would spur a second referendum. Using panel data from the British Election Study, we examine whether Scottish voters voted tactically to leave the EU. We argue that SNP voters were likely to interpret statements on the conditions for a second independence referendum as an implicit signal to vote " Leave ". The results have important implications for the role of referendums in representative democracy, strategic voting, and the importance of intra-party division on individual vote choices.
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Papers by Zachary Greene
common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect
parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’
organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.
Drafts by Zachary Greene
common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect
parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’
organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.