Issue Evolution in Multiparty Systems

• Applicant: Dr. Anna-Sophie Kurella
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 436624663

Over the last decade, more and more radical right parties emerged all over Europe. This common trend is accompanied by an increase in the emphasis of policy issues like immigration and European integration in electoral campaigns. Is the emergence of immigration as a salient policy issue the result of a tactical manoeuver by radical right parties? Do they push the issue of immigration because they benefit electorally if political competition focuses more on cultural issues? The proposed research project will study issue evolution, by analyzing situations in which new issues emerge and become salient enough to restructure the policy space, and by asking for the role radical right parties play herein. It will thus generate insights that advance our understanding of how political competition in policy issue spaces works. The question when and why parties are successful with emphasizing a new policy issue or even inventing a new issue dimension has been studied extensively for the US plurality system. Here, the emergence of new issues in the political arena is attributed to strategic incentives of the current loser. He/she can break the ruling coalition by introducing a new issue, on which the current winner does not hold a majority. For proportional systems, however, the game of political competition is much more complex. Prospective coalition considerations increase the costs of proposing policies that are too distant from potential coalition partners. At the same time, the threshold for new parties to form and enter competition is much lower. We still know little about how issue evolution works in multiparty systems, and in what aspects it differs from issue evolution in plurality systems. The project will address this gap. The contribution of the project is twofold, by first providing a theory of political competition that considers position taking and issue emphasizing as party strategies. I will take up a formal modeling approach to study incentives in the party system. Second, it will generate empirical insights, by testing observable implications of the theory. The recent phenomenon of immigration issues becoming more important in various European countries serves as the empirical case. This will be done by applying the formal model to empirical survey data on European policy spaces, to identify party incentives to increase or decrease the importance of immigration issues. An analysis of party press releases will be used to validate the model predictions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants