Fleeing the Mainstream: Party Positions and Voter Perceptions in Contemporary Liberal Democracies

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This research explores the relationship between the ideological positioning of traditional mainstream parties and the electoral fortunes of challenger parties across liberal democracies in and outside the European Union. It applies a wide range of empirical techniques to demonstrate that when the mainstream parties converge, voters are more likely to switch to challenger parties. The empirical analyses focus on both party ideology using manifesto data and voter perceptions using survey data. The findings are organized into two papers. A first paper examines the effects of European integration on actual and perceived mainstream party convergence using regressions and matching methods. A second paper tests the effects of party convergence on the electoral performance of challenger parties.