Where is my party? Party position-taking between elections and its consequences for party performance

要使选举作为民主的工具有效发挥作用，至少需要满足两个条件。公民既需要充分了解政党的政策立场，也需要知道政党在选举后是否忠于其宣布的立场。这两个条件在实践中是否成立，这一点也不清楚。我们将满足上述第二个要求。主要的研究问题是：（1）政党在选举日之后是否忠于他们在选举期间的立场;（2）如果不是，他们是否会因此受到惩罚。为了得到有经验依据的答案，我们将根据政党发布的新闻稿分析它们在选举之间的立场，并研究它们的行为对民意调查和二阶选举中反映的表现的影响。在理论和实证上，我们将区分原则性和务实性问题领域的政策维度，并特别关注政府和在野党之间的差异。为了进行实证分析，我们将收集前一个项目中已经涵盖的十个欧洲国家中每个国家选举后两年的政党新闻稿。新闻稿的优点是代表了党的领导层的“官方”但相对不受约束的声明。这就是为什么它们在过去几年中成为分析政党政策偏好及其政治学战略的重要信息来源。将结合定量文本分析和手工编码对文件进行分析。为了测试媒体对新闻稿的报道程度，以及媒体报道如何报道党的立场的变化，我们还将在比较环境中随机选择三个月对党的政策立场的媒体报道进行编码。为了获得政党的支持率，我们将收集民意调查，并辅之以次国家和欧洲选举的结果。我们希望新项目能对文献的几个分支做出重要贡献。目前，政党立场的确定工作仅限于通过比较孤立的选举前时期而推断出的转变。为了研究各方对政策受欢迎程度的信号的反应，并为了更好地了解各方之间的互动情况，高频数据至关重要。从研究直接影响和短期动态中可以获得很多东西。通过比较政党在选举期间的沟通与竞选期间的沟通，我们可以了解政党放弃早期立场的条件，以及他们和竞争对手的沟通如何影响公民的反应。此外，项目结果将提供媒体如何报道政党新闻稿的比较视角。

For elections to work effectively as instruments of democracy, at least two conditions need to be met. Citizens both require sufficient knowledge about the policy positions of parties, and they need to know whether political parties stay true to their announced positions after the election. It is by no means clear that these two conditions hold in practice. We will address the second of the above-mentioned requirements. The central research questions are (1) whether parties stay true to their campaign-time positions after election day, and, (2) if not, whether they are punished for doing so. To arrive at empirically grounded answers, we will analyze parties’ between-election position-taking based on the press releases they issue, and examine the consequences of their behavior for their performance as reflected in opinion polls and second-order elections. Theoretically and empirically, we will distinguish between policy dimensions falling into principled and pragmatic issue domains, and pay special attention to differences between government and opposition parties. For the empirical analysis, we will collect party press releases from two post-electoral two-year periods for each of the ten European countries already covered in the previous project. Press releases have the advantage of representing an ‘official’ but comparatively unconstrained statement by the party leadership. That is why they have become an important source of information for the analysis of the policy preferences of political parties and their strategies in political science in the last years. The documents will be analyzed with a combination of quantitative text analysis and hand-coding. To test to which degree press releases are covered in the media, and how the media reports cover the shifts in party positions, we will also code the media coverage of party policy positions for three separate randomly selected months in a comparative setting. To capture party popularity, we will assemble opinion polls, complemented with results from sub-national and European elections.We expect the new project to make important contributions to several branches of the literature. Work on party position-taking is currently limited to shifts that are inferred from comparing isolated pre-election periods. To study parties’ reactions to signals about the popularity of policies, and to generally better capture the interaction between parties, higher-frequency data is essential. Much is to be gained from studying proximate effects and short-run dynamics. And by comparing parties’ positions in between-election communication to those taken during the campaign, we can learn about the conditions under which parties give up on earlier positions, and how their and competitors’ communication affects citizens’ responses. Furthermore, the project results will provide a comparative perspective of how party press releases are covered by the media.