Search

How does voter polarisation affect party responsiveness? Previous research has shown that political parties emphasise political issues that are important to their voters. However, it is posited in this article that political parties are not equally responsive to citizen demands across all issue areas. The hypothesis is that party responsiveness varies considerably with the preference configuration of the electorate. More specifically, it is argued that party responsiveness increases with the polarisation of issues among voters. To test these theoretical expectations, party responsiveness is analysed across nine West European countries from 1982 until 2013. Data on voter attention and voter preferences with regard to specific policy issues from a variety of national election studies is combined with Comparative Manifestos Project data on parties' emphasis of these issues in their election manifestos. The findings have major implications for understanding party competition and political representation in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Values and ideologies seem to be changing rapidly in many countries of Western Europe. These developments imply a shift among the adherents of political parties. On the one hand, we expect to see a process of deideologization weakening the traditional ties between parties and their adherents. On the other hand, increasing pluralization is suggested by the ongoing process of individualization. In this study we analyze the orientations of the adherents of the main political parties in 12 Western European countries in the last two decades. We expect to find clear traces of ongoing deideologization as well as pluralization, but this expectation proves to be inaccurate. Neither deideologization nor pluralization can be accepted as a common feature of party adherents in advanced industrial societies. On the contrary. Each of these processes seems to follow a different path of development in distinct countries and in distinct party families. A general 'decline-of-the-party' or an 'end-of-ideology' is not to be found among the adherents of the main parties in Western Europe in the last decades. The processes appear to be more complicated, with divergent developments in different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]