Disentangling Blurring: Party Strategy in a Multidimensional Environment

• In Event: Polarization and Dimensionality in Advanced Industrial Societies

Abstract

This paper reconceptualizes our understanding of position blurring and analyzes what strategies parties adopt, and when, to obscure their policy stances. Theories of party competition typically assume that the policy positions of political parties are objectively given and one-dimensional. In a multidimensional environment, however, parties may have an incentive to avoid clear position taking. On less salient issues, in particular, a party runs the risk of uncovering disagreement among both internal factions and (potential) supporters.

Building on a growing literature about second dimension politics, I argue that a party can blur its positions by means of two distinct strategies. First, a party can simply try to create uncertainty about its stances by avoiding an issue entirely. Second, a party can decide to take up conflicting policy positions on an issue or dimension. In this case, uncertainty about a party’s agenda does not stem from a lack of information but from the absence of a coherent platform. Although both strategies aim to produce blurred positions, their respective effectiveness will vary, as they require a different course of action and are suited for specific types of parties and contexts.

Using a combination of expert and manifesto data on parties’ policy positions, drawn from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) and the Manifesto Project (MARPOR), respectively, I analyze position blurring across three ideological divides—socio-economic left-right, cultural GAL-TAN, and European integration—and study which of the above strategies is employed, successfully, on each dimension. My analysis covers fourteen countries in Western Europe from 1999-2014.

My results confirm that position blurring is neither universally adopted nor uniformly effective across all parties and dimensions. While blurring is certainly more prominent when a dimension’s salience is low, a conflicting strategy is less effective on the more coherent left-right dimension. Furthermore, parties with more established reputations, e.g. due to their age, size, or government experience, are limited in the extent to which they can blur their policy positions.

As voters and scholars alike use parties’ ideological programs to evaluate what is on offer during an election campaign, and to assess the extent to which parties live up to their promises after being elected into office, this paper has important implications for our understanding of political contestation and democratic representation in advanced liberal democracies.

Author

• Jelle Koedam, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill