Party Competition as Constituency-Creation

• In Event: How Elites Destabilize Democracies: Evidence from 19th Century Europe

Abstract

The recent surge of nationalist mobilization in electoral campaigns across the world provides compelling evidence that elections are not won by appealing to voters’ policy preferences alone, but rather by connecting those preferences to voters’ group identities. Yet, the established literature on elections centers on issue competition, neglecting parties’ identity appeals, while the more specialized literature on ethnic parties emphasizes how these parties manipulate identity categories, but tends to ignore their issue positions. This paper develops a novel “preference-attribute” model of party competition that combines these perspectives, thereby treating constituency creation as a fundamental function of party competition in general. Drawing on a novel dataset of historical election manifestos, we explore the potential of this model with an analysis of electoral competition before and after the full introduction of mass suffrage in pre-WWI Austria.

Authors

• Christina Isabel Zuber, University of Konstanz

• Philip James Howe, Adrian College