Anmerkungen:
In: EPSA 2013 Annual General Conference Paper 379
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2013 erstellt
Beschreibung:
This paper investigates the impact of niche party success on mainstream party policy positions. While a growing body of research has been dedicated to the determinants of niche party success, far less is known about the effects of niche party support on established parties’ behavior. Based on a conceptualization of political competition as spatial and issue competition this paper makes two main arguments about the impact of niche party success. First, green parties and far-right parties affect mainstream parties’ behavior in different ways. While far-right party success should cause mainstream parties to politicize the issue of immigration, especially as a way to attract the losers of globalization, green party success should have the opposite effect for environmental issues. Since green parties own the issue of environmental protection, their success should make established parties deemphasize the issue. Second, the impact of niche parties will depend on characteristics of the mainstream parties such as their ideological position and past electoral performance as well as the institutional context. While low electoral thresholds should allow niche parties to exert greater influence, their impact should be significantly smaller with thresholds being high, because parliamentary representation is a key condition to influence the party system agenda. Using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project in a time-series cross-section analysis, this paper empirically establishes that green and far-right parties differ in their effect on mainstream party behavior and that their impact depends on the type of mainstream party and the institutional context