Issue Salience and Candidate Position Taking in Parliamentary Parties
| Author | Mathias Tromborg |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718765520 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2018
Article
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(2) 307 –325
Issue Salience and
© The Author(s) 2018
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Candidate Position Taking
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in Parliamentary Parties
Mathias Tromborg
Abstract
Research on parliamentary representation has traditionally assumed that political parties take clear
and differentiated policy positions, but recent studies suggest that parties sometimes have an electoral
incentive to present voters with a distribution of positions to select from at the ballot box. This article
explores whether parliamentary parties pursue such a strategy through candidate position taking using
unique elite and mass survey data from Denmark. The results illustrate that parties are highly unified
on issues that are salient to their electoral brand, but that they develop a distribution of positions that
is related to voter preferences at the district level on less salient issues. These findings have important
implications for the way that representation works in parliamentary democracies.
Keywords
parliamentary democracies, candidate positions, issue salience, broad-appeal strategy,
representation
Accepted: 26 February 2018
An emerging literature on broad-appeal strategies in parliamentary democracies suggests
that political parties sometimes have an electoral incentive to present voters with a distribu-
tion of positions on political issues instead of a single position (Bräuninger and Giger, 2016;
Lo et al., 2016; Rovny, 2012; Somer-Topcu, 2015). Doing so helps a party to win votes if it
can convince different groups of voters with diverse preferences that it is ideologically closer
to the issue positions that they prefer. However, this emerging literature has developed with-
out fully considering the role candidates and their constituents have in shaping the party
distribution of issue positions. Furthermore, it is not yet fully understood how parliamentary
parties balance the incentive to appeal broadly with the potentially conflicting incentive to
protect the informational value of the party label. The purpose of the article is to address
these gaps theoretically and empirically.
Aarhus University, Denmark
Corresponding author:
Mathias Tromborg, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 7, 8000 Aarhus C,
Denmark.
Email: tromborg@ps.au.dk
308
Political Studies 67(2)
Theoretically, the article suggests that party leaders enforce discipline on issues that
are salient to their party’s electoral brand because these are the types of issues where dam-
age to the informational value of the party’s label is most electorally dangerous. On issues
that are less salient to the party, on the other hand, party leaders do not sanction district-
targeted position taking among their candidates. This behavior results in a distribution of
candidate issue positions that allows a party to appeal broadly in an efficient way by tar-
geting regional voter preferences while protecting the informational value of the party’s
label on the issues that are most salient to the party’s electoral brand.
Empirically, these possibilities are tested with data from Denmark. The Danish case is
useful because it contains a unique and non-anonymous candidate survey with an unusu-
ally high response rate, which I merge with district level data on voter preferences, using
an original mass survey and multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) methods.
Consistent with the theoretical expectations, the analysis of these data shows that Danish
candidates almost always take the same positions as their party leader on issues that are
salient to their party, but that they often diverge from their party’s position on less salient
issues when it is unpopular among the voters in their district. Furthermore, district-targeted
position taking is more prevalent among mainstream than niche party candidates.
These findings are not only important because they help illuminate parliamentary
party strategies in a new way, but also because they have important implications for the
way that parliamentary representation works. On one hand, clear and distinguishable
party positions have traditionally been considered normatively desirable features of rep-
resentative democracy (Dahlberg, 2009; Ranney, 1954), and district-targeted position
taking may obscure a party’s positions. On the other hand, individual candidates have
several opportunities to influence policy in the direction that their constituents prefer if
they get (re)elected to a parliament. Parliamentary parties typically have high levels of
unity when they vote on legislative bills, but MPs can influence the content of these bills
in ministries (Laver and Shepsle, 1996) and on legislative committees (Strøm, 1998).
Furthermore, individual party members can influence their party’s policy positions within
party factions such that the party votes differently when a bill comes up for a legislative
vote (Budge et al., 2010). The positive relationship between candidate and district voter
positions may thus be indicative of substantive representation at the district level in par-
liamentary contexts.
The article proceeds as follows: The next section describes comparative and
American research on representation and uses the insights from this literature to gener-
ate a theoretical model of candidate position taking in parliamentary parties. The sec-
tion that follows is empirical and composed of three subsections. The first subsection
presents the Danish case. The second subsection presents the data and analyzes the
relationship between issue salience, district voter preferences, party leader preferences,
and candidate position taking in Denmark. The third subsection analyzes whether this
relationship is confined to mainstream parties or whether it applies to niche parties as
well. The final section concludes.
Parties, Candidates, and Voters in Parliamentary
Democracies
A key assumption in the literature on parliamentary representation—particularly the
prominent literature on congruence—has traditionally been that each political party acts
as a unitary actor that takes a single clear-cut ideological position which it seeks to
Tromborg
309
transform into policy in the government and/or legislature (Huber and Powell, 1994;
McDonald and Budge, 2005; Powell, 2000). This is very different from research on rep-
resentation in the United States which has long shown that individual representatives
often diverge from their party when the district calls for it (Bartels, 1991; Mayhew, 1974;
Miller and Stokes, 1963).
A key reason for this discrepancy in the parliamentary and American literature on
representation is that parliamentary party leaders have more institutional opportunity to
enforce party discipline among their candidates.1 Prime ministers, for example, have the
formal power to treat each vote on a legislative bill as a vote of confidence, which
increases the costs of dissent among backbenchers in the governing coalition (Diermeier
and Feddersen, 1998). This is not possible in the United States because of the fixed term
of the executive and the stricter separation of powers more generally. Parliamentary party
leaders in the executive can use this power (or the threat of dissolution) in addition to their
agenda setting powers (Chandler et al., 2006; Cox et al., 2007; Huber, 1992) to ensure
that there is unity when the governing coalition votes on bills.
Parliamentary party leaders also have at least three other formal powers they can use
to influence position taking among their members that party leaders in the United States
do not have. First, candidate selection rules in parliamentary democracies tend to be much
more centralized than in the United States. Parliamentary party leaders, for example,
often have the power to decide which district each candidate competes in (if at all), or the
candidate’s placement on the party’s list in the district s(he) competes in (André et al.,
2017; Ferrara, 2004). These formal powers allow parliamentary leaders to select candi-
dates who take the positions that they prefer, and to de-select those who do not. In the
United States, on the other hand, the selection of candidates is largely made by voters at
the district level in party primaries.
Second, parliamentary party leaders control career advancement from the legislature
to the executive in a way that party leaders in the United States cannot due to the separa-
tion of the two branches (Kam, 2009). Specifically, party leaders from a parliamentary
government select MPs to the cabinet, (or, in opposition, to the shadow cabinet), and
these positions are desirable for party members who are motivated by influence and/or
office perks. It is thus important for both policy- and office-seeking candidates in parlia-
mentary democracies to take the preferences of their leadership into consideration when
they take public positions on political issues.
Finally, if parliamentary candidates take positions that their party leaders oppose after
having been nominated, and despite having career incentives to adhere to party leader
preferences, then parliamentary party leaders have a final tool available to enforce disci-
pline, namely expulsion from the party (Malloy, 2003). Party leaders in...
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