Party Responsiveness to Public Opinion in Young Democracies
| Author | Raimondas Ibenskas,Jonathan Polk |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721993635 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721993635
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(4) 919 –938
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321721993635
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Party Responsiveness to Public
Opinion in Young Democracies
Raimondas Ibenskas1 and Jonathan Polk2,3
Abstract
Are political parties in young democracies responsive to the policy preferences of the public?
Compared to extensive scholarship on party responsiveness in established democracies, research
on party responsiveness in young democracies is limited. We argue that weaker programmatic
party–voter linkages in post-communist democracies create incentives for parties to respond to
their supporters rather than the more general electorate. Such responsiveness occurs in two
ways. First, parties follow shifts in the mean position of their supporters. Second, drawing on
the research on party–voter congruence, we argue that parties adjust their policy positions to
eliminate previous incongruence between themselves and their supporters. Analyses based on
a comprehensive dataset that uses expert surveys, parties’ manifestoes and election surveys to
measure parties’ positions, and several cross-national and national surveys to measure voters’
preferences provide strong support for this argument.
Keywords
political parties, Central and Eastern Europe, party policy change, ideological congruence
Accepted: 18 January 2021
Introduction
The 2015 parliamentary election in Poland brought a victory to Law and Justice (Prawo i
Sprawiedliwość, PiS), the main opposition party. The party’s election campaign was char-
acterised by its criticism of the liberal economic policies of the incumbent government
and harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. The party’s strategy was ‘clearly about firing up the
base, not about appealing to moderate voters’ (Tworzecki, 2019: 103–104).
Whether such patterns of party responsiveness to the public’s policy preferences are
widespread in young democracies is relatively unknown. Compared to the large body of
scholarship on party responsiveness in established democracies (e.g. Adams et al., 2006;
Ezrow et al., 2011), research on party responsiveness in new democracies is limited
despite the importance of party responsiveness for democratic representation. The present
1Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
2Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
3Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Corresponding author:
Raimondas Ibenskas, Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, 5020 Bergen, Norway.
Email: Raimondas.Ibenskas@uib.no
993635PSX0010.1177/0032321721993635Political StudiesIbenskas and Polk
research-article2021
Article
920 Political Studies 70(4)
study addresses this omission by asking the following question: are political parties in
young democracies responsive to the policy preferences of the public?
We argue that established parties (defined as parties that existed as significant electoral
forces for at least two consecutive general elections) in young democracies primarily
respond to their partisan supporters. They do so in two ways. First, parties follow shifts in
the mean position of their supporters. Second, parties also adjust their policy positions in
order to eliminate previous incongruence between themselves and their supporters. Our
argument draws on and combines insights from two contrasting perspectives on party
democracy in post-communist and other young democracies.
On one hand, high levels of electoral volatility and the electoral success of new
parties (Haughton and Deegan-Krause, 2015; Tavits, 2008), the prevalence of anti-
establishment parties with vague programmatic appeals (Sikk, 2012) and the less sig-
nificant role of the left–right dimension (Dalton et al., 2011) provide indirect
indications that parties’ responsiveness to public opinion is weak. We draw on this
body of research by arguing that “Central and Eastern European (CEE)” parties do not
respond to the general electorate. On the other hand, ‘programmaticness’ of party poli-
tics in the region is suggested by relatively programmatic appeals of political parties
(Benoit and Laver, 2006), stability of the structures of competition (Rovny and Polk,
2017) and moderately high congruence between parties’ and their supporters’ ideo-
logical positions (Kitschelt et al., 1999). We build on this work by suggesting that
parties respond to their partisan supporters.
Weaker programmatic positional and competence-based party–voter linkages lead par-
ties in post-communist democracies to respond not to the general electorate but to their
supporters. Compared to their Western European counterparts, CEE electorates are less
likely to identify the substantive content of the broader ideological dimension (Dalton
et al., 2011), to locate their own and parties’ positions on this dimension (Ezrow et al.,
2014) and to use this information when casting their votes (Burlacu and Tóka, 2014).
They are also more disappointed with the performance of established parties (Pop-
Eleches, 2010; Roberts, 2010).
However, there are significant differences between partisan supporters and independ-
ent voters. Partisans in CEE democracies are characterised by higher levels of ideological
structuration and voting and satisfaction with the performance of established parties. CEE
parties are therefore able to find policy positions that respond to partisan supporters’ pref-
erences on multiple issues and can reasonably expect to be electorally rewarded for this
responsiveness.
Meanwhile, most independent voters are strongly disaffected by the performance of
established parties, lack structure in their policy preferences or are characterised by weak
ideological voting. Established parties are therefore unable to develop policy packages that
are responsive to the concerns of many independent voters and/or lack electoral incentives
to do so. Overall, established parties primarily respond to their partisan supporters.
Our empirical analyses are based on the most comprehensive dataset on parties’ and
voters’ left–right positions ever assembled in the context of Central and Eastern Europe.
Specifically, we combine data on parties’ positions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey
(CHES), Manifesto Project Database (MARPOR) and a set of national and European
election surveys with data on the public’s preferences from the same set of election
surveys as well as the European Social Survey (ESS). While time periods covered by
each of these sources vary, as a whole the dataset considers two and a half decades of
democratic party competition in Central and Eastern Europe. Our analyses show
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