When Voters and Parties Agree: Valence Issues and Party Competition
| Published date | 01 October 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00671.x |
| Author | Jane Green |
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
When Voters and Parties Agree:Valence
Issues and Party Competition
Jane Green
University of Manchester
There has been much talk of valence,consensus or competence politics but little theoretical explanation
or empirical investigation of how this has arisen. In this article I argue that British political competition
has become competence-based because the major parties and the electorate have converged on the
dominant left–right dimension of British voting behaviour. As a result, commonly cited core vote
explanations for party polarisation have only limited application. The electorate has converged on
left–right issues, narrowing the policy space and the available positional strateg ies of political parties.A
different pattern is found for the issue of Europe, and this is interpreted in light of possible causal
mechanisms. The article offers a formal model for a r ise in valencepolitics as parties and voters converge,
and the implications are discussed for theories of party competition. I argue in favour of competence and
salience-based theories of party strategy in place of a reliance on traditional spatial models.
The term ‘valence’was used by Donald Stokes (1963) to illustrate the significance
of consensual issues – those issues on which there is agreement on the ends of
politics, such as lower crime or economic growth. This is in contrast with position
issues, on which voters and par ties are divided on the ends of politics ( Butler and
Stokes, 1969; Stokes, 1985; 1992). Stokes’ argument was phrased as a direct
challenge to the dominant spatial model of party equilibrium, namely Anthony
Downs’ (1957) theory of two-party convergence on a normally distributed
preference dimension.Stokes’ (1963; 1992) claim wasthat valence issues are highly
important to party competition and to political choice, and since there is consen-
sus on these issues, parties are instead judged on their performance to deliver. On
position issues voters have different ideal points but on valence issues voters have
the same ideal point (Enelow and Hinich, 1982). The greater the importance of
valence issues, the less spatial models help us understand vote choices and parties’
competitive strategies. The term ‘valence’ has since been used as a proxy for
leadership ratings allowing for leverage over electoral strategy (Groseclose, 2001;
Schofield, 2004),for candidate trustworthiness and honesty (Enelow and Hinich,
1982) and for economic performance ratings ( Whiteley, 1984).
There is good reason to focus more carefully on the concept of ‘valence’ in order
to understand better why and whether valence politics is an apt description of
British political behaviour. Three relevant f actors have coincided: the significance
of judgement or competence ratings to the vote choice (Clarke et al., 2004;
Denver, 1994), a decline in the association between left–r ight position and vote
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00671.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007 VOL 55, 629–655
© 2007The Author.Jour nal compilation © 2007 Political StudiesAssociation
choice (Sanders, 1999) and the perceived convergence of the main parties (Bara
and Budge, 2001; Endersby and Galatas, 1998; Heath et al., 2001; McLean, 2002).
In this article the significance of a fourth empirical f actor is revealed and linked
to the concept of valence and to a causal theory of valence politics. Party
convergence has occurred within a period of gradual consensus among voters on
the key left–right dimension of British politics. This electoral consensus, coupled
with the convergence on this dimension by parties,logically leads to the scenar io
described by Stokes in 1963 wherein competition is on valence issues instead of
position issues. The consequence is that parties are judged on competence in
place of ideological differentiation. Harold Clarke et al. (2004) argue that valence
politics has always been crucial to the vote choice, but this article claims that a
transition to the presence of ‘valence issues’ represents a recent character istic of
the British electoral landscape. Increasing consensus, particularly on left–right
issues, has important implications for party competition. Not only does such a
trend point to the importance of competence evaluations in party choice but it
also confounds the arguments that parties are constrained by the more polarised
ideological positions of their traditional supporters. For example,many commen-
tators cite the core vote explanation to be the main cause of the Conservative
party’s electoral difficulties between 1997 and 2005.1Thus, in two respects, the
trend revealed in this article provides important infor mation for our understand-
ing of British political competition.
Theory
A great deal of the academic literature explaining the ideological positions parties
adopt arose during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period the two main British
parties were clearly differentiated along policy lines (Clarke et al., 2004; Heath
et al., 1985;McLean, 1982) and this was a challenge to the traditional Downsian
model of party competition (1957) that, in a two-par ty system, rational parties
will converge at the median voter to win the g reatest number of votes. Party
polarisation in the US and elsewhere has more recently been offered as further
evidence to challenge the Downsian model (MacDonald and Rabinowitz,1998;
Schofield, 2003; 2004; Schofield and Sened, 2005).
In order to account for this differentiation the dominant alternative explanation
has been that parties are constrained by their existing supporters, because tradi-
tional party supporters are motivated by more ideologically divergent opinions.In
order to maintain this core support, parties place themselves closer to these voters
than the median position allows.2Therefore, according to these ‘core vote’ or
‘activist’theor ies,the equilibrium position will be midway between the core voter
or activist median position and the median voter overall.3
However, the recent period of British political competition appears to confirm
the Downsian view once again, that parties converge towards the median voter.4
This is borne out by the fact that fewer and fewer people now recognise a
630 JANE GREEN
© 2007The Author.Jour nal compilation © 2007 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(3)
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