Voter Perceptions and Party Strategies: An Empirical Approach

Over thirty years ago Duverger set a paradox which still stands. find ourselves in a vicious circle: a general theory of parties will eventually be constructed only upon the preliminary work of many profound studies, but these studies cannot be truly profound so long as there exists no general theory of I In large part the academic attack on this problem has been piecemeal; very few authors have attempted to consider a general theory of parties. Those who have attempted such a study-and who we will consider in a moment-have tended to focus upon party competition as the main problem to be attacked. Even here, however, the approach has been piecemeal in that the majority of writers on party competition only inadequately consider the important other half of the coin, namely, electoral behavior. In this paper we seek to examine a more complete conception of party competition. The plan of attack is to develop an explicit model of voting behavior and a set of consequences for party behavior. After this we turn to empirical evidence of both the voting model and party behavior. We begin, however, by elaborating upon our contention that inadequate attention to voters has been a downfall of models of party competition. In order to make this task manageable, we will divide the literature somewhat arbitrarily into formal and nonformal or comparativist, beginning our discussion with the latter. To a fairly large extent the traditional comparativist models of party competition have been grounded in implicit, and often idiosyncratic, models of voting behavior, the general impact of which is to build up a picture of political parties as either being unable to move policy positions or being able to move almost at will. A few examples will serve to illustrate this point. First let us examine those who see parties as being able to move freely throughout a policy space. The earliest examples of this view are expressed by Michels and Kirchheimer who see the old socialist or class-mass parties as being able to abandon their old, radical positions and move to become centrist or catch-all parties.2 Objections to this sell out are seen to come mainly from within the party organizations themselves and not from the voters. That is to say, for example, Socialist and Communist parties, once they manage to overcome internal opposition, can move to become centrist parties with little or no electoral penalty, a picture that is clearly at odds with the difficulties postwar Communist parties have experienced in selling their belief in the parliamentary road to socialism to European voters.