|
Abstract:
Recent studies (e.g. Mair, 2009, 2014) have theorized the existence of a tension between responsibility and responsiveness experienced by political parties in several Western European countries. Such a tension is due to the presence of exogenous constraints (including international markets, international organizations and international and EU-imposed commitments) and it often leads to a gap in parties’ representative capacity. While the tension between responsibility and responsiveness has been a key subject of analysis for political science for a while now, the impact of such a tension upon parties’ electoral support has not yet been investigated from a fully-fledged empirical perspective. This study aims at bringing a further contribution to the previous literature by assessing the impact of parties’ level of responsiveness upon electoral support, i.e. the widening of parties’ electoral basis. Yet, differently from most contributions in the current literature, the connection between parties’ level of responsiveness and their electoral support is assessed at the individual level of analysis. Accordingly, the paper infers parties’ responsiveness to the public through the concept of issue saliency congruence between parties and individual voters in each of the country considered. As far as electoral support is concerned, this aggregate level concept corresponds at the individual level to the concepts of party preference and party preference change. The analysis is based on data from the Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP), including both a CAWI (two-wave panel) voter survey from 4 West European countries (namely, Austria, Germany, Italy and the UK) and Twitter campaign data from official party accounts in the time-span between 2017 and 2018.The final findings outline that, in the countries analyzed, saliency difference has some significant negative effects upon individual party preferences before national election campaigns, even if the patterns are not uniform. Rather, it does not have an impact upon individual’s party preferences change following electoral campaign.
|
