Lost in Space? The Emptiness of the Political Center
Published:
Funding: Fritz Thyssen Foundation; 131,000 Euro (93,000 Euro initial + 38,000 Euro extension); July 2017 – June 2020
Status: Completed
Recent elections to national parliaments and, more so, to the European Parliament have demonstrated that voters tend to systematically favour parties which are more extreme than their personal ideological or programmatic preferences. This project accounted for centrifugal tendencies in EP elections via a two-step model.
In the first step, the project reviewed spatial models of vote choice, stressing specifications that account for the success of non-centrist parties. Within the family of spatial voting models, voters may select parties in line with their ideological ideal points (proximity voting), may overshoot the mark to compensate for institutional constraints on policy delivery (discounting or compensational voting), or may aim to push for change in their desired direction without caring about exact positions (directional voting). These specifications have substantive implications: proximity voting implies the victory of centrist parties, while compensational and directional voting predict the strong performance of less-centrist actors (Merrill and Grofman 1999).
In the second step, the project analysed how parties strategically adapt to the expected dynamics of electoral behaviour. By computing Nash equilibria in probabilistic voting models (Merrill and Adams 2001) and comparing equilibrium party positions with observed positions, the project tested spatial and non-spatial hypotheses about extreme party positioning in a systematic comparative framework. Empirical analyses drew on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and the European Election Studies.