Beyond salience and position-taking

Autor(en)

Martin Dolezal, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Wolfgang Claudius Müller, Katrin Praprotnik, Anna Katharina Winkler

Abstrakt

This article examines aspects of election manifestos that are largely ignored by extant manifesto-based studies focusing on issue saliencies and policy positions. Drawing on the literatures on negative campaigning, retrospective voting, party mandates and personalization, we develop a scheme of categories that allows for the analysis of attacks on competitors, references to a party's track record, subjective and objective policy pledges and the prominence of party leaders in manifestos. We also show that these elements are present in manifestos of major European parties. The relevance of these categories, we argue, should be influenced by a party's status in government or opposition, its ideology, its size, the relative popularity of party leaders and the occurrence of early elections. Our systematic examination of 46 Austrian election manifestos produced between 1986 and 2013 demonstrates that many of these expectations are supported by the evidence. Most notably, it emerges that government and opposition parties write manifestos that differ with respect to all of the five characteristics analysed. This suggests that there are systematic differences between government and opposition party manifestos that should be taken into consideration by scholars engaged in manifesto-based research.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Staatswissenschaft

Externe Organisation(en)

Universität Hamburg

Journal

Party Politics

Band

24

Seiten

240-252

Anzahl der Seiten

13

ISSN

1354-0688

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068816678893

Publikationsdatum

11-2016

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

506014 Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Sociology and Political Science

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/beyond-salience-and-positiontaking(5ec59bd7-71ff-4814-8f72-c370c2dc6a48).html