Abstract
Programmatic alternatives at elections are a crucial part of any healthy democracy. If parties offered the same program, voters would have no real choice between policy alternatives. It is said that electoral programs are becoming more and more similar, which might indicate fewer differences between parties. In this chapter, we analyze this symptom of an alleged crisis of democracy by studying four aspects of the quality of parties’ programmatic supply: the differentiation of positions, their visibility, their clarity, and the heterogeneity of priorities. On the basis of quantitative content analysis of party election manifestos collected by the MARPOR project, we are able to study the programmatic quality of 2103 manifestos, from 279 different parties and 371 elections in 21 OECD countries between 1951 and 2011. The chapter focuses on the three most prominent conflict dimensions: the socioeconomic conflict, the sociocultural conflict, and the center-periphery conflict. While the diversity and visibility of party positions have changed little, the clarity of party positions has increased over the last few decades. Only the heterogeneity of party priorities has decreased and even then only slightly. Contrary to the assertion that parties no longer differ in their programs, our investigation of the quality of election manifestos suggests there is little evidence of a deterioration in programmatic quality.
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Notes
- 1.
With one exception, parliamentary elections were held in Turkey every three to 4 years between 1950 and 2011. The longest interruption of the regular election cycle between 1977 and 1983 due to military intervention lasted just under 5 years.
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Volkens, A., Merz, N. (2018). Are Programmatic Alternatives Disappearing? The Quality of Election Manifestos in 21 OECD Countries Since the 1950s. In: Merkel, W., Kneip, S. (eds) Democracy and Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72559-8_4
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