Notes

J. van Spanje & N.D. de Graaf (2018)

 How established parties reduce other parties’ electoral support: the

strategy of parroting the pariah, 
West European Politics, 41:1, 1-27 
https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.library.uu.nl/doi/full/10.1080/01402382.2017.1332328

The article builds on previous theories of party competition but furthers our understanding of the
matter first by studying a larger number of cases and secondly by looking at non-issue-based
(ostracism) and issue-based (parroting) reactions to challenger parties.

A. Hypothesis: “Parroting the Pariah Hypothesis” like a mutation of the “Parrot Hypothesis”

(established parties can steal votes from the challenger party by copying its position on a
specific issue.)
 Hypothesis 1: If a challenger party is parroted, its electoral support decreases.
 Hypothesis 2: If a challenger party is treated as a pariah, its electoral support decreases.
 Hypothesis 3: If a challenger party is parroted and treated as a pariah, its electoral support
decreases.

A challenger party’s electoral support is not reduced unless it is simultaneously parroted and
treated as a pariah. In this context, crucial voters are those who primarily vote in order to
influence policy-making.

B. Operationalization: 13 anti-immigration parties from 15 Western European countries +

largest communist party for each country. Party competition at national level.
Use of the Manifesto Project Database (MPD) which is the full database of political
manifestos as well as election performance covering more than 50 countries. Examples:
 For anti-immigration parties, the tactics are coded based on the proportion of the main
right-wing parties’ manifesto devoted to multiculturalism. If the main right-wing party
mentions multiculturalism more negatively than the election before, its reaction is
coded parroting
 For Communist parties, we examine ‘Market regulation’. If the Social Democratic
party mentions market regulation more than the election before, its reaction is coded
parroting.
    The parroting of a challenger party turns out to be quite a common tactic, occurring in 68
 out of 296 observations (23%)
To measure the ostracism (legal restrictions, blocking coalitions, de facto isolation ex. RN in
France, VB in Belgium, Communist Parties in Western Europe) of challenger parties, the
authors conducted a survey of party experts from each studied country.
Challenger parties were ostracized in 45% of the cases. 
Expert agreement is considerable, example:100% of the experts agreed that Communist
parties of Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland were ostracized in at least one election a year.

C. Method
 296 national-level elections that the 28 challenger parties under study
contested between 1944 and 2011. Only parroting a challenger party, or only
treating the party as a pariah does not appear to matter.
 Multiple regression analysis: dependent variable: party-specific series of
national election results; independent variable: indicators of parroting (H1), of
ostracism (H2) and indicators of an interaction of both(H3).  According to the
Parroting the Pariah Hypothesis, the interaction of the parroting variable and
the pariah variable should have a negative coefficient.
 economic voting taken into account: the study includes growth of GDP per
capita. The expectation here is that voters blame incumbent parties for a poor
economy, from which challenger parties might benefit

D. Results
 challenger parties that are parroted and also treated as a pariah lose out but Anti-
immigration parties lose twice as much as Communist parties.
 no empirical evidence for H1, on the contrary, only parroting the challenger party
seems to slightly strengthen the party
 Treating the party as a pariah (H2) has a different effect on anti-immigration vs
communist parties: the first ones seem to benefit from being ostracized whereas each
ostracised Communist party received a smaller vote share than each non-ostracised
counterpart, with only one exception – the powerful French PCF. 
 This means that established parties can hurt their challenger rivals by parroting them
and treating them as a pariah at the same time.
 Predictive margins of electoral performance of challenger parties in 15 West-
European countries, 1944‒2011

 there is a significant negative effect of being a parroted pariah: electoral performance

is on average reduced by 0.9 percentage points, hence a reduction by 18%  compared
to the party’s expected performance.

Does an established parties’ parroting of a challenger party decrease its support?

 In the absence of systematic ostracism, it does not:
For example, there is a parrot effect concerning ‘radical right’ parties but not Green
parties because they are not ostracized.
Example 1: German Republicans suffered electorally as a result of being ostracised
(previous hypothesis) but this article’s results would suggest that the substantial losses
were also due to the fact that their main rivals criticised multiculturalism at the same
time (parroting).
Example 2: Similarly, ostracism did not hurt the FN and the VB up to 2007 but more
recently, the main right-wing and left-wing parties have been criticising
multiculturalism, and the FN (in 2007) and the VB have lost many votes
This is different in the case of Communist parties who perform poorly when they are non-parroted
pariahs and ofc even worse when they are parroted pariahs. But this could be explain by the lack of
media attention for communist parties (whereas right-wing extremist parties receive a lot of attention)
ex. the Dutch government banned the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) from public
broadcasting for two decades. 

Why is it that established parties do not use this strategy more often?
 mainstream/established parties face certain constraints.
1. It might need to cooperate with a challenger party in order to reach its goals: electoral
outcomes are very uncertain.
2. In order to induce losses to a challenger party, the established party has to ostracize
and parrot. However, it might not be in position to ‘copy’ its political agenda.
After all, if a party is so odious that it should be ostracised, co-opting its policy
proposals does not seem particularly consistent or desirable. 

How is this a threat to democracy?