A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors
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Book Review A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors Adams, James F., Samuel Merrill III and Bernard Grofman Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, ISBN 0521544939, h26.54. Acta Politica (2007) 42, 476–478. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500199
A Unified Theory of Party Competition is an excellent contribution to the literature on voting behaviour and party strategies. In a similar vein to a previous book by Samuel Merrill III and Bernard Grofman (A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Spatial Models. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, ISBN 0521665493, h23.41), the authors elegantly combine different — and in the literature often conceived of as divergent — schools of thought into an integrated model. The value of this integrative perspective goes beyond settling scholarly debates, and advances our understanding of the patterns of party competition observed in actual elections. Traditional Downisan spatial models of voting behaviour and party competition assume that voters only choose parties closest to their own position within a multidimensional policy space, and that parties behave in a purely vote-maximizing manner, that is, by adopting the position in this policy space that promises maximum electoral strength. This model has been the object of much critique because it often leads to implausible and incorrect predictions of political competition in real-world elections. In the first part of the book, the authors relax the unrealistic assumption of solely policy-oriented voters, and allow for additional determinants of vote choice as identified in a large body of behavioural electoral research — for example, group loyalties and party identification. Chapters 2–4 formally elaborate this integrated model of vote choice and illustrate that the modified view of voter behaviour leads to noticeably different incentives for party strategies. Chapters 5–9 empirically demonstrate that the model proposed is better able to predict the policy positions of parties and candidates than the traditional spatial model, even within very diverse political settings (the French presidential election of 1988; the US presidential elections of 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2000; the Norwegian parliamentary election of 1989; and the British parliamentary election of 1997). The second, much shorter part of the book, turns the focus from voter-induced party strategies to parties’ own motivations for their proposed policies. By relaxing the restrictive assumption of parties being purely office-seeking, and replacing it with the assumption of political elites being
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both office-seeking and policy-seeking, distinctly different predictions are produced regarding the patterns of political competition. Chapter 11 formally describes the consequences of candidate’s policy motivations on their strategies in two-party contests, and Chapter 12 illustrates that such predictions illuminate the actual policy placement of candidates in French and US
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