Moderate Now, Win Votes Later: The Electoral Consequences of Parties’ Policy Shifts in 25 Postwar Democracies

Abstract

A central tenet of spatial modeling and political representation studies is that, to the extent that citizens vote prospectively, they evaluate the policies that political parties are currently proposing. Yet research on issue evolution and macropartisanship suggests that significant time periods often elapse before voters update their perceptions of parties’ policy positions. We report cross-national, time-series analyses on the relationship between parties’ policy programs and election outcomes in 25 postwar democracies, which suggest that parties’ policy promises exert lagged effects on their electoral support: namely, parties gain votes at the current election when they moderated their policies at the previous Election. By contrast, we find only weak and inconsistent evidence that parties’ support responds to their current policy programs. Our findings have important implications for spatial modeling and for studies on political representation.