Electoral trade-offs in post-industrial societies

European politics have fundamentally changed in the past 30 years. New issues such as climate change, immigration and gender equality have come to dominate political agendas. The project will investigate how parties’ programmatic appeals in this changing environment affect support among different groups. A core idea for understanding these different support patterns is the concept of a trade-off. Simply put, if a party appeals to one electoral group, it might alienate another one. In a multi-issue and multi-party space where parties have to form new electoral alliances, the idea of trade-offs has become commonplace in how researchers think about dynamics of political competition.
Political science research has documented the diverging preferences of social groups in post-industrial societies and has concluded that parties trying to build electoral coalitions face significant trade-offs. For example social democratic parties try to appeal to working class and educated middle class voters who have diverging preferences on issues such as immigration or gender equality. The concept of trade-offs in a multi-party and multi-issue space, however, has remained conceptually underdeveloped. There is only little research that directly investigates how parties’ programmatic appeals create trade-offs among social groups.
The research project aims to close this gap by conceptualising and analysing a new typology of voters and their availability to programmatic competition. It will create and test a typology of voters that includes party loyalists, performance voters and those who are potentials for programmatic competition. The project will then analyse parties’ programmatic appeals in the field of progressive politics. What groups can social democratic, green and radical left parties appeal to with different programmatic profiles? The project will combine observational data with a conjoint experiment that lets people choose between stylized party programs and will be fielded in Germany, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The project will contribute to a better understanding of how parties’ programmatic profiles affect their electoral support and which positions create trade-offs. It also has important implications for the broader public debate around how progressive positions affect the fortunes of political parties.