‘Credible’ or ‘Capricious’? The Reputational Cost of Party Policy Change

Political competition in Europe has become more unpredictable. Mainstream parties increasingly struggle with declining public trust, decreasing voter loyalty, and the rise of radical challenger parties. This has compelled mainstream parties to change their policy positions for strategic reasons, in the hope of improving their election performance or their governing prospects. Although political scientists have extensively studied the drivers of party policy change, it is unclear how party policy change affects partiesâ?? reputations in the eyes of the voters. This project examines under which circumstances voters accept policy change as credible and when they reject it as capricious. Grasping how party policy change affects partiesâ?? reputations is of crucial importance for our understanding of how European representative democracies function in an era of strategic party politics. It sheds light on how our societies can cope with the dual challenge of declining public trust in political parties and of changing political circumstances to which parties must respond, two pillars of the Dutch National Research Agendaâ??s thematic route â??Towards Resilient Societiesâ?. To assess the effect of policy change on party reputations, the empirical focus of this project lies on assessing what explains individual votersâ?? credence in mainstream parties and their policy changes. As votersâ?? appraisal of policy change is unlikely to be the same across all political contexts, I expect that votersâ?? credence in policy change will be particularly affected by three factors: (1) the type of policy issue and its saliency; (2) whether voters associate the party with the issue in question; and (3) the presence of successful challenger parties. To examine the effect of party policy change on mainstream party reputations in Europe, I employ a multi-method empirical strategy consisting of innovative survey experiments in three European countries complemented with analyses of existing cross-national survey data and party positioning data.