Rory Costello

Party competition sometimes resembles an auction, where parties seek to ‘buy’ elections through promises of economic largesse. In this article, I argue that whether parties engage in this practice will depend on political circumstances, such as the level of ideological competition. Incentives to promise more to voters will also vary depending on a party's electoral prospects: for parties that expect a significant level of government responsibility, promising too much is a risky strategy. I test these arguments by focusing on the spending commitments in party manifestos from 20 countries over the period 1945–2017. In line with expectations, parties tend to make more expansionary election pledges when ideological competition is more muted. In addition, left‐wing parties’ spending commitments are found to be influenced by their projected seat shares (based on opinion polls from before the start of the election campaign) relative to their competitors. Specifically, the stronger a left‐wing party's electoral prospects, the more fiscally conservative it tends to be, and vice versa.

If the European Parliament (EP) is responsive to electoral outcomes, then the positions it takes during negotiations on policy issues with other EU institutions will reflect its ideological composition. However, the dominance of a grand coalition of the centrist party groups may limit the extent to which changes in the composition of the EP affect the policy positions that it adopts. The EP may also suffer from an integrationist bias, as further integration enhances its power. This paper tests whether the positions taken by the EP in legislative negotiations reflect its ideological composition, drawing on data covering the period 1999–2019. The findings indicate that the policy positions adopted by the EP more closely reflect the ideological profile of the grand coalition than the median MEP. While the EP generally adopts pro-integration positions, this is in line with its ideological composition; there is no evidence of systematic policy drift in this direction.

Political parties often employ the rhetoric of electoral mandates, claiming that the people who voted for them endorsed their policies. However, the level of voter-party issue congruence may vary across parties, issues, and elections; and the views of certain types of voters may be better represented by their party than others. This paper puts forward a series of hypotheses to explain variation in issue congruence, relating to how well-informed voters are about party policy, the role of non-policy determinants of vote choice, and the nature of policy competition between parties. The hypotheses are tested using data from surveys of voters and parties conducted during the 2020 general election and the 2019 European Parliament election in Ireland. Congruence is found to be higher when a party is particularly associated with an issue. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, for whom non-policy attributes play a significant part in voters’ assessments, are found to have lower policy congruence with their voters overall than other parties. While there is no evidence that certain socio-demographic groups are systematically more or less well represented by their parties across all policy areas, some gaps in representation are identified, particularly in relation to so-called ‘cultural’ issues.

When national interests are threatened by an international political crisis, there is often a ‘rally around the flag’ effect among both the public and the political elite, interpreted as a patriotic response to an external threat. Brexit represented a significant threat both to the Irish economy and to the constitutional settlement on the island of Ireland. In contrast to other international crises that have been studied in relation to the rally effect, a supranational body (the EU) was acting on behalf of the threatened state (Ireland) in the negotiations. This paper examines how Brexit affected Irish party positions on EU affairs in the Republic of Ireland and asks if there was a ‘rally around the EU flag’ at the elite level. Using automated content analysis of parliamentary debates in Ireland between 2014–2019, the results show that there was indeed a significant and sustained pro-EU rally among most Irish parties. The findings also show that the rally effect differs depending on whether the party has a nationalist or internationalist orientation.

The level of congruence between parties and their voters can vary greatly from one policy issue to another, which raises questions regarding the effectiveness of political representation. We seek to explain variation in party–voter congruence across issues and parties. We focus on the hypotheses that (1) average proximity between the positions of voters and the party they vote for will be highest on the issues that the party emphasises in the election campaign and that (2) this relationship will be stronger for niche parties. We test these hypotheses using data on the policy preferences of voters, party positions, party attention profiles and salience on concrete policy issues in four countries: The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Sweden. Overall, we find that voter–party proximity tends to be higher on issues that the party emphasises. As these are the issues where parties typically have the greatest policy impact, this implies that the quality of representation is highest where it matters most. There is some limited evidence that the positive relationship between issue salience and proximity is stronger for niche parties. In sum, the quality of policy representation varies strongly with party‐level issue salience and to a lesser extent with the type of political party.

Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first large‐scale comparative analysis of pledge fulfillment with common definitions. We study the fulfillment of over 20,000 pledges made in 57 election campaigns in 12 countries, and our findings challenge the common view of parties as promise breakers. Many parties that enter government executives are highly likely to fulfill their pledges, and significantly more so than parties that do not enter government executives. We explain variation in the fulfillment of governing parties’ pledges by the extent to which parties share power in government. Parties in single‐party executives, both with and without legislative majorities, have the highest fulfillment rates. Within coalition governments, the likelihood of pledge fulfillment is highest when the party receives the chief executive post and when another governing party made a similar pledge.