Publications
Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications
Under Review
Say It Like You Mean It: The Varied Effects of Emphasis- and Opinion-Based Change on Voter Behaviour
Shifting political party positions are a hallmark of parties' strategic behavior in competitive democratic elections, and whilst a substantial literature documents systematic differences in how these positional shifts are carried out, we know comparatively little about their varied electoral implications. Building on the established distinction between emphasis-based and confrontational modes of position-taking, this paper asks whether the manner in which a party adjusts its programme conditions the electoral returns it secures. To do so, we assemble the most up-to-date and comprehensive combined collection of election panel studies yet compiled, harmonizing just under 16,000 voters across 175 unique party-elections. We pair this with a novel measurement strategy in which an open-source large language model categorizes manifesto content, yielding positional and salience-based measures of party positions across a wide range of policy issues. Using quantitative methods that link aggregate positional movement to individual-level patterns of vote switching, we test for an associational relationship between the two. Results show that parties engaging in salience-based shifts retain greater core-party voter cohesion, albeit at the expense of potential to expand their electoral coalition, whereas the more common positional shifts shed core-party voters whilst attracting previously unattached voters. Alongside broader findings concerning the role of demographic attributes in the propensity for vote-switching, these carry broader implications for how we measure the electoral success of party positional shifts, and for electoral competition in an era of increasing voter volatility and partisan dealignment.