Record Details


Field	Value

Title	Replication data for: The Effect of Inequality and Social Identity on Party Strategies

Identifier	https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26516

Creator	Tavits, Margit Potter, Joshua D.

Publisher	Harvard Dataverse

Description	How do parties decide which issues to emphasize during electoral competition? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how parties of the Left and of the Right respond to economic inequality. Increasing inequality shifts the proportion of the population falling into lower socioeconomic categories, thereby increasing the size of the electoral constituency that is receptive toward leftist parties' redistributive economic appeals. In the face of rising inequality, then, leftist parties will emphasize economic issues in their manifestos. By contrast, the non-redistributive economic policies often espoused by rightist parties will not appeal to this burgeoning constituency. Rather, we argue, rightist parties will opt to emphasize values-based issues, especially in those cases where "social demand" in the electorate for values-based representation is high. We find support for these relationships with hierarchical regression models that draw from data across hundreds of parties in a diverse set of the world's democracies.

Subject	Social Sciences Party platforms Income inequality Social identity

Contributor	Margit Tavits

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