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Replication data for: How Aspiration to Office Conditions the Impact of Government Participation on Party Platform Change

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication data for: How Aspiration to Office Conditions the Impact of Government Participation on Party Platform Change
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/27662
 
Creator Schumacher, Gijs
van de Wardt, Marc
Vis, Barbara
Klitgaard, Michael Baggesen
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Considerable ambiguity exists regarding the effect of government/opposition status on party platform change. Existing theories’ predict that: (1) it has no effect, (2) opposition parties change more, (3) opposition parties change more after several spells in opposition and (4) parties’ responses vary because of different goal orientations. We propose that a party’s aspiration to office, measured by its historical success or failure in entering office, determines a party’s reaction to being in opposition or government. We hypothesize that, because of loss aversion, parties with low office aspiration change more when they are in government than when they are in opposition. Conversely, parties with high office aspiration change more as opposition party than as government party. We find evidence for these hypotheses through a pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis of 1,585 platform changes in 21 democracies, using the Comparative Manifesto Data and an innovative measure of party platform change.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Party platform
Party manifesto
 
Contributor Gijs Schumacher