Room to Maneuver? Party Strategies in the European Political Space

Research on voting behaviour in elections to the European Parliament (EP) has demonstrated that voters tend to systematically favour parties which are ``more extreme'' than their personal ideological or programmatic preferences. This paper accounts for centrifugal tendencies in EP elections by a two-step model: (1) We begin with an evaluation of centrifugal tendencies in electoral behaviour which stem from spatial (symbolic politics and directional voting; institutional stalemate and the discounting model) and non-spatial motives (party identification, economic voting). (2) We link electoral behaviour with dominant strategies adopted by vote-maximizing political parties and apply the model party competition model by Adams, Grofman, and Merrill to the analysis EP elections. Our findings are of substantive significance, because they explain why issue entrepreneurs may successfully mobilize extremist and/or euroskeptic constituencies in some member states, but not in others.