Sikk, A; Koeker, P; (2019) Candidate Turnover and Party Policy Change in Central and Eastern Europe. In: (Proceedings) 2019 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition. American Political Science Association (APSA)

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Abstract

We have previously suggested using the turnover of candidates from one election to the next as an overall proxy for party change. This paper studies the relationship between candidate change and party policy change. The causality can run in both ways. On the one hand, candidate change reflects general personnel change among parties and policy ideas can change following the change of people. On the other hand, policy changes can alienate existing candidates and/or draw in new people. Our analysis finds that candidate and policy change are linked when controlling for factors like party size, change in support etc. For candidate change, we rely on our original dataset “Electoral Candidates in Central and Eastern Europe” covering 200,000 candidates from 60 elections in nine democracies since 1990. For measuring policy change, we use MARPOR and CHES – two authoritative datasets with time-series data on party policies. Instead of employing ready-made aggregate indices (Left-Right/Gal-Tan), we develop new measures accounting for changes in specific policies; this is necessary as previous studies have cautioned against using the Left-Right scale in the region.

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