It can often seem as though political parties are veering ever closer to the margins, with radical stances becoming the norm.  While it’s tempting to conflate this with an intense belief in that policy, a new study from Lancaster University suggests it might actually reflect a lack of interest instead.

The paper reveals that it’s very common for parties to take radically different policy stances on an issues even if they receive largely the same information.  What’s more, it’s quite common for those parties who have less of a stance on the issue initially who eventually adopt a radical position.

Taking a stance

It’s normal for parties to have considerably more information than the general public upon which to base their decisions and policies, but when parties largely have access to the same information as each other, it’s common for one to take a moderate stance and the other a more radical one.

This will often involve one party taking a ‘pandering’ approach, which the authors define as that which they believe will harvest the most votes, while the other party adopts an ‘anti-pandering’ approach, which places it closer to its original ideals.  If the issue is such that only one party is motivated to take a stance however, it’s quite often the moderate party.

“Our research helps to explain why, even where parties are given identical signals with regards to a policy, they can diverge, with the emergence of moderate and radical parties,” the authors explain.  “What we found with our model was that where two parties took a stance on an issue, there would be one more moderate and one more radical, but if only one did, this would be the one with the moderate stance. This implies that it is parties who care least about policies who will make the more audacious, radical proposals on issues while those who care most will not alter their positions.”

To the margins

The authors suggest that the parties taking the extreme position often do so purely in an attempt to garner votes rather than any ideological belief in their stance.

This was evident when assessing issues as diverse as the UK’s entry into the Iraq War and the nuclear power debate in Germany.  In the UK, for instance, both Labour and Conservatives broadly supported entry into the war, whereas in Germany, Angela Merkel’s CDU party dramatically changed their stance on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.  Her SPD opponents adopted a more moderate, but no less critical, stance on the issue, which allowed Merkel to close the country’s nuclear plants almost immediately rather than phase them out gradually as the SPD proposed.

“Even interested voters cannot be well informed about every conceivable policy. They have to rely on representatives and experts to provide information, and parties signal the information they have via their platforms—with the more attractive elected,” the authors conclude.  “Parties take the more moderate or extreme position, but our model shows that voters are able to deduce which party is conveying the more credible message.”