Beyond Class: Class Party Programmatic Responses to Globalization Pressures and Cleavage Change

This paper examines possible party strategies in response to underlying changes in traditional cleavage structures. Specifically, the paper explores how parties originally tied to Rokkan-ian cleavage structures have adapted their programmatic supply in response to continually disappearing class-based constituencies and the rising salience of new issues linked to globalization. The paper proposes that parties can choose between two strategies: obscuring their programmatic supply in an attempt to reach constituencies that have more heterogeneous policy interests or to diversify their manifestos in order to take up new issues while retaining older ones. Using a new measure of programmatic clarity, the analysis includes two time series cross section models - one for each strategy. The data are from the Manifesto Project database and cover the period from 1960-2010. The findings are mixed but do make two important contributions to the literature: first, that traditional center parties on the left and right adopt different strategies with left parties choosing to obscure their manifesto positions while right parties choose higher clarity. Additionally, the findings suggest that, regardless of whether they are class based or not, parties facing a declining vote shares and decreasing levels of voter turnout, are more likely to obscure their manifesto positions.