Thesis
Unlikely, yet true : the impact of external shocks on party decision-making and electoral outcomes
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2026
- Thesis identifier
- T17606
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 202054788
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- This dissertation investigates how national political parties adapt to external shocks and how these adaptations shape competition and electoral outcomes. It develops and applies novel text-based methods to estimate party positions and salience, combining manifesto and parliamentary speech data across European countries from 2001 to 2019. The first part introduces a machine-learning pipeline that classifies and scales immigration-related text in party manifestos to estimate issue-specific positions. By integrating supervised classifiers and scaling models such as Wordfish and Wordscores, it produces a new dataset of 165 party positions across eight countries, validated against expert benchmarks. This approach offers a transparent and replicable method for generating low-cost, high-coverage positional data. The second part examines how the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis affected parties’ positional adaptation. Using manifesto-based estimates, it shows that crises prompt limited positional change, challenging expectations that the magnitude of adaptation is systematically driven by party-system fragmentation or incumbency. Adaptation follows structural rather than ideological patterns, with larger governing parties more constrained than small challengers. The third part analyses how the refugee crisis reshaped parliamentary debate and issue salience using ParlEE data. It finds a sharp, system-wide increase in immigration salience after 2015, independent of inflow levels and similar across government and opposition. The final part connects adaptation to electoral outcomes. Using speech-based positional estimates for seventeen countries, it shows that neither positional shifts nor salience changes predict electoral gains after a shock. Instead, large parties are disproportionately punished, while smaller challengers benefit. Overall, the findings demonstrate that crises reallocate political attention more than they alter ideological space. They highlight how structural constraints and accountability pressures shape party behaviour in uncertain times, providing a comparative framework for studying political adaptation under crisis conditions.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Greene, Zoe
- Resource Type
- DOI
- Date Created
- 2025
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