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One Trick Pony, or a Horse on the Rails?
Exploring the recent success of the United Kingdom Independence Party
Copyright: Morten Morland Cartoon for The Times
Master’s thesis Political Science
Student: Nienke Venema International Relations
Student ID: 5791820 Graduate School of Social Sciences
Date of completion: 30-04-2014 University of Amsterdam
2 ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has been around for twenty plus years, very little academic attention has been paid to it. This is most likely the result of the fact that until recently, UKIP was known to most people as a single-issue, hard Eurosceptic protest party troubled by internal quarrels and only really capable of booking electoral success at the secondary European Parliament elections. As of 2011 however, UKIP has been on a winning streak in by-elections and local parliament elections, and it has soared in British national polls. Moreover, its policy profile now seems to closely resemble that of the populist radical right. This research project is an attempt to
systematically explore, dissect and explain UKIP’s recent success by mapping why people vote for it and exploring how its policies have developed and broadened in recent years. By triangulating data from a content analysis of the UKIP’s local election manifestos, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the British Election Studies Continuous Monitoring Survey, market research companies Ipsos Mori and YouGov and recent studies, it finds that UKIP has taken on an issue entrepreneurial strategy regarding immigration from which it is currently most likely reaping the fruits. A further analysis of the data finds that UKIP’s success can be further explained by the strategies taken on by its mainstream competitor on the right, the Conservative Party. By delving into this peculiar case study, this research project aspires to create a deeper understanding of UKIP as well as of the complex issue of niche party strategies and success whilst adding strength to existing research. By looking at voter preferences, mainstream party responses and strategies as well as ay UKIP’s own evolvement in recent years, it aims to paint a broad picture of the reasons for its recent success.
Keywords: UKIP, Britain, Conservative Party, niche parties, niche party strategies, populist radical right, issue entrepreneurs, protest voting, issue voting, anti-immigrant parties, hard-Eurosceptic, single-issue party, populism, party competition, voter behavior
3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... 4 1. INTRODUCTION ... 5 1.1CATEGORIZING UKIP ... 7 1.2SUB-QUESTIONS ... 7
1.3METHODOLOGY AND DATA ... 8
1.4STRUCTURE ... 9
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ... 10
2.1DEFINING SUCCESS ... 10
2.2WHY DO PEOPLE VOTE FOR UKIP? ... 11
2.2.1 UKIP and the populist radical right ... 12
2.2.2 UKIP and the BNP ... 13
2.3VOTER BEHAVIOR AND PARTY COMPETITION ... 16
2.4NICHE PARTY SUCCESS ... 18
2.4.1 Issue entrepreneurs ... 19
2.4.2 Mainstream party strategies ... 22
2.5A SUMMARY OF THE EXPECTATIONS ... 23
3. METHODOLOGY AND DATA ... 25
3.1PROTEST OR IDEOLOGY? ... 25
3.1.1 Data and operalization ... 25
3.1.2 Methodology ... 27
3.2SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES PART I: POSITIONS AND EMPHASIS... 27
3.2.1 Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2010 ... 27
3.2.2 Local Election Manifestos ... 29
3.3UNIFIED POSITION ... 31
3.4SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES PART II: PUBLIC OPINION ... 32
3.4.1 Salience ... 32 3.4.2. Position... 33 3.4.3 Issue reputation ... 34 3.4PARTY COMPETITION ... 34 4. FINDINGS ... 35 4.1PROTEST OR IDEOLOGY? ... 36
4.2SUCCESSFUL STRATEGY I: PARTY POSITION AND EMPHASIS ... 37
4.1.1 The CHES analysis ... 37
4.1.2 Content analysis party manifestos ... 39
4.3UNIFIED POSITION ... 41
4.4SUCCESSFUL STRATEGY PART II: PUBLIC OPINION ... 41
4.3.1 Salience ... 41
4.3.2 Position... 43
4.3.3 Issue Ownership ... 45
4.4MAINSTREAM PARTY STRATEGIES ... 47
5. CONCLUSION, DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS ... 49
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 55
BOOKS AND ARTICLES ... 55
WEBSITES AND ONLINE ARTICLES ... 59
APPENDIX 1: CHAPEL HILL EXPERT SURVEY QUESTIONS ... 60
APPENDIX 2: BRITISH ELECTION STUDY’S CONTINUOUS MONITORING SURVEY ... 61
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Acknowledgements
I never thought that I would see the day that my very own Master’s thesis would lie before me in print. The fact that I have finally completed it is a true victory on both myself and the hard personal circumstances which have caused for it to be such a long and bumpy ride. Because of how much time it took and how difficult it sometimes got, I feel that it is only appropriate to truly thank a few people for their (ongoing) support and encouragement. First and foremost I am grateful to my mother for her endless trust in my abilities and for the fact that she raised me to never be a quitter. Making her proud has been on my mind throughout this process. Secondly I want to thank my love Laurens, who convinced me to start over because he knew how much I wanted to finish my degree, even when I did not. He tirelessly pushed me to keep going throughout this process by being there for me during late nights and grumpy mornings with love, care and the occasional but necessary kick-in-the-butt. He is my rock and I am in awe of the scope of his love and his willingness to support me. Without him, there would be no thesis. Lastly I would like to thank my
supervisor dr. Tjitske Akkerman for her kind encouragements, her flexibility and her useful advice, my dear friend Catherine de Vries for allowing me to pick her brain, my study advisor Geertje Haverkamp for her understanding of my circumstances and her trust in me, Annemarijn Spaans for all the great tools and insights that she gave me, the University of Amsterdam’s examination commission for allowing me to graduate way past the deadline and last but not at all least my wonderful and patient friends for their moral support and their understanding of my busy and boring schedule these last months. I am so grateful to all. Thank you!
Nienke Venema
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1
. Introduction
The earthquake result of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in the local
parliament elections of May 3rd 2013 represents by far the largest incursion into British
local electoral politics by an independent fourth party since the Second World War, and has subsequently caused quite a stir. UKIP came in third place regarding the popular vote, only just after the Labour (first) and Conservative Party (second) and well ahead of Nick
Clegg’s Liberal Democrats (fourth).1 Despite all the commotion surrounding these results,
UKIP is no new kid on the block in British politics: it was founded in 1993 with as its central aim to oppose British membership of the European Union and it has been around ever since. After a bit of a slow start in its first ten years, UKIP began booking substantial successes in the European Parliament elections, coming in third place in 2004 and second place in 2009. However until recently, UKIP had never managed to translate its success from a European to a national level. Its best result in the General Elections has been 3,1% of the popular vote in 2010, and it has never won a seat in the House of Commons. It had not done particularly well in local or by-elections either and had often decided not to even bother standing in them. It’s hard-Eurosceptic character (Taggart and Sczcerbiak 2008) and its failure to break through electorally outside of the European Parliament elections have given UKIP a reputation of being a single-issue party centered on European integration. The fact that UKIP has been prone to quarrels and has seen a vast number party leaders come and go since its founding further contributed to its rather insignificant image. As a consequence it has received very little attention from scholars, aside from in academic literature on hard-Eurosceptic parties.
Since 2011 however, UKIP has been putting in strong showings in by-elections and since the second half of 2012 it has also been soaring in British national polls. The May 2013 local election results have been its biggest electoral success so far, but UKIP is
currently surging into the lead for the European Parliament elections on May 22nd this year.
(Kellner 2014) Moreover, it has been hitting double digits in polls measuring which party people intend to vote for in the next General Elections, leaving the Liberal Democrats far behind and increasingly approaching Labour and the Conservative Party. (Merrick and Rentoul 2014) Media attention for UKIP has risen steeply along with these polls: a “quick and dirty scan” on coverage on both UKIP and Nigel Farage demonstrates almost a tenfold
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increase in mentions in 2013 compared to 2011. (Goodwin and Ford 2013) After having been practically ignored for the first 20 years of its existence, UKIP is suddenly being taken very seriously by politicians, journalists and scholars.
The shock that UKIP’s electoral success brought about is in part the result of the fact that until recently, ‘new’ parties have not really been able to take off in the United Kingdom as a consequence of the country’s electoral system. In the British single-member plurality system, the candidate with the highest number of votes is elected in every
electoral district. With two or fewer candidates running for office, the winner will have a majority whereas with three or more parties, (s)he will have a plurality of votes. This system discourages voters from voting for smaller, newer parties, as they fear that this might ‘waste their vote’: a third party is unlikely to win enough votes for a seat. Another reason not to vote for a newcomer is that this takes a vote away from the favored larger party, and thus increases the chances of the voters’ least favorable candidate being elected from the top two parties. In accordance with Duverger’s law, which states that a plurality rule with single-member districts will most likely result in a two-party system, the United Kingdom party system has been dominated by the Labour Party and the Conservative Party since the mid-1920’s. (Duverger 1951, Riker 1982) The electoral system makes it
particularly hard for more recent, smaller parties such as the Green Party and UKIP to beat the system and become electorally successful in any election, and even harder for them to gain seats in Parliament.
Taken into account the fact that UKIP’s recent success in the local elections is
unprecedented despite that institutional factors such as the electoral system and the party system have not changed and given the fact that it continues to do extremely well in British national polls, this project is built around the following research question:
What explains the recent electoral success of the United Kingdom Independence Party?
Variation in the electoral success of political parties (both mainstream and niche) has typically been explained by institutional factors (electoral rules, governmental types, the structure of the state etc.) and sociological factors (socioeconomic conditions and the value orientation of a society). However, these explanations have often been found insufficient to account for variation in a party’s vote share over time and cannot explain why, for
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example, some niche parties become so successful under unpromising circumstances whereas others fail under favorable ones. (Van der Brug et al. 2005) To analyze which factors might have influenced UKIP’s recent success in terms of votes, this research paper will instead discuss theories of voter behavior and party competition.
1.1 Categorizing UKIP
The main research question requires a definition of UKIP in terms of party family and its core issues, as this is relevant to why a party appeals to voters and which strategies it can use to maximize its vote-share. (Meguid 2005; 2008; Adams et al. 2006) The project is built around the assumption that UKIP belongs to the niche party-family seeing as it mobilizes on a small number of non-economic issues, which is why theories on niche party behavior and success will be applied. (Meguid 2005; 2008; Wagner 2012) However, many different types of niche-parties exist, all with their distinct appeal and strategies. (Adams et al. 2006) Although UKIP was founded as a single-issue hard-Eurosceptic party that
appealed to a very particular group of core-voters, it is highly unlikely that its recent success on a national level has solely been the result of this rather specific characteristic. (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2008) Indeed a single opinion poll fielded by market research company YouGov found that immigration was an even more important reason why people decided to cast the ballot for UKIP in the local elections in May 2013. (Jordan 2013) A desire to leave the European Union came second in the poll and a third important reason for why people decided to vote for UKIP was a dislike of the major parties. As will be further explained in chapter 2, this research project expects that UKIP’s policy agenda has
substantially broadened since its founding, and that it now resembles the populist right in that it attracts voters through it anti-immigrant and protest appeal as well as through its hard-Eurosceptic position.
1.2 Sub-questions
A set of two sub-questions has been prepared to be able to answer the main research question thoroughly and systematically. Firstly, the question of why people decide to vote for a party such as UKIP will be answered through a review of existing theories on the appeal of niche parties in general and parties with a populist radical right character more specifically, thereby not forgetting about UKIP’s hard-Eurosceptic character. Particular attention will be paid to the competing theories of issue voting and protest voting. (Van der Brug et al. 2000; 2003) Secondly, this research project will draw on theories by Adams et
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al (2006), Wagner (2012), Hobolt and De Vries (2012) and Meguid (2005; 2008) to
establish which factors increase the likelihood that people do decide to vote for a party such as UKIP. These two sub-questions will be answered within the theoretical framework and will subsequently lead to a set of hypotheses, which will be laid out in the final sub-chapter of chapter 2 and tested through the analyses that are discussed in chapter 4 and 5.
The sub-questions that will be answered within the theoretical framework and from which the main hypotheses of this research project are drawn are:
1. Why do people decide to vote for a populist, hard-Eurosceptic anti-immigrant niche party such as UKIP?
2. What increases the likelihood that people decide to vote for such a party?
1.3 Methodology and data
This research project will take place in the form of a case study, which is best defined as an “in-depth study of a single unit, where the scholar’s aim is to elucidate features of a larger class of similar phenomena.”(Gerring 2004: 341) The unit in this particular research project is UKIP. Case studies, unlike other studies, do not have hard-and-fast rules but because of their usually more qualitative nature, they allow students and scholars to “emphasize detailed contextual analysis of a limited number of events or conditions and their
relationships”. (ibidem) A substantial amount of large-scale quantitative research on niche parties, their strategies and the different ways in which they can become successful has already been conducted. (i.e. Meguid 2005, 2008; Ezrow 2008; Adams et al. 2006; Wagner 2012) This smaller scale project triangulating different data and methods aims to create deeper understanding of UKIP and its strategies whilst strengthening existing research on niche parties. An advantage of this specific case study is that there have not been any significant changes in the political and social institutions and the political culture in the United Kingdom since UKIP has started climbing up the ladder and therefore a lot of factors can be held stable.
The theoretical framework posed in chapter 2 will lead to a total of eight hypotheses, which predict which factors have lead to UKIP recently becoming electorally successful. These hypotheses will be laid out in the final sub-chapter of chapter 2. Testing the hypotheses requires data on public opinion, voter behavior and party positions. Both quantitative and
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qualitative data and research methods will be used to test them. The quantitative data will be gathered from renown market research companies Ipsos Mori and YouGov, the British Election Studies Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS) and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES). To study UKIP’s more recent strategies, a content analysis of UKIP’s 2011, 2012 and 2013 local elections manifestos will be conducted. An accompanying codebook is provided in Appendix 3. Finally, an analysis of existing studies will be applied where other is not available.
1.4 Structure
This research project has the following structure. The next chapter will set out the theoretical framework from which the eight hypotheses and appurtenant analyses will be drawn. The third chapter will discuss the methodology that this research project will apply to analyze UKIP’s recent success as well as the data that it will rely on. The findings from these analyses will be presented and analyzed in chapter four. Finally, chapter five will reflect on the findings, draw a conclusion on the main research question and provide recommendations for possible further research projects.
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2. Theoretical Framework
This chapter will set out the concepts, definitions and the existing theories that underlie this research project. It will begin by defining success and then continue to categorize UKIP through assessing which party family it belongs to and which core issues it mobilizes on. Then it will set out to answer the two sub-questions posed in the introductory chapter. The answers to these sub-questions will allow for this research project to be able to structurally and systematically analyze and answer the main question of what explains UKIP’s recent electoral success. The first question that will be answered through the theories outlined in this chapter, is why people decide to vote for a party such as UKIP. The second question asks which factors increase the likelihood that people decide to vote for UKIP. The
hypotheses that follow from answering these questions and reviewing the relevant literature will be summarized in the concluding sub-chapter of this theoretical framework.
2.1 Defining success
To be able to explore UKIP’s recent electoral success, it is important to first define what exactly is meant by success. For political parties, success is reached when they achieve one or more of their goals in terms of office-seeking, policy-seeking and vote-seeking or a mix thereof. (Strøm 1990) Vote-seeking behavior means that parties are seeking to maximize their electoral support, office-seeking refers to parties seeking to maximize their control over political office, which is usually operationally defined in terms of being in
government and lastly policy-seeking implies that a party takes on a strategy that aims to maximize its effect on public policy. (Strøm 1990) Most parties care about all three of these goals, but some parties prioritize one over the others. This is caused by the fact that
although these different goals are clearly highly interdependent and oftentimes require the same strategies, they also face important tradeoffs. These tradeoffs apply to some parties more than for others, as will be discussed at further length in chapter 2.4.
Seeing as UKIP has never held office, but instead has recently booked unprecedented results in local elections and soared in the British national polls, this
research paper will focus on explaining its success in terms of votes. That is not to say that UKIP does not also take on a policy-seeking strategy, or that it has not been successful in influencing policy. There are several ways for a party to reach success on this level, and for a small party such as UKIP it might suffice to simply put an issue on the political agenda. The main research question answered in this project however is which factors explain
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UKIP’s recent electoral success. Therefore, it will limit itself to theories centered on
explaining success in terms of votes. Possible implications of the findings of this project on the extent to which UKIP has and will influence policy will be discussed in the conclusion of this project.
2.2 Why do people vote for UKIP?
Before delving into relevant theories of voter behavior and party competition, it is
important to first define UKIP in terms of party type and policy agenda, seeing as different parties appeal to voters for different reasons and through different strategies.
This research project considers UKIP to first and foremost be part of the niche party family. Since the second half of the twentieth century, new and relatively small political parties have emerged and gained popularity on the basis over previously non-politicalized issues such as the environment, immigration and European integration. These parties are generally referred to by their core issue, for example: green parties, anti-immigrant parties and Eurosceptic parties. However oftentimes the term niche parties is used as an umbrella term to describe all of these ‘non-mainstream’ parties. Niche parties, their success and their strategies have been an increasing focal point in recent academic literature. So far three important definitions of what they entail have been offered. The first, by Adams et al. (2006), simply argues that niche parties are characterized by their ‘non-centrist’ or extreme ideologies. The second, more complicated definition offered by Bonnie Meguid (2005) characterizes niche parties as an identifiable group of parties that differ programmatically from their mainstream competitors because they raise a very limited set of issues that fall outside of the traditional class cleavage and that cross-cut existing partisan alignments. (Meguid 2005: 348) A third and last definition is offered by Wagner (2011), who set out specifically to measure and further clarify the concept of niche parties and found that they are best defined simply as “parties that compete primarily on a small number of
non-economic issues”. (Wagner 2011: 2) This research project will rely on Wagner’s simple yet effective definition, according to which UKIP fits the description of a niche party. Because different varieties of niche parties exist, each with their own distinct appeal (Adams et al., 2006), it is necessary to also establish which issues UKIP mobilizes on, and what other characteristics might be relevant for its vote-seeking strategies.
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2.2.1 UKIP and the populist radical right
Up until now, most relevant academic literature has portrayed UKIP as a right-wing hard-Eurosceptic single-issue party. (i.e. Usherwood 2008; Wagner 2012) Single-issue parties are characterized by their aim to “notice and put on the political agenda a specific issue that is of importance to parts of the electorate but that is at that time consciously or
unconsciously ignored by established parties”. (Mudde 1999: 183) Hard-Euroscepticism can be identified by “the principled objection to the current form of European integration in the EU”. (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2008: 10) Indeed UKIP was founded in 1993 with the aim to actively oppose British membership to the European Union and it has conveyed a continuous and strong message of principled opposition to European integration ever since. Moreover its position on Europe has proven to be the most important part of its appeal in previous national and European elections in quite a few analyses. (i.e. Ford et al. 2011) However, this research project assumes that present-day UKIP can no longer be considered a single-issue party. The fact that it failed to translate its success in the second order
European Parliament Elections to a national level might have given off that impression, but its recent electoral results in the local and by-elections and its surging in the British
national polls suggest that UKIP’s appeal has broadened. This research project sets out with the assumption that UKIP can no longer be considered a one-trick pony, but that instead if has become a horse on the rails.
Because Euroscepticism has always far greater effects on support for the party, UKIP has never been treated as a full member of the populist radical right. However, recent literature has noted that the party’s policy offer has increasingly resembled that of the populist radical right. (i.e. Fella 2008; Ford et al. 2011; Widfeldt and Brandenburg 2013) Populist radical right parties share an ideological core combining populism, nativism and
authoritarianism. (Mudde 2007) Nativism is an ideology advocating that states should be inhabited solely by members of the superior native group (nation), and that nonnative elements, persons and ideas form a fundamental threat to this ideal homogeneous nation-state. (Betz 2003; Mudde 2007: 19) Authoritarianism is “the belief in a strictly ordered society in which infringements of authority are to be punished severely”. (Mudde 2007: 25) Populism, finally, has been defined by Mudde as a “thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volunté générale, i.e. the general will of the people”. (Mudde 2007; 2004)
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Most scholars agree that populism is a big part of UKIP’s identity as it continuously criticizes mainstream parties for being elitist, or ‘all the same’ and regularly calls for a strengthening of local democracy and for referendums on a local and national level. (i.e. Fella 2008; Abedi and Lundberg 2009; Ford et al. 2011; Widfeldt and Brandenburg 2013) An interesting observation further strengthening this assumption is fact that in 2010,
UKIP’s election manifesto was – very tellingly - titled ‘Sod the Lot!’2
. The fact that UKIP is considered to be a populist party is relevant to this research project because such parties differ from mainstream parties in the sense that they have a unique ‘protest’ appeal to voters. (Schumacher and Rooduijn 2013)
A second relevant feature is UKIP’s anti-immigrant position. UKIP has increasingly
become associated with immigration, and many scholars now acknowledge the relevance of it’s anti-immigrant stance. (i.e. Fella 2008; Ford et al. 2011 Lynch et al. 2011; Widfeldt and Brandenburg 2013) Several research papers have also mentioned how focusing more on immigration could provide a useful strategy for UKIP in terms of vote-seeking, as its voters have been found to find it a highly important issue. (Ford et al. 2011; Lynch et al. 2011; Lynch and Whitaker 2013). However, UKIP does not feature in academic literature on anti-immigrant parties, and is never categorized as such when it is being analyzed in research papers. Instead, scholars studying anti-immigrant parties in Britain have focused mostly on the far-right British National Party (BNP), which has actively mobilized anti-immigrant sentiments for almost thirty years. (Gallagher, Laver and Mair: 2011, pp. 266)
2.2.2 UKIP and the BNP
An important argument for why the BNP’s success has remained so marginal compared to that of anti-immigrant parties in other countries, aside from the first-past-the-post electoral system mentioned in the introduction, is presumably that the party is stigmatized by its own ‘toxic’ legacy of right-wing extremism. (Goodwin 2013) The BNP lacks what Ivarsflaten refers to as a ‘reputational shield’. (Ivarsflaten 2006) She argues that voters are less likely to vote for parties that seem to be “racist or extremist” because of current “widespread social norms of racial equality and abidance to democratic institutions”. (Ivarsflaten 2006: 6) Her research demonstrates that parties that have built on legacies other than being anti-immigration, and that are perceived to be acceptable by voters and other actors in society are more likely to become successful when mobilizing on this issue because they have such
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a reputational shield to protect them from being associated with racism and extremism. (Ivarsflaten 2006) Whereas the BNP lacks a reputational shield, UKIP does build on a different legacy (Euroscepticism). Therefore, emphasizing its anti-immigrant issue stance could, if successful, potentially open a Pandora’s Box of closet anti-immigrant voters in the United Kingdom.
UKIP’s resembling of the populist radical right is relevant to this research project firstly because it has been demonstrated that such parties can attract large numbers of protest voters. (Van der Brug et al. 2003) These voters are thought to be the so-called “losers of modernity” who are strained by the uncertainties produced by large-scale socio-economic and socio-structural change and motivated by sentiments of alienation and discontent with the way in which society has developed. (Betz 1998) Can UKIP’s success be explained by the fact that it attracts large numbers of such protest voters who are expressing their discontent with existing parties and politics? To measure this phenomenon, Van der Brug et al. (2000) define the protest voter as a rational voter who: “is neither an idealist nor a pragmatist. (S)he does not vote for a party that is ideologically near, nor does (s)he seem to be attracted by a powerful party”. (Van der Brug et al. 2000: 83) Instead, these protest voters aim to “demonstrate rejection of all other parties”. (Van der Brug et al: 82) For a political party to be eligible as a protest party, it needs to be both relatively small (as power cannot be a motivation) and stigmatized by mainstream parties. (Van der Brug et al. 2000) Because ideological proximity on a left/right scale is still considered to be a focal point for voters when deciding which party to cast the ballot for, a second, necessary criterion is that a protest party should draw voters from all big parties equally. (Van der Eijk et al. 1996; Van der Brug et al. 2000; Mair 2007) After all, ideology cannot be part of a true protest voter’s motivation.
Van der Brug et al. conducted research on the extent to which anti-immigrant parties attract protest votes in 2000 and 2003. The first research found that anti-immigrant parties generally attract votes for the same reason that other parties do: ideological and pragmatic considerations. (Van der Brug et al. 2000) However, the follow up research conducted in 2003 found that quite a few of the parties they had studied before had now attracted substantial amounts of protest votes. (Van der Brug et al, 2003) Because UKIP conveys a particularly strong anti-elitist (populist) message, there is still a reasonable chance that it attracts voters on the basis of their strong protest attitude. Is UKIP a protest
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party, and do people vote for UKIP out of protest? Or are they drawn to Nigel Farage’s party out of policy considerations? Because Euroscepticism has been proven to be the strongest determinant of a vote for UKIP in the past, and because the poll mentioned in the introductory chapter demonstrates that European integration and immigration were the two most important reasons why people decided to vote for UKIP in 2013, this research project expects that this is not the case. Instead, it expects that UKIP attracts voters based on their ideological preferences. This leads to the following hypothesis:
H1: UKIP cannot be considered a protest party, but instead draws voters mainly based on their ideological preferences.
It should be noted that some research has demonstrated that leadership has proven to be an important factor in why people decide to vote for populist parties. (Schumacher and Rooduijn 2010) However these theories are contested (Van der Pas et al. 2010) and, more
importantly, UKIP has had the same leader since 2010.3 Therefore the possible effect of
leadership will not be assessed in this research project.
In sum, this research project considers UKIP to resemble the populist radical right in the sense that it mobilizes on a populist anti-immigrant agenda as well as on its
hard-Eurosceptic position. Although such parties are known to sometimes attract voters based on their protest attitudes, it is expected that UKIP appeals to voters based on ideological preferences instead. First, chapter 2.3 will explore general theories of voter behavior and party competition to provide an answer to the second sub-question, which asks which factors increase the likelihood that people decide to vote for a political party such as UKIP. Since existing theories are mainly about mainstream parties, chapter 2.4 will focus more on how they apply to niche parties. Finally, chapter 2.5 will summarize the expectations and hypotheses that follow from the theories discussed in this chapter.
3 Nigel Farage briefly left the party as their leader from late 2009 to contest the Buckingham seat of John
Bercow at the 2010 General Election. He lost that election and returned after being reelected as UKIP’s leader in November 2010.
16 2.3 Voter behavior and party competition
Voter behavior has gone through quite some changes over the last few decades. Up until the second half of the 20th century, political parties in Western Europe were almost entirely inspired by social structure (mostly class and religion) and electoral choice was largely based on partisan loyalties: people voted on the basis of the class they belonged to, or their religious affiliation. However these traditional linkages started weakening in the second half of the twentieth century whilst electoral volatility became stronger and voters became increasingly inclined to change their party of choice. (Mair 2002) As a result of these developments, mainstream parties became less successful whilst niche parties mobilizing on ‘new’ issues increasingly made their way into the political landscape. Although scholars have yet to find a clear-cut answer as to what has replaced socio-structural voting, analyses of recent elections have found an increased importance of issue voting, or the extent to which a policy issue influences voters electoral choices. (e.g. Carmines and Stimson 1980)
Indeed rational choice models of policy and ideological voting have generally been considered the most successful in explaining why people choose to cast the ballot for a certain political party over another. (i.e. Kitschelt 1995; Van der Brug et al. 2000). At the heart of these models lies the ‘classical spatial approach’ or the Downsian proximity model, which argues that parties compete for votes by taking different positions on the dominant policy dimension, which has historically been the left-right scale dominated by economic issues. (Downs 1957) According to this framework, parties can either move towards (converge) or away (diverge) from the position of their competitors in a given policy space (i.e. health care; the welfare state; education) and voters henceforth choose parties whose overall positions they perceive to be the closest to their own policy
preferences. (Downs 1957) It has since been found that a party’s policy offer is not simply made up of the different issues that it decides to address in the way that Downs argues. To begin with, not all political conflicts are about position issues, but instead many are about generally desired goals such as lower unemployment rates, lower poverty rates or a clean environment. (Stokes 1963) These issues on which parties generally agree to a great extent are referred to as valence issues. Valence theory propounds that political actors aren’t always arguing about what goal should be achieved, but rather about how this goal should be realized and what priority should be given to it. (Stokes 1963)
Voters in turn are found not to base their electoral preference only on their given position on certain issues, but also on the extent to which they associate a party with “some
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goal or state or symbol that is positively or negatively valued”. (Stokes 1963: 373) This has important implications for our understanding issue voting: voters do not just cast the ballot based on (dis)agreement with a party’s given positions but instead there are other relevant factors at stake. The extent to which a party has built up credibility towards an issue has been demonstrated to play a key role in issue based voting in general. (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996) Political parties can build up an issue reputation, which is shaped by their policy stances and preferred constituencies and further influenced by their
performance in office. (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996) A positive issue reputation can turn into a perceived issue ownership, which implies that a party is considered to be the most competent, credible proponent of that particular issue by the mean voter. (Petrocik 1996) For example, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom is seen as the most competent party regarding the management of health care and education, whereas the Conservative Party is positively associated with taxes, crime and defense issues. (Budge and Farlie 1983) A party’s reputation is of influence on voter behavior: voters are more likely to vote for a certain party if they consider it to be the most competent on a given issue. (Petrocik 2003; Meguid and Belanger 2008)
Because of this expected influence of issue ownership on electoral choice, parties will emphasize issues which they prefer and avoid issues that might make them look bad– in general but particularly during electoral campaigns. (Petrocik 1996; Meguid 2005; 2008) The underlying rationale is the concept of priming or “the impact that agenda-setting can have on the way in which individuals evaluate public officials by influencing the thematic areas or issues these individuals use to form these evaluations.” (Scheufele 2000: 297) Although political parties are expected to put more weight on issues they currently ‘own’, issue ownership has proven to be a dynamic rather than a static process and parties can also compete over new issues or attempt to ‘steal’ the ownership of existing issues by
emphasizing them in their manifestos, campaign clips or in the media. (Walgrave et al.
2009) Lastly, the impact of issue reputation on an individual’s vote choice has been proven
to be conditional upon whether voters perceive that issue to be salient. (Meguid and Belanger 2008) Only if voters think that an issue is important, does issue ownership affect their decision in the voting booth. (Meguid and Belanger 2008) After all, why would one vote for a party, which they consider competent on a certain issue if they do not think the issue itself is important? Issue salience and position are found to be two complementary
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factors, and it has been demonstrated that political parties will come across as more competent overall if the issues that they are perceived competent on are the ones
dominating the political agenda and/or the public debate. (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996; Meguid and Belanger 2008)
In sum, the theories explained above have demonstrated that a party’s appeal to voters is not just made up of the different issues that it decided to address. Instead it consists of different “issue components”, which are the elements surrounding a different issue such as a party’s given position, the extent to which this position is emphasized by the party and the perceived positive or negative reputation that the party has on it. (Wagner 2012:65; Petricik 1996; Budge and Farlie 1996; Meguid 2005; 2008) These issue components all affect the likelihood that people will decide to vote for a party based on its issues, both individually and combined.
2.4 Niche party success
The abovementioned theories about voter behavior and party competition are designed for understanding why people vote for mainstream parties, and what strategies these parties can take to influence this process. Although important parts of these theories do apply to niche parties, these parties also differ from mainstream parties a great deal. As Adams et al. put it: “linkages between a niche party’s programs, public opinion and the outcomes of elections are dramatically different for niche parties compared to mainstream parties”. (Adams et al. 2006: 514) The most important difference between both party types that applies to this research project is the distinct voice that niche parties have on their core, non-economic issue(s) and the way in which this influences their chances of electoral success and the strategies they have to maximize this success. (Adams et al. 2006) Whereas mainstream parties attract voters on a broad policy platform, niche parties are more
dependent on their original appeal: their core issue is crucial in receiving support from their candidates, members and activists. (Adams et al. 2006) Evidence from previous research suggests that unlike their mainstream counterparts, niche party elites are hardly faced with the complicated strategic trade-off between compromising on policy and electoral gain, seeing as altering their core positions or their emphasis on them is unlikely to be electorally rewarding or even feasible for them. (Adams et al. 2006) Instead they have to stick to their original policy position to retain their core-voters. Whereas mainstream parties are
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increase their vote share, niche parties cannot enhance their electoral appeal by presenting moderate policy programs as “such an adjustment depresses the party’s electoral support and moves the party away from its members preferred policy positions”. (Adams et al. 2006: 525; Ezrow 2008) Instead, rigidly sticking to their core policy position is “an electorally pragmatic strategy” for niche parties, who will both lose votes and suffer internal divisions if they move away from it. (Ezrow 2008: 206; Adams et a. 2006) As Adams et al. put it: “both vote-seeking and policy seeking objectives motivate a pat-stand strategy” which leads to niche parties arguably being “prisoners of their own ideologies”: they are forced to stick to the policy positions that they have originally chosen. (Adams et al. 2006: 525-526) For niche parties to be electorally successful, their core issue(s) therefore need to have high salience for voters. (Ezrow 2008, Meguid 2005, 2008) Additionally, a relatively large share of voters has to agree with their relatively extreme position, and consider the party to be the issue owner. (Petrocik 1963)
2.4.1 Issue entrepreneurs
What vote-seeking weapons do niche parties have in their own arsenal? Although they cannot move away from their core policy position, they can decide to broaden their political agenda by also mobilizing on a different issue. (Adams et al. 2006: 526; Meguid 2005) A recent article by Wagner and Meyer demonstrates that niche-parties “appear to respond to vote-seeking incentives to broaden their salience profile”. (Wagner and Meyer 2013: 174) As has been noted earlier, this research project assumes that UKIP has
broadened its policy agenda in the past by increasingly mobilizing on an anti-immigrant position. It will explore which factors lead to such a strategy being successful by drawing from a recent paper by Hobolt and De Vries (2012). In this paper, they set out to explore the dynamics of issue competition by examining which parties facilitate the politicization of new policy issues. The term issue entrepreneurship is defined as “the party strategy of active mobilization of a new policy issue by adopting a policy position on that issue that is substantially different from the current position of the mainstream”. (Hobolt and De Vries 2012: 5) Although the Downsian spatial model predicts convergence around the median voter, the reality of political competition is that both centripetal (convergence) and
centrifugal (divergence) incentives are important in most party systems. (Cox 1990) It has been established that niche parties in particular do not profit from moving towards the political center, but instead are better off distinguishing themselves from other parties via “product differentiation”, or the taking and emphasizing of extreme positions. (Mudde
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1999: 118; Hobolt and De Vries 2012;Wagner 2012) Taking on a position that is relatively extreme compared to other parties can provide these parties with increased media coverage and upgrade their public profile. On the longer term, it can have a positive effect on their perceived issue reputation, as they will be increasingly associated with the topic and seen as competent on it. (Wagner 2012) An example of such a strategy being successful are Green parties, which are perceived as having the most extreme position on environmental issues whilst also being strongly identified with that policy area, and often being
considered to have the best reputation on it. (Wagner 2012) The dual benefits of policy differentiation and issue ownership make it an attractive strategy for niche parties.
Hobolt and De Vries found that “challenger parties”, which they define as parties that have never held political office and that are far removed from the mean voter and the mean party position, usually take on successful issue entrepreneurial strategies. (Hobolt and De Vries 2012: 8) The two other two party categories that they define, “mainstream
governing parties” and “mainstream opposition parties”, are unlikely to “upset the existing political equilibrium” by mobilizing on ‘new’ policy issues, as they benefit from the ways things are and would only risk alienating their existing voters as well as endangering future coalition negotiations in doing so. (Hobolt and De Vries 2012: 7) Challenger parties on the other hand have a real incentive upset the status quo as they already occupy a ‘losing position’ in the political landscape and seeing as such a strategy has the potential of increasing their chances of electoral success. (ibidem) That is not to say that challenger parties do not face risks when taking on such a strategy, as a broadening of their policy agenda can potentially jeopardize their internal unity. (Hobolt and De Vries 2012; Lynch et al. 2012) Indeed challenger parties are found to be most successful as issue entrepreneurs if they hold an internally unified position on the new policy issue. (Hobolt and De Vries 2012) This finding is further strengthened by the fact that voters are found to be more likely to vote for a party based on issues when they are certain about the party’s position on them. (Van der Eijk and Franklin 1996) Mixed messages can have a negative effect on voter perceptions. Hobolt and De Vries also demonstrated that challenger parties are more likely to successfully promote a new policy issue when their position on it is relatively close to that of the mean voter position. (Hobolt and De Vries 2012) Lastly, it is expected the issue needs to be salient to the public, or the effects of mobilizing on it will be minimal. (Meguid and Belanger 2008)
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In sum, for an issue entrepreneurial strategy to be successful, parties need to
mobilize on a ‘winning issue’, which is an issue on which they agree internally, on which a large share of the general public agrees with them and which is salient to the general public. Their position needs to also be clearly distinct (more extreme) compared to that of competitors. Lastly, these parties need to assure that voters are aware of their
comparatively different position by emphasizing it in their campaign materials, interviews and other outlets. (Hobolt and De Vries 2012; Wagner 2012)
The abovementioned theories have established which factors increase the likelihood that people vote for parties such as UKIP based on its issues, namely: if their position on these issues is distinct (more extreme), if they emphasize these positions, if they are internally unified on them and if the issues they select are salient to the public. In addition, the position that the party takes on this issue should be close to that of the mean voter. If all of the abovementioned factors are successfully implemented, it can be expected that this will lead to an increase in these parties’ issue reputation, which in turn will increase their appeal and therefore their vote share. It has also been established that taking on an issue
entrepreneurial strategy visa-vi a new issue can be a successful way for niche parties, who are otherwise “prisoners of their own ideology”, to increase their vote share. (Adams et al. 2006: 526) These theories all apply to the UKIP having possibly broadened its policy agenda by mobilizing on immigration. However, since its position on European integration has proven to be an important reason why people vote for it, they should also be applicable to this issue. This leads to the following hypotheses:
H2: UKIP’s position on both European integration and immigration is more extreme than that of its competitor(s);
H3: UKIP emphasizes its positions on European integration and immigration;
H4: UKIP holds a unified position on European integration and immigration;
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H6: The mean voter in Britain holds a position that is close to that of UKIP on European integration and immigration;
H7: A vast amount of the British public considers UKIP to be the issue owner of European integration and immigration;
2.4.2 Mainstream party strategies
The last factor that might influence the chances that a niche party such as UKIP has in attracting issue voters is the strategy of its mainstream competitors. In her seminal work on niche party success, Meguid (2005) identifies three different mainstream party strategies that can be of influence on issue salience, position, ownership and niche party vote share. If the proximal mainstream party finds the niche party’s core issue either unimportant or complicated, it can choose to adopt a dismissive strategy (ignore the issue) in order to lower its salience and to reduce the niche party’s support. This is expected to have a negative effect on the niche party’s success, seeing as it has limited issues of increasing the salience of issues compared to its mainstream competitors. However, such a dismissive strategy could also backfire if a non-proximal mainstream party then decides to raise the salience of that issue by taking on an adversarial strategy, in which it opposes the niche party’s issue, which it might decide to do in order to (re)claim ownership of the niche party’s core issue. Of course, it could also backfire if the issue is salient for other reasons. Lastly, a proximal mainstream party can choose an accommodative strategy if it feels sufficiently threatened by the niche party, in which it acknowledges the issue’s relevance and moves towards the niche party’s position in order to regain ownership of that issue, thereby lowering the niche party’s vote share.
Bale et al. (2010) studied social democratic responses to the radical right and found fairly similar strategies, for which they have further specified the circumstances under which they might be taken on. They argue that mainstream parties might hold their position if they do not consider the niche party to be a significant threat, thereby reinforcing their own policy stance, mobilizing support and facing down the challenger. Secondly, they found that a mainstream party might decide to defuse the niche party’s issue if they find the challenger too serious and complicated, thereby attempting to reduce its salience. Lastly, it can choose to adopt a niche party’s position if it fears that the posed threat is so serious that it might reduce its chances of entering government.
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This research project has established that the two issues on which UKIP mobilizes are European integration and immigration. Although they are both considered ‘new’ issues, in the sense that they became salient after the second half of the twentieth century and are not self-evidently included in the traditional economic left-right dimension, they are not particularly new to Britain or to British politics. Indeed the two dominant mainstream parties had already taken position on them by the time that UKIP began its current surge in success in 2011. The Conservative Party is UKIP’s most proximal mainstream party on both issues, and the party from which this research project expects that it is most likely to draw its new voters from. This is why it will focus on the Conservative Party’s position and strategies on both these issues in order to assess what space UKIP had to mobilize on them. From the abovementioned theories, it can be expected that the Conservative Party will not have taken on a dismissive or adoptive position on either issue, seeing as it will not have felt threatened by UKIP on a national level due to the latter’s grim prospects of winning seats. Instead, it can be anticipated that the Conservative Party took on the adversarial strategy. Although this is reserved for the non-proximal mainstream party in Meguid’s (2005) theory, it equals the holding position in the theory designed by Bale et al. (2010). (Lynch and Whitaker 2013) This strategy implies that the Conservative Party stuck to its original position on and emphasis of both immigration and European integration. As a result, UKIP would successfully be able to ‘steal’ some of the Conservative Party’s
ownership on these issues and increase its vote share, as an adversarial strategy implies that the salience of the issues is high. (Lynch and Whitaker 2013) The eighth and final
hypothesis of this research project therefore reads:
H8: The Conservative Party had taken on an adversarial strategy regarding both European integration and immigration prior to UKIP rising in the British national polls at
the end of 2012;
2.5 A summary of the expectations
This theoretical framework has set out to answer two sub-questions that underlie the main research question of this project. The first question was why people decide to vote for a party such as UKIP. After determining that present-day UKIP resembles the populist radical right, theories of issue and protest voting were discussed. (Van der Brug et al. 2000; 2003) These theories lead to the expectation that UKIP voters are usually rational and goal
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orientated, and motivated by ideological considerations rather than by a desire of the general public to show discontent to the political elite. Therefore, the expectation is that UKIP voters decide to cast the ballot based on issues rather than on protest.
The second sub-question that automatically followed was which factors increase the likelihood that people decide to vote for such a party based on issues. To answer this question, theories on voter behavior, party competition, issue ownership, niche party success and issue entrepreneurship were discussed. These theories lead to the expectations that UKIP holds a position on the issues on which it mobilizes that is more extreme than that of its mainstream competitor (the Conservative Party), that it emphasizes these issues and that it is internally unified on them. Furthermore, it is expected that the issues are salient to the British public and that the mean British voter holds a position on them that resembles that of UKIP. The theories lead to the belief that a vast amount of British voters will consider UKIP to be the issue owner on these topics, as a positive issue reputation will increase its vote share.
Lastly research conducted by Meguid (2005) and Bale et al. (2010) implies that mainstream parties can take on several strategies regarding the issues that niche parties raise, and that these strategies can have a real impact on the chances of these niche parties becoming successful. In the case of UKIP, the issues that it is currently expected to book electoral success on have been part of the British political culture for a longer period of time. Its main competitor on these issues has traditionally been the Conservative Party. For UKIP to be able to ‘steal’ (part of) the issue ownership from this party, the latter would need to have adopted an adversarial/holding strategy towards them.
The next chapter (three) will be centered on explaining the methodology and the selected data that this project relies upon to test these hypotheses.
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3. Methodology and data
This chapter will discuss the different methods and data that will be applied to test the eight hypotheses posed in chapter two. In accordance with the previously maintained structure, it will begin by explaining how this project will measure whether UKIP does in fact attract more voters based on ideology than on protest. The second sub-chapter will focus on the methods that will be applied to assess whether UKIP has taken on a successful issue entrepreneurial strategy on ‘winning’ issues. The last sub-chapter will explain how this research project will determine what the Conservative Party’s strategy towards both European integration and immigration has been. The applied methods and data will be summarized in the concluding sub-chapter.
3.1 Protest or ideology?
The theories discussed in chapter 2 have demonstrated two different, relevant reasons why people might decide to vote for parties with a populist radical right appeal: protest or ideology. Existing research has found that policy considerations are key to explaining the success of such parties, and this research project therefore expects that the same will be the case for UKIP. (Van der Brug et al. 2000; 2005; 2010) However because UKIP conveys a particularly strong anti-elitist (populist) message and since populist parties have been found to also attract voters based on protest (Van der Brug et al. 2003; Schumacher and Rooduijn 2013), it has set out to assess the extent to which this is the case.
3.1.1 Data and operalization
Van der Brug et al. (2000; 2003) have established that a clear sign of protest voting is when parties attract voters from all mainstream parties equally. This research project will analyze whether this is true through data from the British Election Study’s Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS). The CMS data are generated by monthly national surveys of the British electorate and conducted by the renowned market research company YouGov. Each survey includes core component questions that return every month. Average monthly sample sizes exceed 1000 cases. To establish whether UKIP’s current success in the polls stems from protest voters or issue voters, this research project will look at the most recent results that are currently available, which are the monthly surveys administered in the year 2012. As this is also the year in which UKIP started reaching double digits in opinion polls, it can be expected that the participants in 2012 will include both ‘old’ and ‘new’ UKIP voters. This
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makes the data particularly well-suited to this research project. The data have been
downloaded from the British Election Studies’ website.4
All questions have been added to Appendix 2.
The first variable that will be used in the cross-tab analysis is the ‘UKIP voter’. The CMS data asks participants several questions about their party preferences, including which party they voted for in the previous election, which party they feel closest to and which party they really prefer. To analyze causes for UKIP’s current electoral success however, a more solid indication for an intention to vote UKIP is preferred. Therefore it will rely on questions six, which asks respondents: “If there were a General Election tomorrow, which party would you vote for?” There are five possible answers available for this multiple-choice question: the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats and the options ‘none’ and ‘other’. If participants indicate ‘other’, they are redirected to next question (7) stating: “You say you would vote for another party. Which, if any, of the following would you vote for?” UKIP is among the possible answers for this question, together with other smaller parties such as the Green Party and the British National Party. Voters can also indicate that they would vote for another party at this point, although no further follow up is provided. Because of the way in which the answers to this question are structured, there is a risk of a certain bias: potential UKIP voters might be more inclined to select one of the three mainstream parties when they do not immediately see their party of choice in the first set of answers. However, since the other questions in the survey are phrased in the same way and therefore create a similar risk, this question will be relied on to provide the best possible result for indicating a (potential) UKIP voter.
The second variable is which party UKIP voters voted for in the previous General Election (2010). To establish from which mainstream parties UKIP is attracting its new voters, this project will use question 11, which asks respondents exactly that. The potential answers are constructed in the same way as for the question on which party they would vote for in the next General Election, five multiple-choice options including the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, ‘none’ and ‘other’. As the hypothesis established by Van der Brug et al. states that protest parties should attract voters from all big parties equally, the results from this question will suffice for this analysis. (Van der Brug et al. 2000)
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3.1.2 Methodology
The relation between voters that intend to vote for UKIP and their previous electoral choice will be analyzed through means of cross-tabulation analyses, or cross-tabs. Cross-tabs are a quantitative research method appropriate for analyzing the relationship between two or more variables. They provide information about the relationship between separate variables by recording the frequency of respondents that have the specific characteristics described in the cells of the table. The axes of the table contain one or more selected variables and the resulting table will have as many rows and columns as there are codes in the corresponding axis specification. In the case of measuring where new UKIP voters are coming from, one variable per axis will suffice. Twelve separate cross-tab analyses will be conducted with the beforementioned variables in SPSS, one for each month that the CMS was administered. This allows for any trends that may have occurred over the year to be visible, which is relevant because 2012 was a year in which UKIP began to rise in the polls, which means that it was attracting many new voters. The average result for 2012 will also be calculated, by adding up the percentages per party and dividing them by the number of measurements. All data have been weighted prior to being analyzed, to create a representative national sample. The results will be presented in a graph and a table.
3.2 Successful strategies part I: positions and emphasis
3.2.1 Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2010
This part of the research project will assess whether UKIP has taken on successful issue entrepreneurial strategies on both immigration and European integration. To accomplish this, UKIP’s position on both topics needs to be measured as well as the extent to which it puts emphasis on them. The same needs to be done for the Conservative Party to be able to compare both parties. To do so, this research project will rely on data from the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys 1999-2010 dataset (CHES). The CHES dataset has as its great advantage that the experts that provide the data rely on various sources of information (manifesto, campaigning, parliamentary behavior) to reach their conclusion, thereby combining what parties say with that they do. (Netjes and Binnema 2007) There are several other sources available for examining developments in party positions, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. However, in their study of party positioning on European integration, Marks et al. (2007) find that experts, manifestos and voter and candidate surveys provide
convergent measures of EU party positions, but that expert data (CHES) is the most valid among those sources. In a similar cross-validation exercise of different EU salience
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measures, Netjes and Binnema (2007) conclude that expert surveys and manifestos provide convergent measures of party salience to political issues. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey will be used for this part of the analysis as it corresponds with the General Election years and offers the most extensive and reliable data set available on UKIP.
Each CHES dataset includes an estimation of party positioning on European integration, ideology and policy issues for several national parties in different European countries over time, and thereby enables scholars to “inspect the dynamics of the
ideological and policy stances of political parties [..] over more than a decade.” (Hooghe et al. 2010: 4) CHES sets out to monitor the ideological positioning of parties on a general, all-encompassing left-right dimension as well as on separate economic and social left-right dimensions, with the social dimension varying from green/alternative/libertarian to
traditionalist/authoritarian. Their original aim of the survey was to “track the relationships between the ideological placement of parties and their position on European integration”, which is why it includes an extensive array of questions on the different aspects of this issue. (Hooghe et al. 2010: 4) However the survey also covers attitudes towards the economy and, as of 2005, includes party policy positions on immigration. The salience of and position on a certain issue can be complementary elements of a party’s vote seeking efforts. (Meguid 2005; Meguid and Belanger 2008) Because CHES also includes questions about the salience of these topics, this data-set is particularly useful for analyzing UKIP’s policy agenda over time. CHES first began running in 1999, with follow-up waves in 2002, 2006 and 2010. On average, 15,67 experts contributed to the data on the United Kingdom per wave. The Conservative Party was included in all survey years and UKIP was included in all years except 2002. CHES data from 2006 and 2010 will be used to provide an
oversight over time of UKIP’s comparative position on both issues. The questions that are relied on to operationalize the data have been included in Appendix 2.
To assess whether UKIP has taken on a position on European integration and immigration that is more extreme than that of its mainstream competitor, and whether it has sufficiently emphasized these issues, the following four CHES questions will be used. Experts were asked to indicate what they considered to be “the overall orientation of the party leadership towards European integration” in a certain year (Q1), with (1) indicating that they are strongly opposed, (4) indicating a neutral position and a (7) standing for them being strongly in favor of this process. The experts were also asked to indicate the relative
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salience of European integration in the party’s public stance through the following rating system: (0) it is of no importance, (1) it is of minor importance, (2) it is important, (3) it is one of the most important issues and finally (4) it is the most important issue. Of the entire scale of questions available on European integration, this was considered to be the most straightforward and useful. Regarding immigration, the expert survey includes a question (Q31) on whether a party opposes (0pt) or favors (10pt) tough policies and another one (Q32) on whether it finds this not important at all (0pt) or extremely important (10pt). There were also questions available on the party’s position towards the multicultural society and the rights of ethnic minorities, but since this research project focusses on UKIP’s position on immigration more generally, the answers to these questions were considered to provide sufficient information. The results of the expert survey on these questions will be presented in tables.
3.2.2 Local election manifestos
The information gathered from the Chapel Hill datasets aims to provide a thorough understanding of UKIP and the Conservative Party’s position on immigration in 2006 and 2010 and to allow for this project to establish whether or not immigration can be
considered one of UKIP’s core issues, it also gathers information on whether this has changed over time. However because the CHES data only cover the period of 1999-2010 whilst UKIP’s current electoral success streak began to really take off in 2011, an
additional data source is needed to measure whether UKIP has perhaps increased its emphasis or taken on a more extreme position. To measure whether this is the case, this research project will conduct a content analysis of UKIP’s local government manifestos. Manifestos are written by members of the party’s elite, usually during election time, and therefore can be considered the clearest available rendering of a party’s position. “As an official document, it will be difficult for party members to resile from policies in the party manifesto, while party leaders can be charged with failure to implement published
manifesto pledges when given the chance to do so.” (Laver & Garry 2000: 620) This characteristic makes manifestos particularly useful for measuring both the policy positions and issue salience of parties at a given time. An alternative method to measure party positions and issue salience is through analyzing media articles, however research has found that these data measure different constructs compared to party manifestos, mass and expert surveys and therefore cannot be used interchangeably. (Hebling & Tresch 2011)
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Moreover, research on measuring party positions and issue salience has established that there is a media bias with regard to the selection of topics. (Heibling and Tresch 2010)
Whereas most parties only produce nation-wide election manifestos for general and European elections, UKIP also produces such documents for local government elections. These manifestos are more concise than their national or European counterparts, and the differences between each document can be somewhat marginal due to the fact that they are produced annually and political parties are unlikely to change their policy agenda every year. Nevertheless they are produced specifically for each election year and each document is unique. Therefore any serious shifts in issue saliency or position will certainly be
represented in them. Since the CHES data already provide a proper understanding of UKIP’s position on immigration up until 2010, this research project will conduct a content analysis of UKIP’s local government manifestos from that moment onwards. The years 2011, 2012 and 2013 will be coded for that purpose.
The approach this project uses to conduct a content analysis of UKIP’s local election manifestos builds on the salience measurement theory that also underlies the Comparative Manifesto Project’s approach (CMP) to generating position scores. The CMP is considered to be the most comprehensive effort to provide a comparative framework for the analysis of party manifestos. (Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al. 2006) It codes the quasi-sentences of election manifestos and groups them into a set of policy categories to determine how important that category is for a party. The CMP’s content analysis methodology is based on a classification scheme that contains 54 fixed categories used to cover the total content of electoral manifestos, which it does by identifying the statements of preference that are being expressed in these texts. The coding procedure comprises both a classification and quantification of manifesto statements. The coding unit is the ‘quasi-sentence’, which is defined as the verbal expression of one political idea or issue. The frequency of quasi-sentences under the same category is used as an indicator of how salient a given policy issue is for the party.
This research project is interested in classifying and quantifying UKIP’s position on European integration and immigration, rather than analyzing the content of its entire policy agenda. For this cause, a simple yet efficient coding scheme has been created which allows measuring how salient both issues are to UKIP, and whether it has become more or less negative regarding them. To establish the extent to which UKIP’s policies on immigration
