Introduction

IN THEIR COMPETITION FOR VOTES, POLITICAL PARTIES ARE CONFRONTED with two contradictory forces. On the one hand, signaling moderation and centrism in their ideological position usually helps in securing votes from the moderate and centrist voters, who typically form a large part of the electorate. On the other hand, signaling commitment to a clear ideological stance enhances the party’s credibility and helps building up a strong party image (Hinich and Munger 1994).

How to deal with the tension between moderation and commitment is one of the recurring questions for political parties all over the world. Should they take moderate, centrist ideological standpoints, or should they take positions that are as clear and unambiguous as possible? From an electoral viewpoint, the latter strategy will only work when voters understand and reward those parties which choose sides. Do voters reward parties that take a clear side on the issues, or are voters on the whole more inclined to prefer the party that is merely close to their own position? And how does the political-institutional environment affect the chances of success of this strategy? These questions have been at the core of the debate on proximity versus directional models of party evaluation, which started with Rabinowitz and Macdonald’s (1989) seminal APSR article. Since then, research on these questions has been mostly limited to single-country studies (e.g. Macdonald et al. 1991), or internationally comparative studies of a limited set of countries (e.g. Iversen 1994). In this contribution, we cover as many as 66 democratic elections from all over the world in an attempt to obtain results that are as general as possible. We will use data from Modules 1 and 2 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), which has been conducted in many countries on different continents starting in 1996. Jacques Thomassen was involved from the very start with the CSES project, as co-author of its original stimulus paper of 1994 and as chair of its first Steering Committee. His contributions, as all are aware who have seen CSES develop, were extremely important for the success of this worldwide endeavor.

However, a price is to be paid for worldwide coverage: the tertium comparationis – the aspects on which different elections are compared, must be so general and abstract that election-specific issues and circumstances cannot play a great role in the analysis.