The central research goals of my project were to understand the short- and long-term electoral ramifications of party position shifts by major center-left and center-right parties on the left-right dimension in advanced industrialized democracies. The most major development over the course of the project, was an increased focus on multidimensional party competition and the interplay of party positioning on the left-right dimension and the socio-cultural dimension.

A key aspect of my argument is that partisan constituents react differently to ideological moderation and/or incongruence from political parties than less committed voter groups. Testing this required information on party positions, partisan supporters, and the preferences of the general electorate. A substantial portion of the project involved collecting, combining, and analyzing national election study data in 16 Western democracies between 1980-2015. These data on the preferences of citizens were essential to understanding the electoral effects of party policy moderation across a wide range of countries and time. The project was also implemented by collecting new datasets on party positioning in Europe – the 2014 and 2017 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which, when combined with previous survey waves, form a trend file ranging from 1999-2017. I also collected original data on the preferences of party members through the 2015 Swedish Party Membership Survey. Several of my publications combine this latter source of data with comparable party membership surveys in other Nordic and Northern European democracies. Together, these original data sources contain rich information on the positions of political party leadership across Europe and detailed survey responses from members of political parties, those I expected to be most averse to ideological moderation. Most of my publications during this research project pertain to analyses of these three types of data and investigate the relationship between party-voter or party-member congruence on various ideological dimensions and how it affects political behavior.

The project’s findings show that (1) ideological moderation by political parties can have detrimental electoral consequences in the longer term; but that (2) the consequences of moderation differ across major left and right parties; and (3) core and fickle voters respond differently to moderation strategies, with additional differences across the left-right and socio-cultural dimensions of electoral competition.

Moderation on the left-right ideological dimension, both short and long-term, produces substantial benefits for major right-wing parties. This is not the case for social democratic parties, where short-term gains from moderation disappear and turn into losses in the long-term. It also decreases the propensity for partisan – “core” major left voters – to select the same major left party over multiple elections. In contrast, left-right moderation increases the propensity of less committed, “fickle” right party voters to select the same major right-wing party and does not negatively affect these parties’ core voters. Further, left-right moderation does not lead to more defection or abstention from major right parties. While economic moderation appears to be a winning strategy for major right-wing parties but not major left parties, the effects of moderation on the socio-cultural dimension are less associated with electoral benefits for both major left and major right parties.

These substantive findings are important contributions to international research, and make additional, interrelated contributions based on research design and methodology. First, they depend on taking time seriously in analyses of party-voter electoral linkages and show that what might appear a winning strategy in the short term can sometimes have different effects over a longer period. Second, the results highlight the importance of supplementing aggregate-level analysis (party vote shares) with individual-level data. In addition to facilitating longer-term analysis, individual-level data helps us unpack the differences between partisan and independent responses to ideological moderation. Finally, the multidimensional setup is crucial for understanding party competition surrounding issues that do not always map onto left-right ideology, such as immigration policy.

The project was motivated by questions related to representational congruence between political parties and voters in European democracies. This focus continued but expanded to address new research questions with deeper attention to party-voter congruence on multiple dimensions or issues of competition, e.g. the economic and the cultural dimensions of political competition, as well as congruence related to the European Union. On the whole, congruence between parties and their voters on the left-right dimension is rather high, yet low levels of trust and satisfaction with parties persists, and mainstream parties continue to lose vote share. Towards the end of the project, I began investigating if a cumulative measure of party-voter congruence, that combines multiple dimensions and issues, could better conceptualize this important relationship between parties and voters. I have also begun examining the possibility that interest groups could fill the representational gaps that are left by political parties.

It has also become clear throughout this project that the conclusions we draw about the dynamic relationship between political parties and voters is very much dependent on the data sources we use in analyses. We know much less than we should about how different ways of estimating the positions of political parties and measuring the preferences of citizens affect the results of our research. My most recent work has begun to address this by combining a wider range of the information on these political actors to probe the robustness of our central findings about dynamic representation across various data sources and time periods.

Finally, social scientists now have a sufficiently long time series to begin examining how party-voter responsiveness works in the newer democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Most of our knowledge about the interactive relationship between party positioning, citizen preferences, and vote choice are derived from Western Europe. Do these findings apply to the CEE context as well, or does representation work differently in this region? Rapid changes to the CEE party systems and concerns about an erosion of democratic norms in the area make these questions more pressing than ever. My most recent research addresses the similarities and differences in party-voter linkages across Western and Eastern Europe.

The project was extremely international in orientation and execution. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey research group is made up of a team from a variety of European and U.S. universities. As a co-principal investigator for this group, my network of affiliated international researchers is broad. I also co-founded a party research group within the political science department at the University of Gothenburg, which hosts seminars for scholars from different European and U.S. universities. I organized a workshop on intra-party politics that took place in Gothenburg on September 17-18, 2015 that included scholars based in: Austria, Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Scotland, Sweden, and the United States. More recently, I was responsible for programming the scientific content of the 2018 Swedish Network for European Studies in Political Science Annual Conference, which included keynote lectures from premiere scholars based in England and Switzerland, as well as a number of other international researchers. Finally, I am currently serving as the co-chair for the Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies Division of the 2018 American Political Science Association’s Annual Conference. In this capacity, I have programmed 13 panels for this year’s conference and processed hundreds of applications from all over the world for inclusion in the conference.

I frequently presented my research at workshops and conferences in Europe, North America, and East Asia. I also maintain a number of co-authors from other institutions in Europe and the United States. In sum, my work is visible in the international community of scholars and very much informed by these networks.

The project results have been disseminated to other researchers through publications in international peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, international conference and seminar presentations, and in the form of working papers. I published research as working papers at the Centre for European Research (CERGU) website prior to their publication in international peer-reviewed journals, which facilitates communication with researchers and a wider audience. CERGU maintains extensive contacts with researchers and groups outside the scientific community and works to disseminate this research through various channels, including its social media platforms. These working papers are free and publicly accessible.

I also write popular science summaries of my research articles for websites that focus on disseminating academic research to a general audience, such as The Washington Post, The London School of Economics European Politics and Policy blog, and the Swedish political science blog, Politologerna. These platforms are widely read by academics, journalists, think tank researchers, politicians, and those in the public with an interest in politics. This helps connect with broader research communities than those within the formal structures of academia. Finally, I provide interviews for media outlets in Europe and the United States, and link to these interviews and other research-related output through my social media pages, which provide another opportunity for people to find my research.