Dynamics of Endogenous Valence in Ideological Competition: Empirical Evidence from the German 2013 General Election

Zeit: 
15.12.2014 - 12:00
Ort: 
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Art der Veranstaltung: 
AB B-Kolloquium
Vortragende/r: 
Prof. Dr. Susumu Shikano
Zugehörigkeit des Vortragenden: 
Universität Konstanz
Beschreibung: 

Valence has been long integrated into spatial models of party competition as exogenous non-policy factor. Recently some theoretical works conceptualized valence as endogenous and dependent of e.g. campaigning. While the endogenous and dynamic valence brought diverse theoretical implications, most empirical studies are still based on the exogenous and static concept of valence. This paper aims to fill this gap by estimating valence for individual days during the campaign to observe its dynamics. For this purpose we suggest a quite simple measurement approach based on a comprehensive conceptualization of valence. Implementation of this approach requires a dataset with a large sample size for each day as well as with reliable measure of citizens' and parties' political positions. As such dataset we utilize data from a voting advice application which was set up for the German Federal Election 2013. Our estimation results provide some evidence of dynamics of valence during the campaign, which obtained an increasing importance relative to the policy factors just before the polling day.