Voter Dealignment and Party Convergence

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between
citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence of this process of
dealignment, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable.
The consequences of this process of change on parties' strategic
behaviour have however received little attention. In this paper, I examine the
impact of dealignment on parties' strategic behaviour and focus on three aspects
of parties' behaviour: (1) changes in ideological positions, (2) responsiveness
to the mean voter and (3) appealing broadly. The expectation of dealignment
allowing parties `to move around more freely' leads to the hypotheses
that parties are changing more, being more responsive and are appealing more
broadly as well. However, research also shows that uncertainty refrains parties
from changing their positions, and dealignment arguably has increased levels
of uncertainty. The results of my analyses do not confirm the expectation that
dealignment has resulted in any change in parties' strategic behaviour, and
this observation is robust to covering different time-periods, relying on different
indicators of dealignment as well as different estimation strategies. The conclusion
thus has to be that even though dealignment profoundly aects voters'
behaviour, parties' ideological strategies do not seem to be affected by the fact
that electorates have become more dealigned.