Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2021
Political parties learn from foreign incumbents, that is, parties abroad that won office. But does the scope of this cross-national policy diffusion vary with the party family that generates those incumbents? The authors argue that party family conditions transnational policy learning when it makes information on the positions of sister parties more readily available and relevant. Both conditions apply to social democratic parties. Unlike other party families, social democrats have faced major competitive challenges since the 1970s and they exhibit exceptionally strong transnational organizations—factors, the authors contend, that uniquely facilitate cross-national policy learning from successful parties within the family. The authors analyze parties’ policy positions using spatial methods and find that social democratic parties are indeed exceptional because they emulate one another across borders more than do Christian democratic and conservative parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation and of social democratic parties’ election strategies over the past forty years.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.