Position-taking and issue salience in local manifestos: Evidence from Belgium

One of the key functions of political parties is the articulation of interests, values, and policy options. Parties take up this role by, amongst other things, formulating manifestos in times of elections. In these texts parties outline their pledges on a wide range of issues. Therefore, extracting positions from election manifestos occupies many party politics scholars. Party programs used in national elections are extensively researched in political science (Klingemann et al., 2006), but so far little is known about the ideological competition in local politics. Except for some rather isolated papers (Nyhuis, 2017; Van de Voorde et al., 2018; Gross & Jankowski, 2020) the manifestos and policy preferences of local parties have been neglected. This is odd, because the local level is the closest political unit for citizens and highly relevant for their everyday life. Moreover, there is considerable academic debate about the role of ideology in local politics. Some argue partisan frames and interests have become dominant in decision-making at the municipal level (Copus & Erlingsson, 2012). National parties have entered the local arena, where they fight their ideological struggles and make value-based policy choices. In line with this view we expect substantial differences in the preferences of local parties. Others emphasize the enduring relevance of an alternative conception of local governing as largely outside the political (i.e., partisan) sphere and merely factual and harmonic. Here, different actors commonly strive for a single best solution to local issues (Copus et al., 2012). Hence, the platforms of parties would be rather similar. In order to shed more light on the (variance in) policy preferences of local parties I will conduct an automatic quantitative content analysis of their manifestos in 37 municipalities in Flanders (Belgium). With the aid of Wordscores I will estimate local parties’ positions on the general, economic and cultural (GAL-TAN) left-right dimensions. By computing ideological distance and polarization I will test whether policy differences exist at the local level. Are there many dissimilarities between the manifestos of the parties in the municipalities under research or do all parties defend more or less the same program? I will test this for parties within the same municipality, but also whether the differences between local branches of the same national party are smaller than the differences between the parties in the same locality. As such, this paper will provide essential and novel insights into parties’ positions and preferences in sub-national politics.