New Political Parties as Innovators - Formation and Success

This cumulative dissertation investigates the formation and success of new political parties in developed democracies from the perspective of the programmatic competition between parties (see. introduction in chapter 1). It starts by arguing that the current state of the programmatic supply by existing parties is a central determinant for the likelihood of new party formation (chapter 2). A low programmatic diversity of existing parties creates scope for programmatic innovations by new parties. The dissertation establishes a connection between the literature on new parties and niche parties by analyzing the latter as typical cases of innovating new parties (chapter 3). For this purpose, the author combines two concepts with corresponding measures in order to capture the programmatic profiles of parties. Nicheness refers to differences in the emphasis of topics between a given party and its counterparts while programmatic concentration shows the narrowness of a given policy profile. Chapter 4 investigates how the variation in the programmatic profiles of niche parties affect their long-term electoral performance. Previous studies on niche parties have not fully taken into account the evolutionary aspect of the programmatic profiles of these parties. Acknowledging the variation in programmatic profiles between niche parties and over time, the article argues that the electoral effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration as programmatic features of niche parties vary over their lifecycle. The literature on new parties assumes that they can benefit from the poor representation of parts of the electorate by existing parties. This strand of research provides plausible results, but it operates on the macro level, which is problematic for theoretical and methodological reasons. The study in chapter 5 overcomes these problems through a multilevel analysis of the vote choice between new parties, existing parties and abstention.

Good is generally more alike than bad in the information ecology: Investigating the case of (the ABC model of) group stereotypes

On most if not all evaluatively relevant dimensions such as the temperature level, taste intensity, and nutritional value of a meal, one range of adequate, positive states is framed by two ranges of inadequate, negative states, namely too much and too little. This distribution of positive and negative states in the information ecology results in a higher similarity of positive objects, people, and events to other positive stimuli as compared to the similarity of negative stimuli to other negative stimuli. In other words, there are fewer ways in which an object, a person, or an event can be positive as compared to negative. Oftentimes, there is only one way in which a stimulus can be positive (e.g., a good meal has to have an adequate temperature level, taste intensity, and nutritional value). In contrast, there are many different ways in which a stimulus can be negative (e.g., a bad meal can be too hot or too cold, too spicy or too bland, or too fat or too lean). This higher similarity of positive as compared to negative stimuli is important, as similarity greatly impacts speed and accuracy on virtually all levels of information processing, including attention, classification, categorization, judgment and decision making, and recognition and recall memory. Thus, if the difference in similarity between positive and negative stimuli is a general phenomenon, it predicts and may explain a variety of valence asymmetries in cognitive processing (e.g., positive as compared to negative stimuli are processed faster but less accurately). In my dissertation, I show that the similarity asymmetry is indeed a general phenomenon that is observed in thousands of words and pictures. Further, I show that the similarity asymmetry applies to social groups. Groups stereotyped as average on the two dimensions agency / socio-economic success (A) and conservative-progressive beliefs (B) are stereotyped as positive or high on communion (C), while groups stereotyped as extreme on A and B (e.g., managers, homeless people, punks, and religious people) are stereotyped as negative or low on C. As average groups are more similar to one another than extreme groups, according to this ABC model of group stereotypes, positive groups are mentally represented as more similar to one another than negative groups. Finally, I discuss implications of the ABC model of group stereotypes, pointing to avenues for future research on how stereotype content shapes social perception, cognition, and behavior.