Replication Data for: "Moderate as Necessary. The Role of Electoral Competitiveness and Party Size in Explaining Parties' Policy Shifts."

We provide data on a new measure of electoral competitiveness at the party level for parties that gained parliamentary representation in 11 countries from 1970 to 2014. The countries covered are Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The replication material contains all code necessary to compute the competitiveness measure as well as code to replicate all findings reported in the paper. The paper investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties' policy positions. It follows a growing body of research on party positioning in multi-party competition that regards elections as signals for parties that have to choose their positions and issue strategies. In this article we argue that previous elections provide information about the competitiveness of the upcoming election. The expected degree of electoral competition affects parties' future policy positions since with increasing competitiveness of an election, parties have higher incentives to move towards a vote-maximizing position. However, what constitutes a vote-maximizing strategy varies between parties. While large mainstream parties have an incentive to moderate their positions, small and niche parties choose more extreme positions to distinguish themselves from their mainstream competitors. Applying a novel measure of electoral competitiveness, we find that the degree of electoral competition, indeed, determines parties' policy shifts, but that this effect is moderated by party size