Everything to everyone and the conditioning effect of intraparty cohesion: A replication in a cross-national context

Abstract

Taking the intraparty politics perspective, Lehrer and Lin recently revisit Somer-Topcu’s work that demonstrates how being ambiguous can help parties expand support in elections. Using survey data from the German Internet Panel, Lehrer and Lin find that intraparty cohesion is a critical moderator of Somer-Topcu’s argument. While Lehrer and Lin’s results are of relevance to a wide literature on party competition, intraparty politics, and political representation, their empirical strategy of relying on only one country prohibits other researchers from drawing meaningful and generalizable conclusions. In this note, we join this literature and reevaluate Lehrer and Lin’s conjecture by using an innovative cross-national survey data that covers 12 European countries. With this comparative data set, we almost perfectly replicate what Somer-Topcu and Lehrer and Lin reveal in their works. Our empirical endeavor not only provides a solid empirical ground to Lehrer and Lin in a cross-national context but also has important implications for future research, particularly on electoral politics, party competition, and democratic representation.