Publicize or perish : challenger party success through megaphones and locomotives

DOLLBAUM, Jan Fabian; DOLLBAUM, Jan Matti

doi:10.1111/1475-6765.12552

Publicize or perish : challenger party success through megaphones and locomotives

dc.contributor.author	DOLLBAUM, Jan Fabian
dc.contributor.author	DOLLBAUM, Jan Matti
dc.date.accessioned	2022-09-26T14:01:21Z
dc.date.available	2022-09-26T14:01:21Z
dc.date.issued	2023
dc.description	First published online: 14 September 2022	en
dc.description.abstract	What makes some challenger parties succeed and others fail? Existing research on party-level factors finds that it is essential for parties to close a representational gap. However, this condition cannot be sufficient. For each successful challenger, there are many others proclaiming a similar message but going unheard. Hence, we argue that, instead of only to the messages, more attention should be paid to parties’ abilities to communicate their messages effectively. Using an original dataset on 74 challenger parties in five countries in a similar political and economic situation (during the post-2008 economic crisis), we show that communication is key for electoral success. In particular, we show that challenger parties can win over voters by, on the one hand, harnessing the prominence of a well-known personality (a locomotive) and by, on the other hand, establishing a means of contacting voters which bypasses the traditional news media and amplifies their message (like a megaphone). But this megaphone only works if it amplifies a message that fills a representational gap (here: an anti-austerity message) – only then do parties benefit. Furthermore, we provide evidence for the widespread but unproven claim that populism helps challenger parties succeed, but this, too, depends on whether parties are able to contact voters on a large scale. By including three crucial aspects of communication (sender, channel, and message), we can explain a large share of the high variability in challenger party success.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - Wiley Transformative Agreement (2020-2023)	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	European journal of political research, 2023, Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 1078-1100	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1111/1475-6765.12552
dc.identifier.endpage	1100
dc.identifier.issn	1475-6765
dc.identifier.issn	0304-4130
dc.identifier.issue	4
dc.identifier.startpage	1078
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1814/74895
dc.identifier.volume	62
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.orcid.upload	true	*
dc.publisher	Wiley	en
dc.relation.ispartof	European journal of political research	en
dc.relation.isreplacedby	https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76808	en
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess	en
dc.rights.license	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International	*
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/	*
dc.title	Publicize or perish : challenger party success through megaphones and locomotives	en
dc.type	Article	en
dspace.entity.type	Publication
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person.identifier.other	43563
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