Title:
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Liberal parties and party systems
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Nagel and Wlezien (2010) found that the Liberal Democrats in Britain tended to gain votes when
the Conservatives moved to the right on the left-right spectrum, and the Labour Party moved to
the left. They also found that, as the Liberal Democrats gained votes, they pushed the
Conservatives to the right, but not Labour. Nagel and Wlezien took their left-right measurements
from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) This thesis studies whether these phenomena
occur cross-nationally across other advanced democracies. Using a dataset of 26 established
wealthy democracies, mainly long-term members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development, this work measures whether increased distance between conservative and
social democratic parties benefits parties in the liberal party family. The thesis finds that the
dynamics that Nagel and Wlezien observed in Great Britain appear in other democracies more
generally. It also finds that liberal party strength pushes conservatives farther to the right (which
Nagel and Wlezien found in Britain) and social democrats farther to the left (which was not the
case in Britain). The work also tests how more general measures of polarization impact liberal
parties, finding either no impact or an unexpected negative association. Finally, the work
concluded with an examination of the role of some liberal parties as players in the postmaterialist
arena, and provides a qualitative study of some new parties which are being or which
may be classified as liberal.
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