GUNNAR SJOBLOM

SOME PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY OF PARTY STRATEGIES

Decisions and activities of political parties are often analyzed in a rational­choice perspective. In the following some problems are briefly discussed concerning decision analysis in general and analysis of party strategies in particular: What does it mean to study party strategies? What types of empirical material are available for such studies? How can specific studies be classified from a formal point of view? What are the consequences of categories proliferation common in decision analysis? How are circular explanations to be avoided? What problems is a theory of party-strategic behavior supposed to solve?

1. ON THE ANALYSIS OF PARTY STRATEGIES

As a starting point for discussion I reproduce a scheme of analysis for the study of party strategies in a multiparty system (Sjoblom, 1968, esp. ch. 5-6). The parties - or rather the party leaders - are the actors in the analysis. The parliament makes the authoritative decisions and selects the government. 'Multiparty system' presupposes that at least three parties compete at the elections and that at least three parties are represented in parliament. A party is an organization which nominates candidates at such elections. The classic multiparty system situation means that no party has its own majority in parliament. The parties are acting on certain arenas, i.e. within certain deci­sion structures (with certain members, certain decisional competence) in competition with each other. The parties are presumed to have certain basic goals, certain types of means (or action variables), and certain resources to put behind these means. The degree of goal attainment for a party depends on the degree to which it can influence the 'influence objects' on different arenas (in competition with other parties). A 'strategy' is a plan for a com­bination of influence activities.

Figure 1 draws our attention to, inter alia, the following things: - A party calculates what effects the content of different party outputs

- combinations of specific contents of the different means - may have on the behavior of the influence objects (and thereby on the degree of goals attainment of the party), considering the competition; it chooses such outputs

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Lei! Lewin and Evert Vedung (eds.),Politics as Rational Action, 157-168. Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.

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General goal: that the party itself shall make the authorita-tive decisions according to its own value system

Goals: Strategic goals Value goal

Vote Max. of

Party Programme parliamentary

Resources: Means: maximization influence

cohesion realization

- Money Standpoints - Manpower - Access to Candiates communica-tion channels Propaganda

Arena: Electoral Parliamentary Internal

Influence objects: Voters Other parties Party in parliament members

Fig. 1. Party strategies in a multiparty system.

that are presumed to maximize the goal attainment. It also estimates different alternatives in relation to its own value system and possibilities to get these values implemented in the authoritative decisions.

- The different goals may be in conflict, i.e. it may not be possible to fmd an alternative action which has positive effects on all the goals; in that case, the party must try to decide on some sort of priority.

- The different means must in some way be coordinated, e.g. because of the party's need to appear 'credible': if some standpoints are taken this might mean that some sorts of propaganda are excluded; and some candidates may be eminently unsuitable as propagandists for, say, puritan policies.

- As party action is action under uncertainty, a party must make an assessment between the advantage of a hard commitment to a certain output against the eventual need of a rapid shift of strategy, above all as a result of the activities of the competitors.

Some of the important complications in empirical strategy studies are, however, not very clearly apparent from the figure, among other things:

- A party's action can be short-run or long-run oriented (and it may be necessary to know what orientation dominates in order to understand the choice of strategy).

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Different parties may use different decision rules in different situations (of the type minimax, maximin, etc.).

- By 'decomposing' the problem area in its calculus a party may choose different strategies for different arenas or even different strategies for one and the same arena.

For an understanding of the figure it is, of course, important to observe that party activities are primarily analyzed from a strategic point of view. But the figure also contains a 'value aspect', as a reminder that the strategic aspect may not be in sole control in all situations. To this must be added that there may be situations when a party is unable to fmd action alternatives which are satisfying from either a strategic or a value point of view, but where it is forced to act 'on grounds of fact' (no options seem available), e.g. because of 'the inner logic' of issues (consequence-decisions, etc.) or external constraints (international trade conditions, etc.).

2. TYPES OF EMPIRICAL MATERIAL

What types of empirical material are of use to empirical studies of party strategies? The figure reproduced gives a partial answer: we ought to study the parties' outputs in the form of standpOints, candidates and propaganda. A great number of subdivisions are important. Some examples:

(a) Concerning standpoints: in what subject areas do the parties take standpoints, what subject areas are given priority to, what are the relations between one and the same party's different standpoints, what are the rela­tions between the standpoints of different parties, to what extent is a party innovative or traditional in its choice of standpOints? Etc.

(b) Concerning candidates: how are a party's candidates distributed in relation to profession, sex, age, geography, ideological groupings within the party, etc.? How does a party balance the dilemma between chOOSing 'popular' candidates, candidates with certain skills, candidates who are rewarded for long and faithful party work? Etc.

(c) Concerning propaganda: how does a party describe itself and other parties in general terms (intended 'party image'), what standpoints are presented in the propaganda, what groups among the voters are referred to in the propaganda, what channels does a party use to send its messages? Etc.

Answers to questions of this sort are important to give a more detailed description of a party's strategic activities (and also for a more general descrip­tion of a party's intended 'identity image'). In other words, they are necessary

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to give a more accurate description of the 'dependent variable', the party's output.

But there are, of course, other types of empirical material for the study of party strategies, e.g. the following:

party-strategic doctrines, material from a party's campaign planning, the parties' interpretations of elections, interviews with members of party elites, effect analysis of a party's proposals in different subject areas.

All these types of material have their advantages and disadvantages. Party­strategic doctrines are often simplistic and sometimes contain vague rules of thumb (e.g.: "We will increase our share of the electorate by mobilizing our sympathizers to the last voter, not by trying to win voters, who normally sympathize with other parties"). Material from a party's campaign planning may be useful to interpret the party's actual output, but planning may be one thing, implementation another. From party's interpretation of electoral results we may learn something about its learning process, but such inter­pretations are often rationalizations; the same thing may apply to interview answers from party elites. Effect analysis of party proposals (if they were to be implemented) may give a very useful contribution to an understanding of a party's 'real aims'; but such analyses are often complicated and may require quite another form of skill than an analyst of parties normally possesses. But irrespective of these shortcomings, it is a good rule to try to use as many types of material as possible, as the elements of 'interpretation' are so obvious in party-strategic analyses.

3. THREE TYPES OF STUDIES

In what follows I will discuss two problems which are quite difficult in all types of decision studies: the need to make a balance between the 'parsimony' of the analytical apparatus and its 'realism', and the problem how to avoid circularity in rational-choice-explanations. But fIrst some words about a distinction of relevance for both these problems.

Scholarly studies (nota bene those which are 'nomothetically oriented') may, inter alia, be divided in the following way: theory-testing studies, theory-generating studies, and interpretative studies. In the first case we test an existing theory on new material. In the second case we try, in different ways, to formulate a theory (in neither of these cases needs 'theory' to be taken in any strict meaning: what we often do test are not theoretically

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deduced hypotheses but just preliminary empirical generalizations of greater or less scope; 'theory-generation' may just mean the formulation of a hope­fully fruitful conceptual apparatus or attempts at formulating empirical generalizations). Interpretative studies, finally, are characterized in such a way that one tries to 'understand' and 'explain' possible specific cases (one or several) as well, and in that connection uses any theories, concepts, empirical generalizations, etc., which seem instrumental to such a task. 1 The main part of studies in political science belongs to this category (this is true not least of decision studies (Sjoblom, 1977).

The objects of interpretative studies are, accordingly, certain specific phenomena: a special system, a special event, a special course of events. In such studies there is a tendency to go into detail. Any system (event, etc.) is always in some sense unique; in theory-testing and theory-generating studies we normally disregard such unique traits, but no so in interpretative studies: our object is then to understand the object under study, not to use it for testing theories or generating theories. In interpretative studies the analyst usually tries to understand a complex 'Gestalt'; such studies are, therefore, rarely characterized by the formulation of a few, distinct problems. They are, e.g., rarely formulated in terms of 'dependent' and 'independent variables'; if they are, it usually turns out that both categories of variables are very com­plex. It happens that one uses such studies as a base to go further and to generate theory, but it lies near at hand that theories, formulated in connec­tion with a specific case, have a limited scope and will easily be parochial, etnocentric and anachronic: the way to the formulation of useful general categories is long and uncertain.

4. THE PROBLEM OF CATEGORY PROLIFERATION

One of the great problems in the study of decision-making (and often also in other types of studies) is the conflict or the balance between 'parsimony' and 'realism' at the formulation of the conceptual apparatus. A theory ought to be as parsimonious as possible ('in principle', 'other things equal' , etc). This is not only an aesthetic claim but it may be condition for its functioning as explanation of a specific phenomenon or a class of phenomena.2 When we start to complicate our theoretical formulations farther by adding (non­hierarchical) categories we run the risk that they will at last, only be of use as structuring means of assistance for interpretative studies.

We fmd examples in the field of (non-formal) decision theories. Certain rather strictly 'rational theories' do function as explanations - maybe not as

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satisfactory explanations, but anyhow as explanations. But when theorists begin to accept the common complaints about such theories, especially from political practitioners ('things do not happen that way', 'reality is much more complicated than so', etc.), they will soon fmd themselves in a situation where the formulation of a descriptive language prevails over the formulation of an explanatory language (which, incidentally, is another way to put the dilemma between 'parsimony. and 'realism').

Let us take decision theories of the type 'disjointed incrementalism' or 'bureaucratic politics' as examples. It is not to be denied that they draw our attention to important things, nor that they, as it were, increase our 'under­standing', nor that they may function as conceptual schemes at interpretative studies - but it is highly uncertain that they really permit us to formulate any general hypotheses about decision-making (cf. Bruun, 1977; if we proceed to some phenomenological or ethnomethodological approaches we depart even further from the 'nomothetic ideal'). An effect to create a systhesis of (or rather a 'co-existence' between) these approaches is the idea that each of them is suitable as an analytical instrument for a certain type of situation (advocates of 'mixed-scanning' and 'garbage-can' assert exactly this, cf. Etzioni, 1968, 282ff and Olsen, 1972): in some types of situations decision-makers are said to have according to 'the synoptic model', in other situations according to 'the incremental model', in other situations, again, according to 'the garbage-can model'. Possibly, this assumption is reasonable; if so, it emphasizes the important and difficult task to formulate an adequate typology of such decision situations.

There is in the research process a constant oscillation between deJuctive and inductive elements; during this process it is evidently important that we do not forget that one central aim of a theory is to try to concentrate a lot of information in a way that is as economical as possible. A condition is that the conceptual categories in use are as far as possible formed 'vertically' (or hierarchically, or through 'invention by subdivision'), not 'horizontally' (or collaterally, or through 'invention by extension', Dubin, 1969, 77ft).

5. THE PROBLEM OF CIRCULARITY

The second problem to be discussed here is the risk of running into circulari­ties at efforts to explain political decision-making from a rational-choice­perspective.

It is, of course, both a conceptual and an empirical problem. We must be on our guard not to define our dependent and independent variables in terms

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of each other, and we must as far as possible try to keep our different independent variables apart. And when in empirical studies we try to explain an actor's behavior by help of factors like goals (or value, system, belief system, operational code, utility, party identification, and so on) we must establish the content of these factors independent of the behavior that is to be explained (cf., e.g., Goldmann, 1971, 16f, 33ft). While this is central, and even self-evident, it is often also very difficult to accomplish - even if we often, for good or bad reasons, think that phenomena like 'value systems' are relatively constant over time.

But what is it we want to explain, properly speaking, at the study of party strategies, and what can we explain?

The simplest answer to the question is that the parties' choices of strategies or plans form the explanandum: we presume that the parties have certain goals and that they plan and choose those action alternatives which most probably lead to the attainment of these goals (of course, some goals are 'zero-sum', and not all of the competitors can reach them at the same time); the goal is, accordingly, used to explain the choice of strategy. But this is just a preliminary answer, because the goals are just formulated as general targets - if we want to explain a special party's actions in a special situation, the description of the goal must be more detailed, Le. we must try to assess what aspiration level an actor has in a certain situation.

The aspiration level concerning vote maximization may be to keep the party's share of the electorate from last election, to increase it with a certain percent, to win certain specific groups of voters for the party, or to try to minimize losses, if such are regarded as inevitable. The parliamentary aspira­tion level (if no party has its own parliamentary majority) may be to form a coalition with one or several other parliamentary parties; or, if this is consi­dered impossible, the party may try to have a 'distance influence' by its mere existence or its activities on the parties forming the majority. Further, a party has an ambition, more or less, to get its values materialized in the authorita­tive decisions of the political system, whether the party belongs to the majority formation or not. And, finally, every party tries to reach at least a 'sufficient' degree of party cohesion -lack of internal party cohesion cannot be tolerated if it reaches such a level that the party's activities on the external arenas are severely obstructed. - So, if we want to explain a party's choice of strategy, we must know its aspiration level concerning the different goals in the situation, when the strategy is chosen.

Of course, it may sometimes be possible to establish an actor's goals and aspiration level by stipulation and by rational analysis: we can say, e.g., that,

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given the general structure of a certain political system, an actor must have vote maximization' as one goal; or that, given a party's last election result and some current polls, its 'aspiration level' concerning 'vote maximization' ought to fall within a certain interval. Assumptions like the last one may function during stable periods and they may be useful for interpretative studies - but they don't explain anything in a general way.

When we make an interpretative study without too much theoretical ambition we often use a party's output in order to try to establish its aspira­tion level concerning different goals, following the scheme: the party P should not use this or that propaganda if it does not try to influence this or that group of voters. If we come to such a conclusion we have, to be sure, reached a certain 'understanding' of the situation under study, but nothing more: the 'explanation' is, of course, circular - as is very often the case in a 'pure' ('a-theoretical') interpretative case-study; the 'explanation' can also be characterized as 'contextual' or 'ad-hoc'; it is, in any way, not general. A general explanation should be of the following form: a certain type of party has certain aspiration levels concerning different goals in a certain type of situation; a certain aspiration level means a certain 'goal state'; this 'goal state' is brought into effect by a certain combination of actions (a certain strategy); we predict that this party in this situation will choose this strategy.

The classical method to avoid circularity is (as is well known) to formulate hypotheses, which are predictive, and to state clearly under what conditions these hypotheses are to be regarded as falsified (as circular or tautological hypotheses not are falsifiable but always, as it were, 'verified' at an empirical test). Unfortunately, this method is not always applicable in current political science, for at least two reasons:

(a) the most difficult cases of circularity are not those where it is total, but where it is partial and where the problem is not so much 'logical triviality' (tautology) as 'empirical triviality', i.e. results which have an extremely low 'informative value' (Sjoblom, 1977, p. 25; incidentally, this will very easily be the result with the use of 'dispositional concepts').

(b) At the present stage of the development of political science most of the work on theory building consists of theoretically very preliminary activities, and it is not very common that we arrive at a formulation of theoretically grounded hypotheses; we rather 'test' preliminaries of the type general approaches classifications, typologies, vague empirical generalizations, and so on. The problem is not, then, whether such 'constructs' are true or false, probable or improbable - they can be neither - but whether they seem 'fruitful', whether they outline our problems in a reasonable way, whether

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they suggest connections which we more or less intuitively regard as worthy of further research. As 'tests' of this sort do not contain the type of control against circularity that is built into the formulation and testing of falsifiable hypotheses, it is very urgent to try to find some sort of criteria for the assessment of the value of such 'products' (Sjoblom, 1977, p. 25).

6. A RESEARCH PROGRAM

This discussion of the study of party strategies started from a fairly abstract scheme of analysis; the scheme gives us, hopefully, some general under­standing of some fundamental mechanisms in a party's choice of a strategy. But it can't, of course, explain why a certain party in a certain situation chooses a certain strategy. For such an explanation we must know the party's aspiration level and this is influenced by several factors: the party's relative size, its relative political position, the type of situation, and so on. In an interpretative study we must 'fill in' information of this sort in order to understand the party's choice.

Let us suppose that we have made a number of such studies and that we now want to generalize our informations in order to make the scheme more detailed in general terms. This means that we move from the interpretative activity to the theory-generating. The parties are the units of analysis; we want to fmd a number of variables that may help us to predict the choice of strategies; if we follow an inductive method, we hope to find certain clusters of values of these variables in order to form some typologies. Given the theoretical ideal 'extension by subdivision' the variables must be closely connected to the basic scheme.

If we take the scheme's four basic goals as a starting point we can try to build a typology of the different parties based on their relative size and their relative political positions (connections to 'vote maximization' and to 'maximization of parliamentary influence'), their 'cohesive capacity' (connec­tion to 'party cohesion') and the importance they attach to their value systems (connection to 'programme realization'). A party's choice of a certain strategy can then be supposed to be a function of its relative size and/or its relative political position and/or its cohesive capacity and/or the importance it attaches to its value system.

We also need a typology of strategies. The problem here is that lots of dimensions may be used. Of course, we could also in this case connect strategies and the four basic goals and distinguish between vote maximization strategies, strategies for the maximization of parliamentary influence, and so

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on. But this does not seem very advisable, because in that case the typology will probably be based on declared intentions, not on actual choices of outputs or on the relation between such outputs and certain goals states. The main problem here is, of course, that the last-mentioned relation is so com­plex (one and the same output may lead to different goal states; different outputs may lead to the same goal state). This does not mean that the problem area is anarchical - after all, parties do not act at random. But it certainly means that the problem area is complex and that we, in the prepara­tory work on the theory of party-strategic behavior, must try to collect as many empirical generalizations as possible about the relations between strategic actions and goals states, and that our typology of strategies should be built on such generalizations - or, to complicate the problem further, on how party actors perceive such relations.

A third possibility for the creation of a typology of strategies is to use a ground for classification, where the element of 'interpretation' is less impor­tant and where we more or less directly use behavioral data: we classify strategies on the grounds of what the parties directly do. We find that party attacks other parties or that it defends itself, and we distinguish then between 'offensive' and 'defensive' strategies; we find that a party tries to come closer to one or more of the other parties or that it tries to increase the distance to them, and we distinguish them between 'approaching' and 'distancing' strategies. We find that a party tries to win voters from other parties or we find that it tries to mobilize its own sympatizers, and we distinguish then between 'penetration strategies' and 'mobilization strategies' (Sjoblom, 1968, esp. ch. 7); and so on - we can go very far, but the field is not endless.

We start from a decision-making perspective which means, of course, that we have to take decision rules into account (of the type minimax, etc.). I don't think that it would be a good idea to build these rules into the typology of strategies, because it may be possible that different strategies may be chosen on the basis of one and the same decision rule; further, a party's use of decision rules may reflect its attitude to, e.g., risk-taking. If we make a rough distinction between 'cautious' and 'bold' strategies we can formulate hypotheses of the following type (more or less reasonable):

- a party with low cohesive capacity tends to use cautious decision rules; - a party with strong cohesive capacity and which attaches low impor-

tance to its value system tends to follow bold decision rules; - a party which has several coalition options tends to use bold decision

rules, a party which has only one coalition option tends to use cautious decision rules.

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We have also reason to try to formulate a typology of situations. This may seem like a hopeless task, given the vagueness of the term. However, certain groupings, admittedly rather trivial, seem possible. There are, e.g., general elections at more or less regular intervals, these elections are followed by government formation and, possibly, by coalition formation ad hoc during the mandate period, each party has congresses (or the like) at more or less regular intervals. The trivial assumptions are: by elections, strategies directed at vote maximization are dominant; by government formation and ad hoc formation of parliamentary coalitions, strategies directed at the maximization of parliamentary influence are dominant. And so on.

The following task will be to formulate empirical generalizations about what type of party in what type of situation with the use of what type of decision rule chooses and implements what type of strategy. By combining rational and empirical analyses we may then assess which combinations of strategies are consistent; which are not; which strategies are common; which are not (for different types of parties); which strategies in what situations are successful; which are not.

This is, to be sure, not an easy task. There is hardly any reason to believe that we will be able to formulate a 'simple' and 'elegant' theory for the problem area. We are still far from such a theory, but it is always useful to try to imagine what such a theory would possibly look like, i.e. to specify the problems it is supposed to solve.

NOTES

1 Lijphart (1971), esp. 691ff. Lijphart's classification has been slightly cha.need here. He distinguishes between six types of case-studies, among them 'a-theoretical case­studies' (which are of no interest in this connection), 'theory-confirming' and 'theory­infirming case-studies' (which I have combined to 'theory-testing studies,) and 'deviant case-studies' (which I presume can be made within the frame of either theory-testing studies, theory-generating studies or interpretative studies). 2 Cf. Downs (1957), and the discussion about this book from this aspect in Stokes (1966). It is a great merit of Stokes' critique that he is very well aware of the dilemma described here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bruun, H.H.: 1976, 'Miraculous Mandarins? Investigating the Functions and Influence of Bureaucracy in Foreign Policy', Scandinavian Political Studies 11, 113-129.

Downs, A.: 1957 An Economic Theory of Democracy, Harper & Row, New York. Dubin, R.: 1969, Theory Building, The Free Press, New York.

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Etzioni, A.: 1968, The Active Society, The Fress Press, New York. Goldmann, K.: 1971, International Norms and War Between States, Laromedelsforlagen,

Stockholm. Lijphart, A.: 1971, 'Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method', American

Political Science Review 65, 682-693. Olsen, J. P.: 1971, 'Public Policy-Making and Theories of Organizational Choice',

Scandinavwn Political Studies 7,45-62. Sjoblom, G.: 1968,Party Strategies in a Multiparty System, Studentlitteratur, Lund. Sjoblom, G.: 1977, 'The Cumulation Problem in Political Science: An Essay on Research

Strategies', European Journal of Political Research 5, 1-32. Stokes, D.: 1966, 'Spatial Models of Party Competition', in A. Campbell, P. Converse,

W. Miller, and D. Stokes Elections and the Political Order, Wiiey, New York.