The last several sections have repeatedly demonstrated that fluctuations in platform sym- bolism are not systematically tied to electoral outcomes in the ways predicted by accom- modation theory. I contend that the absence of short-term strategic responsiveness of the type predicted by conventional theory can be explained if both parties are responding to the same symbolic demands. While short-term strategic maneuvering certainly takes place, most of the major innovations in elite symbolism can be found in the words of both parties.
If my argument is correct, stability and imitation should be driven by the same forces. When the political environment causes elites to change their symbolic appeals, parties should use language that is different from their own previous language and the language of their opponents. Conversely, if the political environment remains relatively unchanged from one election to the next, a party’s platform should retain the symbols they used four years earlier and the symbols used in their opponent’s last platform. Accommodation theory leads to very different expectations about how intra-party stability and inter- party imitation should be related. From an accommodation perspective, a party that is pressured to imitate its opponent is also pressured to abandon its earlier symbols, so stability and imitation should be uncorrelated, or even negatively related.
If my argument is correct, and most of the important changes in elite symbolism register in the language of both parties, a party’s similarity to its opponent’s previous language should be a strong predictor of how similar that party is to its own previous language. To go a step further, I expect that the similarity of a party’s current language to its opponent’s previous platform to be a stronger predictor of how stable its own language has been than the lagged level of stability from the previous election. If imitation
and stability are driven by the same factors, they should have more in common with one another than stability from the current period has with stability from the previous presidential cycle. In other words, consistency in a party’s symbolism from the previous election should tell us something about whether we are living in an era of stability or flux generally, but the commonalities between a party’s current platform and what their opponent published four years earlier should tell us even more about how discourse has evolved since the last election.
Table 6.11: Stability as a Function of Imitation and Past Stability Predictor Policy Stability Value Stability
Imitation .83∗∗ .46∗∗ .82∗∗ .53∗∗ (.07) (.10) (.08) (.10) Stabilityt−1 .41∗∗ .39∗∗ (.10) (.10) Constant .13∗∗ .11∗∗ .15∗∗ .08∗ (.05) (.04) (.04) (.04) Adjustedr2 .64 .74 .59 .64 N 74 72 74 72 *=p<.05 **=p<.01
Note: Unit of analysis is a party’s linguistic stability from one election to the next. Thus, there are two observations per election, one for Democrats and one for Republicans. The dependent variable is the similarity of a party’s platform to the language used in their previous platform. The dependent variable in the first two columns of results is the similarity within policy-specific symbols. The dependent variable in the last two columns is each party’s stability within value symbols. The first independent variable is the similarity of each party’s platforms to their opponent’s platform from the previous election. The Second dependent variable is the lagged level of stability, or the similarity of a party’s last platform to its platform of eight years earlier.
The dependent variable in table 6.11 is the similarity of a party’s current symbolism to its own previous platform. The first independent variable is the current similarity of the party’s platform to their opponent’s previous platform. The second independent variable is the similarity of a party’s platform of four years earlier to the platform they published eight years previous, or the dependent variable lagged one election.
First of all, these models demonstrate that the negative relationship between stability and imitation expected by accommodation theory is entirely inaccurate. The first and third columns use the current level of inter-party imitation to predict intra-party stability and find a highly significant and positive relationship, where accommodation theory would
predict a negative association. Moreover, imitation explains a substantial proportion of the variance in stability, both in policy and value symbolism. This provides strong evidence in favor of my argument that stability and flux in elite symbolism registers in the language of both parties at the same time. When the political environment causes a party to use new symbols, those symbols will also be dissimilar to what its opponents used previously. When a party’s symbolism is stable, those symbols will also reflect what appeared in its opponent’s previous platform.
The second and fourth columns extend the analysis by including the lagged level of stability from the previous election as another predictor of stability in the current election. One reason for doing this is the long-term trends in stability discussed earlier. If there are general tendencies toward stability or change that maintain over a series of elections, we want to disentangle these from the unique information about how consistent elite discourse has been over the last four years. Just as my argument predicts, current levels of stability are more strongly associated with a party’s tendency to emulate their opponent’s previous symbolism than it is with how stable they were in the last election. Both predictors are significant, and in the expected direction, but the coefficients for imitation are stronger. Adding the lagged value of stability improves the fit of these models over the models in columns one and three, but difference is not massive.
These results indicate that there are both short-run and long-run forces that influence stability in elite discourse. Knowing how stable a party’s symbolism was in the previous election does provide some information about how stable it is likely to be in the current election. However, a party’s tendency to emphasize symbols used by its opponents previ- ously is an even more telling indicator of whether elite discourse has changed over the past four years. In other words, the signals that cause a party to retain its symbolic appeals will also cause them the retain much of the opponent’s previous language. Moreover, the fact that levels of imitation are better predictors of stability than the lagged level of stability run entirely counter to what accommodation theory expects.
Conclusion
This chapter is centrally concerned with how much commonality exists in campaign sym- bolism. Because formal theory has often focused so much on how the political system should produce dissimilar responses to electoral results, we risk ignoring how often the two parties respond in the same way to changes in the political environment. While the two parties clearly face a different set of challenges following each election, the major in- novations in symbolism are not connected to these distinctions. In Presidential elections, both parties must court the same clientele, causing them to change in similar ways as the political environment evolves. While this point has not gone unnoticed in the field, work on platform behavior continues to be organized by the spatial thinking pioneered by Downs. I am not arguing that spatial theory has no bearing on campaign discourse, but this chapter demonstrates that accommodation theory cannot account for much of what causes elites to change their symbolic appeals.