ABSTRACT
This chapter examines four accounts of multi-party electoral competition-Downs’ (1957) rational choice approach, Przeworski and Sprague’s (1986) class view, Kirchheimer’s (1966a) ‘catch-all’ perspective, and Dunleavy and Ward’s (1981) account of preference-shaping strategies.1 These approaches cover the interplay between the strategies adopted by political parties trying to win elections, and voters’ choices. The first three accounts focus on how factors external to the process of party competition impact on party strategy, and thus, on party differentiation. These approaches implicitly or explicitly assume that voters’ preferences are exogenously fixed and cannot be changed by the process of party competition. Dunleavy and Ward’s account, however, focuses on how factors internal to the process of party competition can produce and sustain party differentiation. Their approach is based on the premise that parties and candidates can exploit state power in order to shift the aggregate distribution of preferences in the electorate. The empirical section shows that none of the abovementioned accounts of party competition can adequately explain party strategies in the British context during the post-1945 period, although some could be successfully applied in certain periods.
