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The Politics of Nostalgia in Europe
Stefan Müller (University College Dublin) and Sven-Oliver Proksch (University of Cologne)
Abstract: Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of party communication. Instead, prior work usually concentrates on electoral pledges, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising given recent evidence that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. Survey experiments show that a nostalgic appeal can increase conservative voters’ support for liberal political positions. In this paper, we apply these findings from political psychology to party communication and party competition, and study the determinants of nostalgia in elections. We present a novel textual measure of partisan nostalgia, validate this measure with hand-coded extracts of party manifestos and cross-national surveys, and apply it to 1,601 party manifestos across 24 European democracies between 1961 and 2018. Our results show that while nostalgia is most prevalent in manifestos of conservative and populist parties, more liberal parties also tend to become more nostalgic when they come under electoral pressure. We discuss the implications of our approach to the study of political parties, party competition, and elections.
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