Credible or Capricious?
Credible or Capricious? The Reputational Cost of Party Policy Change
NWO Veni Personal Grant · Principal Investigator: Maurits Meijers · Radboud University Nijmegen
This NWO Veni-funded project (€250,000, 2019–2024) studied the reputational consequences for political parties when they change their policy positions. When parties change their positions — do voters punish them as capricious flip-floppers, or reward them as credibly adapting to new circumstances?
The project combined comparative analysis of party position change in Western Europe with survey experiments examining voter responses to different types of party repositioning. Key questions included:
- Under what conditions do voters accept versus reject party policy change?
- How do party reputation and prior credibility moderate responses to position change?
- What is the role of justifications, issue salience, and partisan identity in shaping voter reactions?
The project was hosted at Radboud University Nijmegen and received additional support from the Institute for Management Research (IMR) and Kieskompas (Election Compass).
Key Findings
Whether voters penalise parties for policy change depends heavily on partisan considerations: voters are more forgiving of position changes by their own party than by opposing parties.
Justifications matter: parties that offer credible explanations for their policy changes face smaller reputational costs than parties that change without explanation.
Issue ownership and prior credibility shape the size of reputational costs: position changes on owned issues are judged more harshly than changes on non-owned issues.
Publications
Publications from this project are tagged with credible-capricious in the publications list.
NWO Project Page
View on NWO.nl →Funding
NWO Veni Personal Grant
€250,000 · 2019–2024 · NWO (Dutch Research Council)
Additional Veni Funding
€33,800 · Institute for Management Research (IMR), Radboud University
Kieskompas Contribution in Kind
€24,000 · Kieskompas (Election Compass)