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Alternatives in Mobilization: Ethnicity, Religion, and Political Conflict. By Jóhanna Kristín Birnir and Nil Seda Şatana. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 200p. $99.99 cloth.

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and that ``voters reduce their consideration of an issue... in their vote choice as political parties blur their positions” (p. 54). Second, blurring is issue specific. In line with past… Click to show full abstract

and that ``voters reduce their consideration of an issue... in their vote choice as political parties blur their positions” (p. 54). Second, blurring is issue specific. In line with past works, blurring occurs with issues on which the parties are seen as less competent, and where their supporters are divided. Originally, the book shows that blurring is more likely to occur on issues that are nonetheless systemically salient. This is an important finding, infusing the study of ambiguity with much-needed consideration of broader political context. Third, blurring blinds. Focusing on radical right and social democratic parties demonstrates that blurring removes the core electorates’ consideration of party-voter distance on blurred issues. Manual workers and small shop owners are thus willing to support radical right parties despite their incongruence on economic issues, while other manual workers support social democratic parties despite their disagreement over immigration policy. The virtue of Rationality of Irrationality lies in its successful theoretical synthesis, and in its systematic and convincing empirical demonstrations of how and when blurring works. The innovation of the book is its insistence on the contextual nature of blurring, which is most common in situations where parties cannot shy away from engaging political issues due to their preeminence in public debate. The book is also rich with diverse examples of specific tactical choices of concrete political actors, which brings the acts of positional blurring to life. Given its quantitative methodological approach, and its reliance on previously existing data, the book cannot engage several important questions about strategic blurring that stand out. First is the question of how voters actually perceive blurred party positions. The book, like past works, suggests that blurring can take on different forms, such as vague statements on the issue, multiple inconsistent statements on the issue, statements that combine similar issues in atypical ways. The book assumes, again with much of the literature, that ``if voters do not possess enough information on an issue, they rely more on other issues or nonpolicy features” (p. 24). This is likely the case, but it may also be that some voters engage in wishful thinking and project (their) positions onto the party, perhaps with certainty. The duplicitous economic statements of many radical right parties aim to shift voter attention towards immigration only partly. Calls for economic support for native young families combined with calls for cutting taxes, for example, also hope to instill in voters a certainty that radical right parties would support young families and cut taxes. A young parent may thus be as confident about the party’s (left-leaning) views on family allocations, as a small shopkeeper may be about the party’s (right-leaning) tax policy. Creative use of survey experiments may be able to assess how exactly diverse types of ambiguity influence the positional perceptions and subsequent political calculus of voters. Second, the book references other works contending that there is deliberate and strategic use of blurring on the part of political actors. Yet it remains unclear how exactly political elites go about building ambiguous profiles. Do they explicitly plan it in smoky backrooms? Or is it rather a political hunch that leads them to express different positions to different audiences? Ethnographic work and interviews with (retired) politicians may provide a useful glance into the making of ambiguity. Finally, Rationality of Irrationality takes a normative position, arguing that blurring is deplorable as it severs the linkages between the people and their representatives (p. 12, pp. 169-70). The findings of the book itself undermine this view and throw into question the irrationality of positional ambiguity. Following the multidimensional approach to political competition, the book, in line with past work, argues that blurring is primarily a mechanism of deflecting attention to advantageous issues; no party thus blurs everything. Radical right parties are unambiguous champions of national sovereignty and restrained immigration, while socialist parties are clear defenders of generous welfare systems. And voters dominantly support them because of these stances. Blurring some issues thus does not remove policy considerations altogether and does not dissolve parties of their representative responsibilities in general. Perhaps we should not disparage political elites for rationally employing rhetorical and strategic tactics that work. Indeed, decrying blurring on the part of politicians may be as futile as decrying flying on the part of birds. Overall, the Rationality of Irrationality is an important contribution to our understanding of the strategies of political parties seeking to navigate the complexities of diverse electorates—a must-read for all students of political competition.

Keywords: party; issue; right parties; radical right; book; ambiguity

Journal Title: Perspectives on Politics
Year Published: 2023

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