what factors are responsible for political Manifesto of different social group
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Electoral manifestos play a crucial role in visions of party democracy and political science analyses of party competition. While research has focused on the contents of manifestos, we know much less about how parties produce manifestos and the roles they take in campaigns. This paper identifies three campaign-related functions of manifestos: they provide a compendium of valid party positions, streamline the campaign, and are used as campaign material. Based on the characteristics of the candidates, the parties and the campaign, the paper then derives expectations of how party candidates may differ in attributing importance to their party's manifesto. Based on a candidate survey after the 2013 Austrian general election, the paper shows that the key user-group of parliamentary candidates considers manifestos generally important and useful documents. Candidates' policy-centred campaigning and left–right distance from their own party are important in explaining individual differences. While the manifesto's service functions of providing a summary of valid party positions for the candidates and as a campaign means to be handed out to voters are widely appreciated, campaign streamlining is more divisive when it results in constraining candidates.
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1. Introduction
The stylized version of party democracy puts great emphasis on parties' policy programs as structuring the campaign, voters' choices, party coalition building, and government policy. Parties then fight elections rallying behind a manifesto, laying down policy priorities and positions, and a team of leaders committed to them. The victorious party takes government office and implements its policy program. In cases of coalition cabinets, government policy is expected to be some kind of compromise based on the policy programs of the participating parties. In the subsequent election, voters will not only judge parties according to their policy programs for the next term in office, but also retrospectively, focussing on the government's performance and scrutinizing if the parties have kept their promises (see, e.g., Dalton et al., 2011).
an multi-party system with a broad range of parties in terms of ideology, organization, and age. We develop and empirically test hypotheses relating to the characteristics of candidates and manifestos. We also discuss the relevance of party characteristics such as government status, age or performance in the polls, but due to multicollinearity concerns we exclude them in multivariate analyses. Clearly, there are limits to the generalizability of results relating to one country and one election. Yet, we believe that the expectations and findings of our study are also applicable to other countries and elections that share similarities with the Austrian one.