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Following the Lipset-Rokkan cleavage approach, we present an ecological analysis of the electoral outcomes at the regional level of the political parties in 16 European democracies. The search for relationships between voter alignments and the social structure is conducted in terms of a comparative ecology model. Ecological factors at the regional level within each country account for 75% of the variance in support for 93 parties over three elections during the 1970s. More than half of the "regional" variance could be explained by five "structural" properties of the regions: industry, agriculture, affluence, religion, and ethnicity. The impact of these structural properties varied across countries and across party types. Some of the more theoretically interesting variations are discussed for specific countries, individual parties, and party types.

Political folklore holds that political parties often try to change their images following a disastrous election defeat. This paper inquires into the truth of this common assumption through a systematic analysis of manifestos promulgated by eight parties in Britain, Germany and the USA prior to national elections in the 1950s through 1980s. Each election was classified as triumphal, gratifying, tolerable, disappointing or calamitous from the standpoint of each party. The change in party images for adjacent elections was assessed by correlating the percentages of sentences devoted to standard political themes in the pair of manifestos. We tested the hypothesis that parties were most likely to change their policy images following disappointing or calamitous elections. Our findings suggest that poor electoral performance was not a sufficient condition to produce a major overhaul of party images, but poor performance in the prior election was virtually necessary to produce major change in policy packaging at the next election.

It is commonplace to see references to parties' manifestos as their written issue "profiles," and changes in such documents as constituting changes in the parties' "images" or "identities," with the latter terms often used interchangeably to capture the role of platforms. This article argues, however, that projection of a party's "image" and its "identity" are two different functions for a manifesto, not just one, and that it is important for the building and testing of theory that this distinction be maintained. Parties are, after all, addressing two audiences simultaneously with one document, and the two dimensions provide two alternative objects of change which can be used strategically to please both audiences at once. The article employs existing manifesto-based measures of parties' relative issue emphases and their positions on a range of issues as indicators of image and identity, respectively, and finds that the two are indeed empirically distinct. Then, an earlier test of the electoral performance hypothesis as applied to emphasis change is replicated with data designed to capture change in issue positions. The test provides evidence for the prudence of maintaining the distinction between emphasis and position as two different dimensions of party profile change.