Accommodation theory rests on an underlying assumption that is out of step with political reality. If we predict that a losing party will moderate its behavior in the next election, we assume that losing parties always take the same lesson from past outcomes. However, many factors shape how electoral outcomes change campaign messages. Since these factors are not constant across elections, it is extremely unlikely that superficially similar electoral outcomes will be viewed in the same light. Two elections may have identical vote shares but, because other factors are not the same, can have a different impact on how the parties change their promises and language the next time they go before the voters.
First, it is not always clear what election results mean. Political elites and commen- tators can reasonably disagree about how to interpret previous electoral outcomes, and these discussions often preoccupy the political arena for some time after an election. For example, some Republicans have taken the result of the 2008 election as a signal that they need to become less doctrinaire while others have asserted that the problem was really that the Republican party had not been ideological enough. Democrats faced a similar conundrum after the elections of 2002 and 2004. Was the wise move to start acting more like Republicans, to continue emphasizing traditional Democratic stances, or to craft a completely new message? Changes in rhetorical approach are dependent on what party leaders decide the last election meant and, as such, we should not expect the same vote share to occasion the same response in each case.
In addition to uncertainty, intra-party politics can also cause parties to react in dif- ferent ways to electoral outcomes. The aftermath of a losing election often witnesses a factional battle over the future of the party in question. Part of the current debate within Republican circles is clearly rooted in deeper disagreements over what the Republican Party ought to stand for. The question of which strategy would be the most electorally advantageous frequently animates tensions within the party over what its core commit- ments ought to be. Elections to leadership positions within the party, both in Congress and non-legislative party positions, often fall along factional lines that predated the last
election. Debates over what lessons to draw from the previous election are often proxy competitions between rival factions of the party leadership. What a party does four years later is often just as much a function of who won these internal contests as it is driven by simple strategic considerations. Because the structure of intra-party conflict is not constant across elections, the response a losing party chooses is dependent on whether its leadership remains intact or is substantially transformed.
A third reason that we should not expect electoral signals to have the same impact on party behavior in each case is that parties must make inter-related decisions on how to change their approach on many different issues at the same time. The accommodation prediction works best in a single-dimension world where the space for maneuver is well- defined. Again, this does not reflect the reality that party leaders face. Part of the uncertainty about how past outcomes should be interpreted arises from the fact that it is not always clear which aspects of a party’s program the electorate was rejecting. Was it a party’s stance on taxes, or its position on some salient social issues, or a failure to couch its specific stances in appealing symbolic language that accounted for its failure? Should the party retain most of its prior commitments but highlight a new issue, or set of issues, or change the dimensions of competition? Is it advisable to move closer to the opposition on some issues while making the differences on others more striking? It is often difficult or impossible to objectively answer these questions, deepening the uncertainty that surrounds which strategy will be the most effective next time. In addition, intra- party competition over what the party should stand for in the future is often driven by pre-existing debates over which positions should be modified, which accented, and how the vision of the party should be described. The complexity of the policy space effectively compounds both of the preceding reasons that parties do not respond in the same way every time to a win or loss at the polls.
Finally, expectations play a significant role in whether a party abandons its promises and language. In many elections, one side is heavily favored from the outset (i.e. a ruling party during wartime or the opposition during an economic downturn). When the conditions favor one party from the outset, an electoral loss may not be interpreted as
a wholesale rejection of the losing party’s platform. Political science work on campaign promises has found that the content of national platforms has, at best, a marginal impact on a party’s vote share Alvarez and Nagler (1995, 1998); Alvarez, Nagler and Bowler (2000); ?. Savvy elites know that some elections were all but determined before the campaign even got underway and their appeals only have influenced voting at the margins. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the factors that influence whether an election result sets off a major change in party language, or not. The central point is that Downs’ model of campaign behavior fails to capture the complexity of the political environment and, because of this, simple expectations about how parties respond to electoral outcomes do not account for very much of what causes parties to change their discursive approach. Expecting losing parties to imitate their opponents may make intuitive sense, but this response depends on a host of factors that are not part of the accommodation model.