| OCR Text |
Show 159 mainstream relations? One option, mentioned by van Kessel (2013) and in my 2014 interview with Søren Epersen, Deputy Chairman of the Danish People's Party (DF), is to examine what niche parties do between elections. As Epersen explains, The first ten years of the party I worked as the party's press officer, Head of Information, and we were very poor. We did not have very many means, we did not have any money for campaigning, and what we then decided to use our sparse money on was to campaign, so to say, between the elections … It was the only way that we could then be noticed in the advertisements because we would then be alone because all the other parties were very good at saving money up until the election campaign … Also, I had a feeling there myself that in an election, once the campaign is going, in Denmark it's very intense because it's only a few weeks, people in the end get tired of it. They can go to the supermarket or the department store and they will meet people outside handing out pamphlets and things and they'll see the adverts in every newspaper they open. At some stage they get fed up with it, and I thought that being visible when there were no election campaign was the way to do it, because that meant that those people that were then standing in the streets they really would have time to talk to people and wouldn't feel that there was a line, they were just competing with all the other parties. Also, the advertisement would be seen. So we concentrated very much in making adverts that would create a debate and that was what we spent our money on. That could be like a whole page advert in Jyllands-Posten, one of the other leading newspapers and we could spend maybe, I don't know, two hundred thousand on that advert alone, but then generate another debate on the radio and television about the advert at the same time. It could be that other niche parties have adopted a similar strategy and depending on what they do between elections, this could be influencing the responses of mainstream parties and the future electoral success of niche parties. Socioeconomic Conditions: What Do Parties versus Voters Know? The socioeconomic variable cluster included three areas: economic conditions, the "big" niche issue, and postmaterialism. From Chapter II, the figures and cases presented a mixed picture where there were periods that behaved as expected but just as many that |
