Different facets of market orientation: A comparative analysis of party manifestos

In this study, we employ the concept of political market orientation to better understand how the main political parties in the United Kingdom and Germany relate to other stakeholders in the political sphere through an exploratory content analysis of their core election offering, the manifesto. This study has two aims: first, we will discuss the different facets of the market orientation of the main U.K. and German parties in their respective 2005 general elections through an exploratory content analysis, and second, we will compare characteristics of market orientation between the two countries. While the U.K. parties generally exhibited similar levels of market orientation on each of the relevant construct dimensions, the German parties had more distinct profiles; thus, the applied dimensions of political market orientation show discriminatory power within and across electoral systems. In the United Kingdom, it was found that there was a marketplace-determined gravitational center effect that limited the political market orientation of the manifesto, while this was less pronounced in Germany. This leads to the hypothesis that certain aspects of political market orientation may be mediated by structural variables such as the electoral system.