TESTING FOR CONVERGENCE IN LEFT-RIGHT IDEOLOGICAL POSITIONS

This paper investigates convergence in left-right ideological position s in The Netherlands using cointegration techniques. Our sample consis ts of 765 weekly observations on those positions as well as on the cor responding political party preference. The time series data display no nstationary patterns in the sense that their means are not constant ov er time. Therefore, we rely on recently developed techniques in the an alysis of multivariate nonstationary time series to study convergence. One of our results is that the ideological positions, when considered relative to a benchmark, can be described by trend-stationary process es. This means that we cannot reject the presence of convergence. Impl ications of this result are discussed.