What Draws Politicians’ Attention? An Experimental Study of Issue Framing and its Effect on Individual Political Elites

What politicians devote attention to, is an important question as political attention is a precondition of policy change. We use an experimental design to study politicians’ attention to incoming information and deploy it among large samples of elected politicians in three countries: Belgium, Canada, and Israel. Our sample includes party leaders, ministers and regular members of parliament. These elites were confronted with short bits of summary information framed in various ways and were then asked how likely it was that they would read the full information. We test for three frames: conflict, political conflict, and responsibility. We find that framing moderates the effect of messages on politicians’ attention to information. Politicians react more strongly (i.e., they devote more attention) to political conflict frames than to non-political conflict frames and they react stronger to political responsibility attributions than to non-political responsibility attributions. Conflict frames attract more attention than consensus frames only from members of opposition parties. Political conflict frames attract more attention from government party politicians. These effects occur largely across issues and across the three countries.     

Who should be chef? The dynamics of valence evaluations across income groups during economic crises

In this paper, we investigate partisan rationalization in valence politics by trying to better specify the direct and indirect effects of the economy on government support. To do so, we examine how income levels moderate the influence of objective economic conditions on perceptions of which party is the best manager of the economy during a period of economic crisis, 2004–2010, in the United Kingdom. We find that low-income voters are more responsive in their assessments of the incumbent Labour government based on unemployment, as are high-income voters in terms of inflation. In addition, high-income voters tend to behave in a manner consistent with partisan rationalization, while low-income voters do not. These conclusions offer important implications for the effectiveness of electoral control of government policy, as well as the quality of representation.     

Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions

Assigning credit and blame in systems of multilevel government, such as federal states, requires information. This paper examines how voters respond to information about policy outcomes when attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government in a European context. Using an experimental design, we show that the responsibility attributions of British voters are affected by perceptual biases, notably their feelings about the government and the European Union (EU). But interestingly, we also find that voters, regardless of their predispositions, are only responsive to information they receive from their national government, whereas they ignore information provided by EU officials. These findings have implications not only for our understanding of attribution in systems of multiple levels of government, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the credibility of the source.     

Associative Issue Ownership as a Determinant of Voters’ Campaign Attention

Campaigns raise public interest in politics and allow parties to convey their messages to voters. However, voters’ exposure and attention during campaigns are biased towards parties and candidates they like. This hinders parties’ ability to reach new voters. This paper theorises and empirically tests a simple way in which parties can break partisan selective attention: owning an issue. When parties own issues that are important for a voter, that voter is more likely to notice them. Using survey data collected prior to the 2009 Belgian regional elections it is shown that this effect exists independent of partisan preferences and while controlling for the absolute visibility of a party in the media. This indicates that issue ownership has an independent impact on voters’ attention to campaigns. This finding shows that owning salient issues yields (potential) advantages for parties, since getting noticed is a prerequisite for conveying electoral messages and increasing electoral success.     

Do Voters Follow? The Effect of Party Cues on Public Opinion During a Process of Policy Change

A large body of literature has demonstrated how citizens use party endorsements when shaping their policy opinions. However, recent studies question the centrality of party cues in shaping public opinion. This study advances the literature with a four‐wave panel survey design that measures citizens’ policy opinions before, during and after a controversial policy proposal to ban street begging was made by the Norwegian government in 2014. Two main findings inform previous work. First, voters are modestly affected by party cues as the proposition turns salient. Second, when a party shifts their policy position on a highly salient issue, voters do not automatically shift their opinions accordingly. Thus, the magnitude and direction of opinion change in the electorate indicate that party cue effects are modest and that instead of polarizing patterns across time parallel publics moving in the same direction independent of party cues are detected. These findings demonstrate that under some conditions, voters’ opinion formation is less dependent on partisan elites than much of the previous work indicates.     

Entering the men's domain? Gender and portfolio allocation in European governments

While all government portfolios used to be the purview of men exclusively, more and more women are selected to sit around the cabinet table. But under which circumstances do women get appointed to different ministerial portfolios? This article, proposes a theoretical framework to consider how party leaders’ attitudes and motivations influence the allocation of portfolios to male and female ministers. These propositions are tested empirically by bringing together data on 7,005 cabinet appointments across 29 European countries from the late 1980s until 2014. Considering the key partisan dynamics of the ministerial selection process, it is found that women are significantly less likely to be appointed to the ‘core’ offices of state, and ‘masculine’ and ‘neutral’ policy areas. However, these gender differences are moderated by the ideology of the party that allocates them. Women are more likely to be appointed to ‘masculine’ portfolios when a party's voters have more progressive gender attitudes. This theoretical framework and analysis enhances our understanding of women's access to the government, which has important implications for how ministers are selected, as well as how women are represented in the most powerful policy-making positions in Europe.     

The partisan heuristic and the voters’ knowledge: The essential role of the information environment

The low-information rationality theory expects voters with low political knowledge to make more use of the partisan heuristic than those with high knowledge. However, empirical studies on decision making in direct democracy observe a positive correlation between political knowledge and the use of party cues. We resolve this tension between theory and empirical evidence by demonstrating that the relationship between political knowledge and the use of party cues is conditional on the information environment. We provide evidence for this hypothesis by exploiting a natural experiment in Switzerland and analyze a large variety of direct democratic votes. The results show that voters with lower levels of political knowledge tend to align less with their preferred party because they often have a wrong perception of their preferred party’s vote recommendation. However, if information on parties’ position is easily available, their vote choice is at least as much in line with their preferred party as among those with high knowledge. This suggests that in such an information environment voters with low political knowledge strongly rely on the partisan heuristic. Our research note supports the low-information rationality theory and this way contributes to the literature on the quality of political opinion formation and the political psychology of reasoning and decision making.     

The Paradox of the Politically-Sophisticated Partisan: The French Case

The erosion of partisan ties observed in many advanced industrialised democracies has been attributed to a cluster of factors associated with societal modernisation. This article considers the impact of one of these explanatory factors, the political sophistication of the electorate, in the case of France. Specifically, it tests the proposition that a more highly-educated and better-informed electorate will be less partisan. Its findings challenge a number of the assumptions behind the ‘independent’ voter thesis. The evidence points to the fact that it is lower rather than higher cognitive mobilisation that is associated with apartisanship. More politically-sophisticated voters, young and old alike, tend to have stronger party attachment and to rely on this rather than on complex evaluations of issues and policy to guide their voting decision.     

The Political Consequences of External Economic Shocks: Evidence from Poland

How do external economic shocks influence domestic politics? We argue that those materially exposed to the shock will display systematic differences in policy preferences and voting behavior compared to the unexposed, and political parties can exploit these circumstances. Empirically, we take advantage of the 2015 surprise revaluation of the Swiss franc to identify the Polish citizens with direct economic exposure to this exogenous event. Using an original survey fielded prior to the 2015 elections and an embedded survey experiment, we show that exposed individuals were more likely to demand government support and more likely to desert the government and vote for the largest opposition party, which was able to use the shock to expand its electoral coalition without alienating its core voters. Our article clarifies the connection between international shocks, voters’ policy preferences, partisan policy responses, and, ultimately, voting decisions.     

Is Anybody Listening? Evidence That Voters Do Not Respond to European Parties’ Policy Statements During Elections

Although extensive research analyzes the factors that motivate European parties to shift their policy positions, there is little cross‐national research that analyzes how voters respond to parties’ policy shifts. We report pooled, time‐series analyses of election survey data from several European polities, which suggest that voters do not systematically adjust their perceptions of parties’ positions in response to shifts in parties’ policy statements during election campaigns. We also find no evidence that voters adjust their Left‐Right positions or their partisan loyalties in response to shifts in parties’ campaign‐based policy statements. By contrast, we find that voters do respond to their subjective perceptions of the parties’ positions. Our findings have important implications for party policy strategies and for political representation.     

Knowing your sources: Partisan media and voters’ perceptions of the economy

This paper explains how media systems influence the extent to which partisanship colors voters’ perceptions of the economy (i.e., the strength of the partisan screen). It builds upon research on individual-level biases in economic perceptions, seeking to extend existing work by considering how the availability of partisan media for a given party affect such biases. The implication of this is that the greater the availability of media sources favorable to a party, the stronger the partisan screen for its partisans. This follows from several mechanisms including selective acceptance of messages, selective exposure to partisan sources, and incidental exposure to partisan sources. Each of these suggests that differences in the availability of partisan media across parties leads to corresponding differences in the extent of partisan bias for partisans of these parties. I test this Hypothesis in 14 European countries over four time-periods using data built from expert surveys on media characteristics.     

Perceptions and reality: Economic voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections

Abstract.  One of the most influential explanations of voting behaviour is based on economic factors: when the economy is doing well, voters reward the incumbent government and when the economy is doing badly, voters punish the incumbent. This reward-punishment model is thought to be particularly appropriate at second order contests such as European Parliament elections. Yet operationalising this economic voting model using citizens' perceptions of economic performance may suffer from endogeneity problems if citizens' perceptions are in fact a function of their party preferences rather than being a cause of their party preferences. Thus, this article models a 'strict' version of economic voting in which they purge citizens' economic perceptions of partisan effects and only use as a predictor of voting that portion of citizens' economic perceptions that is caused by the real world economy. Using data on voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections for 23 European Union electorates, the article finds some, but limited, evidence for economic voting that is dependent on both voter sophistication and clarity of responsibility for the economy within any country. First, only politically sophisticated voters' subjective economic assessments are in fact grounded in economic reality. Second, the portion of subjective economic assessments that is a function of the real world economy is a significant predictor of voting only in single party government contexts where there can be a clear attribution of responsibility. For coalition government contexts, the article finds essentially no impact of the real economy via economic perceptions on vote choice, at least at European Parliament elections.     

Simulation Analysis of the Effect of Party Identification on Finnish Parties' Optimal Positions

The Finnish National Election Study of 2003 revealed that most voters in Finland do not identify with parties and are self‐described as independents. In this article it is asserted that partisan attachments affect Finnish parties' optimal positions despite the large amount of independents. To show this, the article is divided in two parts. In the first part, voters' decisions are assumed to be deterministic. To show the effect of party identification under deterministic voting, two different types of simulations are conducted: the partisan type, where the partisans' voting behaviour depends on their distance from the party and on a degree of partisan attachment, and the apartisan type, where voting behaviour depends solely on policy issue distance. Results show that partisan attachments drive parties to adopt different ‘one‐off’ optimal positions than they would if party competition was solely based on policy issue distance. In the second part of the article, it is assumed that voters' decisions are probabilistic. Upon showing that party identification makes a voting model solely based on distance significantly more fit, the predicted probabilities of party choice are computed. Results indicate that the probability that a voter will vote for a party is higher when the party is located at its optimal position according to the partisan type of simulations rather than the apartisan one.     

Political Brokers: Partisans or Agents? Evidence from the Mexican Teachers' Union

Political brokers mobilize voters all over the world, yet little is known about what motivates them to do so. This article theorizes about two drivers of brokers' efforts: (1) incentives—monetary rewards or sanctions—and monitoring and (2) partisan attachment. We examine our theory using data on the Mexican National Educational Workers Union (SNTE), Latin America's largest union and a well‐known political machine. Consistent with the role of teachers as brokers, we find that the vote share of parties supported by the SNTE machine is higher in polling stations located in schools. This effect is absent when teachers are asked to mobilize voters in support of a party for which they have no partisan attachment, and it is uncorrelated with the union's monitoring capacity. This suggests that partisan attachment, rather than incentives and monitoring, explains the SNTE's effectiveness as a political machine.     

Elite communication and affective polarization among voters

How does elite communication influence affective polarization between partisan groups? Drawing on the literature on partisan source cues, we expect that communication from in- or outgroup party representatives will increase affective polarization. We argue that polarized social identities are reinforced by partisan source cues, which bias perceptions of elite communication and result in increased intergroup differentiation. Further, we expect that the effect of such source cues is greater for voters with stronger partisan affinities. To evaluate our hypotheses, we performed a survey experiment among about 1300 voters in Sweden. Our analyses show that individuals who received a factual political message with a source cue from an in- or outgroup representative exhibited higher affective polarization, especially when they already held strong partisan affinities. This suggests that political elites can increase affective polarization by reinforcing existing group identities, and that this occurs in conjunction with biased interpretation of elite communication. The results improve our understanding of how political elites can influence affective polarization and add to previous research on party cues and attitude formation by demonstrating that such source cues can also increase intergroup differentiation.     

How Voters Evaluate Economic Competence: A Comparison between Parties In and Out of Power

Accounts of general election outcomes increasingly talk about voters comparing parties in terms of their perceived competence to manage the economy and public services. This raises the question of how voters form evaluations of party competence. While it is assumed that voters form evaluations of the incumbent based on the signals provided by its current performance in office it is less clear how, in the absence of such a performance record, voters might evaluate the potential competence of the opposition. Using data from the British Election Panel Studies this article models the process by which voters form evaluations of parties' competence to manage the economy and compares results across incumbent and opposition parties. On the basis of evidence from general elections of 1992–2001 the article demonstrates that the process of evaluation formation does differ between parties in and out of power with retrospective evaluations of recent economic performance influencing evaluations of the former but not the latter. Nevertheless, the article also demonstrates that voters are capable of forming evaluations of the opposition which are more than a simple mirror image of their evaluations of the incumbent. In the absence of an up-to-date performance record these evaluations are based on long-term partisan and ideological predispositions and the cues provided by party leaders.     

Media proliferation and partisan selective exposure

The number of Internet news media outlets has skyrocketed in recent years. We analyze the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes assuming voters may choose news that is too partisan, from an informational perspective, i.e., engage in partisan selective exposure. We find that if voters who prefer highly partisan news—either because they are truly ideologically extreme, or due to a tendency towards excessive selective exposure—are politically “important,” then proliferation is socially beneficial, as it makes these voters more likely to obtain informative news. Otherwise, proliferation still protects against very poor electoral outcomes that can occur when the number of outlets is small and the only media options are highly partisan. Our model’s overall implication is thus that, surprisingly, proliferation is socially beneficial regardless of the degree of selective exposure.     

Parties are always right: the effects of party cues and policy information on attitudes towards EU issues

Abstract

This article analyses the influence that political parties exert upon citizens’ opinions about European Union issues. By measuring at the same time the content and source effects on political attitudes, the article considers the possibility that voters pay less attention to the arguments used in a political message than to its source. Results from an online survey experiment in Spain show that partisan voters use a heuristic model of processing when taking positions on an unfamiliar EU issue, even though the prevalence of the source effect is moderated by the respondent’s political sophistication and party attachment. The results also indicate that some respondents tend to pay less attention to a message’s content when the message comes from their preferred party. Such findings raise concerns about the possibility for EU issue voting to guarantee the accountability of political elites and party–voter linkages.     

Rating the Chancellors and their Budgets

The annual budget presentation is one of the most important forms of public, partisan behaviour in a parliamentary democracy. As such, it should share many features with the addresses of US presidents, including their presumed efficacy. Yet public reactions to budget presentations have been studied only indirectly, and a link between these reactions and government standing has not been established. We use Gallup data over four decades to investigate how voters assess Chancellors of the Exchequer and their budgets. We find that voters' assessments are a product of the performance of the economy, the content of the budget, the media's reaction to the budget and political factors, and are not simply derivative of general feelings about the government in power or intended vote. While developed independently, evaluations of the Chancellor and the budget affect short-term voting intentions of the public. Thus, in unitary, parliamentary governments, as in federal and presidential systems, voters use more than one focal point (in a single party) to evaluate the government and its actions.     

The accountability effect of endorsements: A survey experiment

Do endorsements from incumbent politicians to co-partisans lead to more electoral accountability for the performance of the government? I use a randomized experiment embedded in a national survey conducted before the 2012 Mexican general election to examine the effect of endorsements by the outgoing president Felipe Calderón to the Senate candidates of his Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Results show that among PAN identifiers, the incumbent vote is more tightly linked to the performance of the president when voters are exposed to the endorsement. I improve on the current standing of the accountability literature by showing that the relationship between an outgoing politician and the candidates of her party matters for electoral sanctioning. My findings imply that politicians’ strategic decisions have an effect on how voters assign responsibility: By nominating candidates without close ties to the endorser in cases of weak government performance, parties can use nominations strategically to diffuse responsibility.