Moderate,extreme, or both? How voters respond to ideologically unpredictable candidates

Candidates and parties often face a choice between endorsing policies that appeal to their core constituencies or generate support from more diverse groups of voters. While the latter strategy may make overtures to a wider set of citizens, existing literature says little about how the overall mix of issue positions affects electoral support. We argue that candidates who endorse diverse sets of policy positions appear unpredictable to voters and incur subsequent electoral penalties. Using data from the 2006 congressional elections, we find that ideological predictability substantially increases electoral support at both the individual and aggregate levels and that voters perceive greater ideological congruence from more predictable candidates. Our results have important implications for candidate and party strategies and suggest that voters are responsive to the mean and the variance of candidates’ policy stances.     

Blind spots in the party system: Spatial voting and issue salience if voters face scarce choices

Drawing on spatial models of political competition, this research investigates whether decision weights vary across groups of voters defined by their policy positioning in a two-dimensional space. Our analyses of electoral survey data from England, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland reveal that the economic and cultural dimensions of electoral competition are salient for the vote choice of most groups of voters. However, those voters who hold economically right and culturally libertarian preferences weigh their preferences on the economic dimension more and discount parties’ position on cultural issues when no party represents their configuration of preferences. Consequently, left parties are less able to attain votes of economically right but culturally libertarian voters for cultural policy reasons, when electoral choices are scarce, while right parties are successful in attaining votes based on both dimensions. As a result, significant representation gaps can occur.     

The Representative Roles of MPs: A Citizen Perspective

From the normative point of view, there is a general agreement that representatives should act in line with the interests of those being represented. The knowledge about citizens' preferences for representation is very limited, however. This study examines MP's representative roles from the perspective of the citizens. It utilises a task definition approach in the Finnish institutional setting, which substantially differs from the context of earlier investigations in terms of open‐list electoral systems with mandatory preferential voting. Based on the 2007 Finnish National Election Study (n = 1,422), voters' preferences concerning four different representational roles are analysed: as representatives pursuing the interests of their electoral district, party, individual voters or being independent actors. Next, voters' preferences are accounted for by the factors related to each type of representation: citizens' regional electoral context, party attachment and electoral supply, political engagement and political competence, respectively. The results show that citizens living in electoral districts located far away from the political centre or in constituencies where it is more difficult for small parties to win political representation are most prone to prefer regional representation. Similarly, voters who have closer ties with political parties prefer party‐centred representation while those who feel less politically efficient favour close ties with their MPs. Education in turn increases the support for a political representative to act independently from the electorate or the party.     

Policy responsiveness to all citizens or only to voters? A longitudinal analysis of policy responsiveness in OECD countries

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. In representative systems, elections are assumed to play a role in realising such congruence. If those who participate in elections are not representative of the public at large, it follows that the reliance on elections as a mechanism of representation entails a risk of unequal representation. In this paper, we evaluate whether voters are better represented by means of an analysis of policy responsiveness to voters and citizens in democracies worldwide. We construct a uniquely comprehensive dataset that includes measures of citizens’ and voters’ ideological (left–right) positions, and data on welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries since 1980. We find evidence of policy responsiveness to voters, but not to the public at large. Since additional tests suggest that the mechanism of electoral turnout does not cause this voter-policy responsiveness, we outline alternate mechanisms to test in future research.     

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.     

It takes two: how Eurosceptic public opinion and party divisions influence party positions

Do parties respond to voters’ preferences on European integration in elections to the European Parliament (EP)? Following recent research that shows political party responsiveness to Eurosceptic attitudes during EP elections is conditioned by party characteristics, this article seeks to understand how party unity on European integration affects party responsiveness to Euroscepticism. It argues that when Eurosceptic attitudes among voters are high and the parties are divided in their position on European integration, parties will be more responsive to voters and take a more Eurosceptic position. To test the theoretical expectations, the study uses data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the Euromanifestos Project, and European Election Study for 1989–2009 for over 120 parties across 20 European Union member states. The findings have important implications for understanding the nature of democratic representation in the European Union.     

Proportional Representation,Majoritarian Legislatures,and Coalitional Voting

Voters in elections under plurality rule face relatively straightforward incentives. In proportional representation systems, voters face more complex incentives as electoral outcomes don’t translate as directly into policy outcomes as in plurality rule elections. A common approach is to assume electoral outcomes translate into policy as a vote‐weighted average of all party platforms. However, most of the world’s legislatures are majoritarian institutions, and elections in PR systems are generally followed by a process of coalition formation. Results obtained using this assumption are not robust to the introduction of even minimal forms of majoritarianism. Incentives to engage in strategic voting depend on considerations about the coalitions that may form after the election, and the voters’ equilibrium strategies are shaped by policy balancing and the postelectoral coalition bargaining situation, including considerations about who will be appointed the formateur.     

Endogenous Credible Commitment and Party Competition over Redistribution under Alternative Electoral Institutions

Political parties competing in elections for the power to set public policy face the problem of making credible their policy promises to voters. I argue that this commitment problem crucially shapes party competition over redistribution. The model I develop shows that under majoritarian electoral rules, parties' efforts to achieve endogenous commitment to policies preferred by the middle class lead to different behavior and outcomes than suggested by existing theories, which either assume commitment or rule out endogenous commitment. Thus, left parties can have incentives to respond to rising income inequality by moving to the right in majoritarian systems but not under proportional representation. The model also generates new insights about the anti‐left electoral bias often attributed to majoritarian electoral rules, and the strategic use of parliamentary candidates as a commitment device. I find evidence for key implications of this logic using panel data on party positions in 16 parliamentary democracies.     

Democracy and Bureaucracy: How their Quality Matters for Popular Satisfaction

This study focuses on how citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is affected by system factors related to the input side of the democratic system, i.e. the electoral dimension, as well as to factors related to the output side, i.e. the quality of government. The study investigates the extent to which different election system characteristics and degrees of policy representation (in terms of ideological congruence between voters and representatives) and the presence of effective, professional and impartial governmental institutions are related to citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works. The study uses data from CSES on individual voters and party system characteristics together with data on governmental institutions from the QoG Institute. Overall, the results indicate that factors such as government effectiveness are of greater importance for citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy functions, compared to factors like ideological congruence on the input side. Impartial and effective bureaucracies matter more than representational devices.     

Retrospective pledge voting: A comparative study of the electoral consequences of government parties’ pledge fulfilment

Does pledge fulfilment bear any electoral consequences for government parties? While previous research on retrospective voting has largely focused on electoral accountability with respect to the economy, the theoretical framework presented in this study links government parties’ performance to their previous electoral pledges. It is argued that government parties are more likely to be rewarded by voters when they have fulfilled more pledges during the legislative term. Good pledge performance of a party is associated with the ability to maximise policy benefits (accomplishment) and to be a responsible actor that will stick to its promises in the future as well (competence). Analysing data from 69 elections in 14 countries shows that a government party's electoral outcome is affected by its previous pledge performance. A government party that fulfils a higher share of election pledges is more likely to prevent electoral losses. This finding indicates that voters react at the polls to party pledge fulfilment, which highlights the crucial role of promissory representation in democratic regimes. Surprisingly and in contrast with economic voting, there is no evidence that retrospective pledge voting is moderated by clarity of responsibility.     

Do politicians anticipate voter control? A comparative study of representatives’ accountability beliefs

Representation literature is rife with the assumption that politicians are responsive to voter preferences because their re-election is contingent upon the approval of those voters, approval that can be won by furthering their desires or, similarly, that can be threatened by ignoring their wishes. Hence, scholars argue that the anticipation of electoral accountability by politicians constitutes a crucial guarantor of (policy) responsiveness; as long as politicians believe that voters are aware of what they do and will take it into account on election day, they are expected to work hard at keeping these voters satisfied. If, on the other hand, politicians were to think what they say and do is inconsequential for citizens’ voting behaviour, they may see leeway to ignore their preferences. In this study, we therefore examine whether politicians anticipate electoral accountability in the first place. In particular, we ask 782 Members of Parliament in Belgium, Germany, Canada and Switzerland in a face-to-face survey about the anticipation of voter control; whether they believe that voters are aware of their behaviour in parliament and their personal policy positions, are able to evaluate the outcomes of their political work, and, finally, whether this knowledge affects their vote choice. We find that a sizable number of MPs believe that voters are aware of what they do and say and take that into account at the ballot box. Still, this general image of rather strong anticipation of voter control hides considerable variation; politicians in party-centred systems (in Belgium and some politicians in Germany that are elected on closed party lists), anticipate less voter control compared to politicians in more candidate-centred systems (Canada and Switzerland). Within these countries, we find that populist politicians are more convinced that voters know about their political actions and take this knowledge into account in elections; it seems that politicians who take pride in being close to voters (and their preferences), also feel more monitored by these voters. Finally, we show that politicians’ views of voter control do not reflect the likelihood that they might be held to account; politicians whose behaviour is more visible and whose policy profile should therefore be better known to voters do not feel the weight of voter control more strongly.     

Roadmaps to Representation: An Experimental Study of How Voter Education Tools Affect Citizen Decision Making

Efforts to educate citizens about the candidates and issues at stake in elections are widespread. These include distributing voter guides describing candidates’ policy views and interactive tools conveying similar information. Do these voter education tools help voters identify candidates who share their policy views? We address this question by conducting survey experiments that randomly assign a nonpartisan voter guide, political party endorsements, a spatial map showing voters their own and the candidates’ ideological positions, or both a spatial map and party endorsements. We find that each type of information strengthens the relationship between voters’ policy views and those of the candidates they choose. These effects are largest for uninformed voters. When spatial maps and party endorsements send conflicting signals, many voters choose candidates with more similar policy views, against their party’s recommendation. These results contribute to debates about citizen competence and demonstrate the efficacy of practical efforts to inform electorates.

     

How voters' perceptions of junior coalition partners depend on the prime minister's position

Recent studies document that voters infer parties' left‐right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left‐right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that ‘niche’ parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government.     

Left-Authoritarians and Policy Representation in Western Europe: Electoral Choice across Ideological Dimensions

Citizens can face a difficult electoral decision when no party even broadly represents their views. In Western Europe, this applies to those citizens with left-wing preferences on economic issues and traditional/authoritarian preferences on socio-cultural issues. There are many voters with such ‘left-authoritarian’ views, but few parties. Hence, the former often have to choose between parties that only match their views on one of these two ideological dimensions. This study shows that whether these citizens privilege economic or socio-cultural congruence in their electoral preferences depends on the issues they are concerned about. In general, it is found that left-authoritarians privilege economic concerns and therefore prefer parties that are left-liberal. These findings have implications for our general understanding of electoral choice and of changing patterns of political competition in Western Europe.     

Cabinet ministers and inequality

Scholars and commentators increasingly wonder whether governments’ failure to address socio-economic inequalities is the result of unequal representation. Recent literature on policy responsiveness in the United States and Europe finds evidence that party and parliamentary policy proposals and actual policy outcomes are closer to the preferences of the rich than of the poor. However, the extent and character of such unequal representation remains thinly understood. Among the most thinly understood mechanisms are the political conditions that link socio-economic inequalities to unequal representation. This paper thickens our understanding of (unequal) representation by investigating the class composition of parliamentary cabinets and its effect on social welfare policy. With the aid of a new dataset on cabinet ministers’ social class, the paper shows that responsiveness to the social welfare preferences of poorer voters varies by cabinet ministers’ professional backgrounds, above and beyond the partisan orientation of the government.     

Rationales Wählen als Reaktion auf Koalitionssignale am Beispiel der Bundestagswahl 2005

This article extends the calculus of rational voting (Riker/Ordeshook 1968) by considering the coalition building process and the legislative process (cf. Austen-Smith/Banks 1988) in multi-party systems. Comparing coalition preferences and their resulting legislative outcomes instead of party preferences, I elaborate preference profiles of voters on coalitions and estimate the probability that a coalition forms, given the parties’ coalition signals and an expected electoral result. I show the results of this rational calculus for the German Bundestag elections 2005 as a political map. Further, this calculus allows the identification of coalition signals that increase and those that reduce a party’s vote share.     

Female representation and electoral clientelism: New insights from South African municipal electionss

Do citizens experience less electoral clientelism in polities with more elected female representatives? The current literature is remarkably silent on the role of gender and female political representation for electoral clientelism. Due to gender differences in issue priorities, targeted constituent groups, networks and resources, we argue that voters experience less clientelism in municipalities with a higher proportion of female politicians because either female politicians are likely to engage less in clientelism or women are less likely to be viable candidates in more clientelist settings. Through either mechanism, we expect all voters – and female voters in particular – to experience less exposure to clientelism in municipalities with higher female representation. We examine this idea using survey data from the 2016 municipal elections in South Africa – a country with high levels of female representation in politics but increasing problems of corruption and patronage in the political system. Our findings are consistent with the argument that municipalities with more elected female councilors have considerably lower rates of electoral clientelism and that this mostly affects whether female voters are targeted by clientelist distribution. These findings shed new light on how women's representation in elected political office shapes the incidence and use of clientelist distribution during elections.     

Kinder an die Macht?

In order to illuminate the consequences of extra votes for parents, this article looks at the questions of whether parents differ in their party choice from younger people and of what the overall results would have been like for German Bundestag elections in 1994–2005. The results can be summarised as follows: (1) In simple comparisons, parents and childless people have not differed a lot in their party preferences since the first half of the 1990s. However, a more complex analysis of the 2005 elections brought to light systematic differences that are contingent on voters’ age and on their region. (2) The aggregate results of the 1994 to 2005 elections would have looked very much the same. Thus, no party would profit per se in electoral terms from the introduction of the proxy vote for children.     

Explaining the effective number of parties: Beyond the standard model

This study casts new light on the conditions determining the effective number of parties in elections. The state-of-the-art mostly considers the interaction between the permissiveness of the electoral system and social heterogeneity, labelled the standard model. This study argues that we should move beyond the standard model and also consider voters’ short term ideological preferences as well as the diversity of issues on the party system agenda. Moreover, the effects of these variables are expected to be conditioned by electoral system permissiveness. The hypotheses are examined on the basis of a longitudinal dataset containing information on 696 elections that took place in 79 countries between 1945 and 2011. Importantly, the hypotheses could only be confirmed on institutionalized party systems.     

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.