Technocratic attitudes and voting behaviour ten years after the Eurozone crisis: Evidence from the 2019 EP elections

The onset of the Great Recession raised the profile of technocracy, or government by experts, as a contrasting model to democracy. Yet, there is little research on how attitudes towards technocracy may impact European citizens' political behaviour. Moreover, the consistency of technocracy supporters' political attitudes, especially towards the EU, is questionable. This paper uses new survey panel data collected before and after the European parliament elections in May 2019 in six countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain). We investigate how citizens’ technocratic attitudes affect their voting behaviour in the European elections. We find evidence that citizens with technocratic attitudes are less likely to support mainstream parties, and tend to either abstain or, if they vote, to give their vote to anti-system parties, especially from the populist right. In addition, by distinguishing technocracy supporters according to their partisanship, we conclude that technocracy is a thin ideology that can be combined with different patterns of political support: while many technocracy supporters have no party identification or support non-mainstream parties and show dissatisfaction with democracy and the EU, another subgroup of technocracy supporters identifies with a mainstream political party and show above average political support and support for the EU.     

Beyond protest and discontent: A cross‐national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support

Studies on populist parties – or ‘supply‐side populism’ more generally – are numerous. Nevertheless, the connection with demand‐side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. This article examines in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. It asks two core questions: (1) are populist party supporters characterised by stronger populist attitudes than other party supporters, and (2) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? The analysis uses fixed effect models and relies on a cross‐sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. The results are threefold. First, in line with single‐country studies, populist attitudes are prominent among supporters of left‐ and right‐wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support in addition to left‐wing socioeconomic issue positions for left‐wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti‐immigration issue positions for right‐wing populist parties. Third, populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy‐related preferences.     

Why do only some people who support parties actually join them? Evidence from Britain

What makes people join a political party is one of the most commonly studied questions in research on party members. Nearly all this research, however, is based on talking to people who have actually joined parties. This article simultaneously analyses surveys of members of political parties in Britain and surveys of non-member supporters of those same parties. This uniquely enables us to model the decision to join parties. The results suggest that most of the elements that constitute the influential ‘General Incentives Model’ are significant. But it also reveals that, while party supporters imagine that selective benefits, social norms and opposing rival parties’ policies are key factors in members’ decisions to join a party, those who actually do so are more likely to say they are motivated by attachments to their party’s values, policies and leaders, as well as by an altruistic desire to support democracy more generally.     

The illusion of state neutrality in a secularising Ireland

It is argued that although the importance of party identification and social cleavages is declining, the bipolarity of the Swedish party system is sustained by voters’ identification with political blocs rather than with parties. Using data from the Swedish election of 2010, the article shows that voters’ bloc identification structures their voting behaviour and stabilises the party system. Four hypotheses are tested and supported. H1: Declining party identification has been replaced by bloc identification. H2: Voters with a strong bloc identification are often detached from a strong party identification, while almost all of the few voters with a strong party identification are also attached to a strong bloc identification. H3: Bloc identification has an effect on voting for parties belonging to one of the political blocs, even when party identification is controlled for. H4: Bloc identification has a small effect on electoral support for anti-establishment parties (such as the Sweden Democrats).     

So who really does the donkey work in ‘multi-speed membership parties’? Comparing the election campaign activity of party members and party supporters

One of the traditional functions of party members is to campaign on behalf of their party at general elections. However, they are not the only people who volunteer for the job. In the context of the growing literature on ‘multi-speed membership’ parties, it is important to ask what non-members do for parties they support. This paper examines how different actors contributed to the electoral campaigns of six parties at the 2015 UK General Election, using survey data covering not only members of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, United Kingdom Independence, Scottish Nationalist, and Green parties, but also voters who identified themselves as being close to one of those parties but did not formally belong to them. As well as exploring how much work they do during campaigns, we ask whether the two groups choose different activities and are differently motivated. We find that, at the individual level, party members do more than non-member supporters, and that this is especially true of more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context and political attitudes influence levels of activity in similar ways for members and supporters. However, we find no consistent impact from demographic factors or ideological incongruence. At the aggregate level, we estimate that the campaign work done by supporters may match or even exceed that done by party members.     

Radical Right Populism in Sweden: Still a Failure,But for How Long?

Although radical right populist (RRP) parties were successful elsewhere in Western Europe during the 1990s, Denmark and Norway included, the Swedish RRP parties have been more or less failures. Besides the short-lived party New Democracy, which disappeared in 1994, no Swedish RRP party has managed to escape electoral marginalization. The main purpose of this article is to explain this failure. Such an explanation is approached by using explanatory factors identified from earlier research on RRP parties elsewhere. We find some factors that have worked against the emergence of a strong Swedish RRP party, namely: enduring class loyalties, especially for working-class voters; an enduring high salience of the economic cleavage dimension (and a corresponding low salience of the sociocultural cleavage dimension); a relatively low salience of the immigration issue; and finally, a low degree of convergence between the established parties in political space. However, we also find some important indicators that there may be an available niche for the emergence of a Swedish RRP party in the near future, namely: widespread popular xenophobia; a high level of discontent with political parties and other political institutions; and a potential available niche for an anti-EU party of the right. Hence, this article concludes that if a sufficiently attractive party emerges in Sweden, with a certain degree of strategic sophistication and without too visible an anti-democratic heresy, it might be able to attract enough voters to secure representation in the Swedish parliament.     

Anti-immigrant parties in Europe: Ideological or protest vote?

Abstract. In this article we address the question whether or not the votes for anti–immigrant parties can be considered as protest votes. We define protest votes by the motives underlying electoral choices, building on earlier research done by Tillie (1995) and Van der Eijk & Franklin (1996). That research showed that ideological proximity and party size are the best predictors of party preference. On this basis we designed a typology of motives for party choice and how these motives would manifest themselves empirically. Analyzing the 1994 elections for the European Parliament for seven political systems we show that anti–immigrant parties attract no more protest votes than other parties do, with only one exception: the Dutch Centrumdemocraten. Voting for anti–immigrant parties is largely motivated by ideological and pragmatic considerations, just like voting for other parties. In addition, (negative) attitudes towards immigrants have a stronger effect on preferences for anti–immigrant parties than on preference for other parties. Social cleavages and attitudes towards European unification are of minor importance as determinants of preferences for anti–immigrant parties. The overall conclusion is that a rational choice model of electoral behavior has strong explanatory power for party preferences in general, but also for the support for anti–immigrant parties in particular.     

A Wider Range of Friends: Multi‐speed Organising during the 2015 Labour Leadership Contest

The British Labour party's recent adoption of a partially open primary for the selection of its leader conforms to a trend seen across many European political parties of increasing rights and privileges in internal party decision‐making and expanding opportunities for more loosely affiliated supporters to participate in party activity. This dual trend can be seen as a response to changes in the membership environment, greater individualisation of political participation and growth in social movement politics and online activism. Yet as much as parties are responding to a changed membership environment, they are also driving that change, increasingly blurring the distinction between members and supporters. This article examines the recent impact of this change within the British Labour party and argues that, in line with Susan Scarrow's theory of ‘multi‐speed’ membership, the Labour party's experiment in expanding affiliation options has led directly to a tension in locating the source of authority within the party, creating a challenge for its new leader in accommodating his new supporters within his party's representative traditions.     

Comparing Class-Related Opinions between MP Candidates and Party Supporters: Evidence from Finland

This article examines whether and to what extent opinions on class-related issues coincide between MP candidates and party supporters in Finland. This strategy is used to approach the mediation of interests from grassroots level to the level of political decision making. In theory, adverse selection and moral hazard problems are identified to have serious implications for the mediation process. Furthermore, the representation role adopted by members of parliament is assumed to be significant in the mediation of interests. Attitudes of the candidates in the 1995 parliamentary elections in Finland and those of citizens are compared empirically. The results indicate that the attitudes of the citizens are not necessarily the same as those of their representatives, i.e. the mediation of interests is not self-evident. A more detailed analysis shows that the candidate's gender, education and adopted representation role can be important as regards the conformity of the candidate's attitudes with those of citizens. Findings also reveal that class struggle is tougher at the level of candidates than at the level of party supporters. Differences in opinions are wider among candidates of the political parties than among party supporters.     

The partisan politics of gold: Switzerland and the sale of gold

This paper explores the relative strength of social, economic and political factors in determining public attitudes towards the sale of a portion of Switzerland's gold reserves and how the money realised from these sales should be used. Partisan political allegiance and generational economic interest are the major factors in determining attitudes towards gold sales in Switzerland in the early 2000s. Cantons and individuals that had supported the Swiss People's Party were more inclined to support its Gold Initiative than supporters of the Swiss Social Democratic Party and other parties of the left which actively campaigned against it. This pattern suggests that, contrary to the suggestions of previous studies, Swiss political parties can play a substantial role in framing political options in referendum campaigns.     

Ideological constraint, political interest and gender: a Swedish-American comparison

Abstract. American and Swedish university and gymnasia students were examined in order to discover whether or not evidence could be found for higher levels of: a) ideological coherence, b) political interest, c) ideological variance, and d) strength of interface between political party preference and political self-concept on the one hand and socio-political attitudes on the other for Swedish citizens as compared to American citizens. The results confirmed the hypotheses in almost all cases and the results are discussed in terms of differences between the nations' political party environments.     

Britain's Oddest Election?

Fringe political parties did well in the European Parliament elections in June 2005. The British National party won their first seats; altogether, four in ten British voters supported a party not represented in the House of Commons at Westminster. YouGov questioned more than 32,000 electors at the time of the election, in order to find out who voted for each party and why: the sample was big enough to enable robust analysis to be done on the BNP, UKIP and Green vote, as well as the supporters of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. YouGov's findings show that there was disillusionment with the traditional main parties, and fears for the future, that were felt by voters across the political spectrum, and not just the supporters of the fringe parties.     

Intra-Party Democracy and Party Responsiveness

This study examines whether parties respond to their supporters or to the median voter position. Party leaders require the support of the ‘selectorate’, which is defined as the group that has influence in party leadership selection. Inclusive parties, which rely on rank-and-file membership to select their leaders, will respond to their members. Exclusive parties, which rely on office-seeking members for leadership selection, will respond to the median voter position. Thus, intra-party institutions that (dis)enfranchise party members are crucial for understanding whether a party responds to their supporters (or to the median voter position). Using data from 1975–2003 for six West European countries, this article reports findings that inclusive parties respond to the mean party supporter position. While there is evidence that exclusive parties respond to the median voter position in two-party systems, this finding does not extend to multiparty systems. This study has implications for the understanding of intra-party institutions and political representation.     

Religion,partisanship and preferences for redistribution

This article offers a new theoretical explanation of the relationship between religion and the demand for redistribution. Previous literature shows that religious individuals are less likely to favour redistribution either because (a) religion provides a substitute for state welfare provision, or (b) it adds a salient moral dimension to an individual's calculus which induces them to act contrary to their economic interests. In this article, it is argued that the effect of religion on an individual's redistributive preferences is best explained by their partisanship, via a process of partisan motivated reasoning. In contexts where parties are able to combine religion with pro-redistribution policies, religious individuals are more likely to favour redistribution as doing so reinforces their partisan identity. In advanced democracies, religious individuals are more likely to be supporters of centre-right parties that oppose redistribution. However, in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the historical and political context leads to the opposite expectation. The nature of party competition in CEE has seen nationalist populist parties adopt policy platforms that combine religion and leftist economic programmes. They are able to credibly combine these two positions due to the way in which religion and the welfare state became linked to conceptions of the nation during the inter-war state-building years. Using data from 2002–2014, the study shows that religiosity is associated with pro-redistribution attitudes in CEE. Furthermore, religious supporters of nationalist populist parties are more likely to favour redistribution than religious supporters of other parties. The results of this research add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between religiosity and economic preferences.     

A multidimensional conceptualization of party identification

The standard treatment of party identification makes several untested assumptions, especially that citizens can identify with only a single party and that political independence is just the opposite of partisanship. A more general possibility is that several attitudes must be taken into account: attitudes toward the Republican party, the Democratic party, political independence, and political parties generally. A literal reading of the usual party identification is consistent with this multidimensional interpretation. Citizen ratings of the two parties turn out to be virtually uncorrelated, as are ratings of independence and political parties, confirming this multidimensional view. Strength of identification and strength of independence are separate in this model, which explains some of the anomalies in the current literature, including intransitivities in relationships with other variables and weak correlations involving independence. New questions included in the 1980 CPS National Election Study support this interpretation and provide a new understanding of political independence.     

Partisan legitimacy across generations

In this paper we argue that parties shape their supporters’ views about the political system via the messages they communicate about the desirability of the political system. Moreover, we contend that the effectiveness of such communication varies considerably across generations. Combining data from election surveys collected in 15 democracies as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project with data on the policy positions of 116 political parties collected by the Comparative Manifestos Project, we find that supporters of parties that express positive positions toward the political system report systematically higher levels of political legitimacy than supporters of parties that communicate negative views. Moreover, this communication is particularly effective among older party identifiers whose partisan identification tends to be more pronounced. Taken together, these findings suggest that political parties play an active role in shaping citizens’ views of the political system but their success in mobilizing consent among citizens in contemporary democracies may weaken with partisan de-alignment and generational change.     

'Small Steps' or 'Great Leaps': How the Swedish Greens Are Learning the Lessons of Government Participation

As Green parties have solidified their positions within the Western European party systems, they have increasingly faced opportunities and pressures to participate in government at varying levels. This has raised significant questions regarding both how the Greens should progress strategically in relation to other longstanding political parties and also whether participation in government represents a process of 'institutionalisation' and a loss of the Greens'new politics' credentials. This paper examines the strategic changes and developments within the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de Gröna) as it has come to terms with opportunities to participate in government. It argues that the decisions within the party have reflected not only internal ideological debates, but also external pressures and opportunities. It also demonstrates that the experiences of the party at local and municipal levels have played a major role in encouraging the national party to consider negotiating with other parties. The paper attempts to draw lessons from the experiences of the Swedish Greens which may prove useful in trying to comprehend the future challenges and pressures facing the continued development of Europe's Green parties.     

The Impact of Radical Right-Wing Parties on the Positions of Mainstream Parties Regarding Multiculturalism

What are the political effects of rising radical right-wing parties (RRPs) in Western Europe? Does the rise of the parties drive mainstream parties (MPs) to become more restrictive on issues mobilised by RRPs, such as multiculturalism? Analysing manifesto data from 1981 to 2008, it is found that the rise of RRPs makes right-wing MPs adopt more restrictive positions regarding multiculturalism. However, left-wing MPs do so only when the opinion of party supporters on foreigners becomes more negative or when the parties lost more votes in the previous election than their opponent right-wing MPs did. The result implies that niche parties with extremist positions can benefit from their own electoral success by dragging MPs toward their own positions. However, the impact of rising niche parties on MPs should be understood against a broader background of party competition, and the impact can be dissimilar between MPs with different ideological commitment and strategic opportunities.     

The link between social attitudes and voting propensities: Attitude-vote consistency among adolescents in Belgium

Research on the political development of adolescents is mainly focused on political engagement and attitudes. The more complex relationship between attitudes and voting behavior is less studied among citizens under the legal voting age. We investigate whether there is a link between social attitudes and voting propensities among Flemish adolescents, using data from the Parent–Child Socialization Study 2012. We observe attitude-vote consistency for three Flemish parties with a clear-cut ideological profile – the Green, radical rightist and Flemish Nationalist party. Findings show that adolescents' attitude-vote consistency is reinforced by their level of political sophistication. The correspondence between social attitudes and vote choice, however, is not impressive and significantly lower than among experienced adults, leaving room for other influential factors.     

Same Considerations,Different Decisions: Motivations for Split‐ticket Voting among Swedish Feminist Initiative Supporters

This article explores why supporters of small, non‐established parties choose to vote for different parties in the elections to the European Parliament (EP) and elections to the national parliament. It uses individual‐level data with open‐ended questions from an online survey on supporters of Feminist Initiative (Fi) – a comparatively small and new Swedish feminist party – to map voters’ own motivations for split‐ticket voting in the 2014 elections. Contrary to expectations based on second‐order election theory, it is found that voters ticket‐split in both directions: there are those voting for Fi in the EP election but not in the national election, and those voting for Fi in the national election but not in the EP election. These voters take the same types of considerations into account but nevertheless end up making opposite voting decisions. Voters clearly distinguish between the two levels – for example, by prioritizing different issues.