Activation,Conversion, or Reinforcement? The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Vote Choice

This study uses multiwave panel data from the 2008 presidential election to investigate the impact of partisan news exposure on changes in vote preferences over time. Overcoming key limitations of prior research, the analysis distinguishes among the potential effects originally delineated by Lazarsfeld and colleagues ( 1948 ): (1) activation—motivating partisans who initially say they are undecided or planning to defect to shift their vote back to their own party's candidate; (2) conversion—motivating partisans to shift their vote to the opposing party's candidate; and (3) reinforcement—strengthening partisans’ preference for their initial vote choice. The results reveal only modest evidence that partisan news reinforces existing vote preferences. Surprisingly, partisan news plays a more robust role motivating changes in vote choice: news slanted toward citizens’ own partisanship increased the odds of activation and decreased the odds of conversion, while news slanted away from citizens’ own partisanship proved a strong counterforce working in the opposite direction.     

The Achilles Heel of Plurality Systems: Geography and Representation in Multiparty Democracies

Building on the unfinished research program of Gudgin and Taylor (1979), we analytically derive the linkage between a party's territorial distribution of support and the basic features of its vote‐seat curve. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the corresponding empirical model with an analysis of elections in postwar Great Britain, focusing in particular on the transformation of the Liberals from a territorially concentrated to a dispersed party in the 1970s. We show that majoritarian biases increase with the number of parties, and majoritarian systems harm small parties when their vote is more dispersed than average, and large parties when their vote is more concentrated than average. Moreover, the evolving experiences of Labour and Conservatives demonstrate how a party's territorial support, and hence its expected seat premium or penalty, changes with its electoral fortunes. This model has a wide variety of applications in multiparty majoritarian democracies around the world.     

Voter perceptions of coalition policy positions in multiparty systems

A growing body of research shows how voters consider coalition formation and policy compromises at the post-electoral stage when making vote choices. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how voters perceive policy positions of coalition governments. Using new survey data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), we study voter perceptions of coalition policy platforms. We find that voters do in general have reasonable expectations of the coalitions' policy positions. However, partisan beliefs and uncertainty affect how voters perceive coalition positions: in addition to projection biases similar to those for individual party placements, partisans of coalition parties tend to align the position of the coalition with their own party's policy position, especially for those coalitions they prefer the most. In contrast, there is no consistent effect of political knowledge on the voters' uncertainty when evaluating coalition policy positions.     

Multicandidate Equilibrium in American Elections

The United States presidential election of 1992 is anexample of a multicandidate contest involving bothDemocratic and Republican candidates. Using a spatialmodelling approach, I analyze candidate policystrategy for such elections, under the assumption thatvoters choose according to the multivariate votingmodel of behavioral research. This model representsvoters' decisions as probabilistic functions of theirpolicy preferences and political partisanship. Isuggest reasons why partisan voting motivatescandidates to locate near their party's partisans inthe policy space, and illustrate this argument withrespect to the 1992 presidential election. The resultsof computer simulations suggest that these motivationslead to multicandidate spatial equilibria, which arerobust to changes in the model's parameters.Partisanship appears to be an important source ofstability in multicandidate electoral competition.     

Gendering the vote for populist radical-right parties

ABSTRACT

Why do more men than women vote for populist radical-right (PRR) parties? And do more men than women still vote for the PRR? Can attitudes regarding gender and gender equality explain these differences (if they exist)? These are the questions that Spierings and Zaslove explore in this article. They begin with an analysis of men's and women's voting patterns for PRR parties in seven countries, comparing these results with voting for mainstream (left-wing and right-wing) parties. They then examine the relationship between attitudes and votes for the populist radical right, focusing on economic redistribution, immigration, trust in the European Union, law and order, environmental protection, personal freedom and development, support for gender equality, and homosexuality. They conclude that more men than women do indeed support PRR parties, as many studies have previously demonstrated. However, the difference is often overemphasized in the literature, in part since it is examined in isolation and not compared with voting for (centre-right) mainstream parties. Moreover, the most important reasons that voters support PRR parties seem to be the same for men and for women; both vote for the populist radical right because of their opposition to immigration. In general, there are no consistent cross-country patterns regarding gender attitudes explaining differences between men and women. There are some recurring country-specific findings though. Most notably: first, among women, economic positions seem to matter less; and economically more left-wing (and those with anti-immigrant attitudes) women also vote for the PRR in Belgium, France, Norway and Switzerland; and, second, those who hold authoritarian or nativist views in combination with a strong belief that gays and lesbians should be able to ‘live their lives as they choose’ are disproportionately much more likely to vote for PRR parties in Sweden and Norway. Despite these findings, Spierings and Zaslove argue that the so-called ‘gender gap’ is often overemphasized. In other words, it appears that populist radical-right parties, with respect to sex and gender, are in many ways simply a more radical version of centre-right parties.     

The gender gap in populist radical-right voting: examining the demand side in Western and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

In most countries, men are more likely to vote for parties of the populist radical right (PRR) than women. The authors argue here that there are two mechanisms that might potentially explain this gender gap: mediation (women's attitudes and characteristics differ from men's in ways that explain the PRR vote) and moderation (women vote for different reasons than men). They apply these two mechanisms to general theories of support for PRR parties—the socio-structural model, the discontent model, and the policy vote model—and test these on a large sample of voters in seventeen Western and Eastern European countries. The study shows that the gender gap is produced by a combination of moderation and mediation. Socio-structural differences between men and women exist, but the extent to which they explain the gender gap is limited, and primarily restricted to post-Communist countries. Furthermore, women generally do not differ from men in their level of nativism, authoritarianism or discontent with democracy. Among women, however, these attitudes are less strongly related to a radical-right vote. This suggests that men consider the issues of the radical right to be more salient, but also that these parties deter women for reasons other than the content of their political programme. While the existing research has focused almost exclusively on mediation, we show that moderation and mediation contribute almost equally to the gender gap.     

The ‘Hows’, not the ‘Whys’ or the ‘Wherefores’: The Role of Intra‐party Competition in the 2011 Breakthrough of the True Finns

From minor party status, the True Finn Party (PS) claimed nearly one‐fifth of the vote and almost the same proportion of parliamentary seats at the April 2011 Finnish general election. It registered the largest gains made by any party in postwar Finnish history, thus writing – in the eyes of foreign journalists at least – yet another chapter in the surge of populist radical right parties across contemporary Europe. This article, however, is concerned more with how the substantial PS vote was mobilised than with how much was mobilised. The idea is not to identify the primary causes of the PS's national breakthrough, but to explore the internal dynamics of party's explosive growth and the process of translating a large prospective vote into ‘hard votes’ through the ballot boxes. The focus is on district‐level nomination strategies, the range of candidate types, the mechanics of vote optimisation and the distribution of the personal vote. With regard to the latter, the article seeks to measure and analyse the role of intra‐party competition in the anatomy of party transformation and to do so by the novel means of adapting the Laakso‐Taagepera index to measure the ‘effective number of co‐partisans’. Significantly, at the 2011 Eduskunta election the PS exhibited the highest level of intra‐party competition of any of the eight parliamentary parties.     

Performance pressure: Patterns of partisanship and the economic vote

Numerous studies have demonstrated a weakening identification of voters with political parties in Western Europe over the last three decades. It is argued here that the growing proportion of voters with weak or no party affinities has strong implications for economic voting. When the proportion of voters with partisan affinities is low, the effect of economic performance on election outcomes is strong; when partisans proliferate, economic conditions matter less. Employing Eurobarometer data for eight European countries from 1976 to 1992, this inverse association between partisanship and the economic vote is demonstrated. This finding implies a growing effect for the objective economy on the vote in Europe. It helps explain an important puzzle in the economic voting literature: Weak results in aggregate level cross‐national studies of economic voting may be attributable to characteristics of the electorate, not just to the characteristics of government.     

Negative Issue Ownership

Existing research considers issue ownership to be a positive attribute of political parties, which are seen as ‘owning’ those policy areas where they are particularly competent and engaged. However, for some citizens a party may also be a negative issue owner if it has a particularly bad reputation for its handling of an issue. This article describes and explains aggregate and individual-level patterns of negative issue ownership using a survey-based measure of handling perceptions from the 2013 Austrian National Election Study (n = 3,266). Naming a particular party as a negative issue owner is affected by partisanship, but also by policy preferences and government performance evaluations. The effects of issue importance vary across issues. These findings lay the groundwork for more research on negative attributions of issue ownership and their empirical consequences on vote choice.     

Floating policy voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Much of the political science literature is skeptical that issue content matters for presidential voting behavior, with partisanship, social identity, and group attitudes providing the vast majority of explanatory power for two-party vote choice at the individual level. This literature stands in contrast with work on issue cross-pressuring, which argues that voters who disagree with their party on salient issues they care about are more likely to either vote for the opposing party's candidate or not participate in the two-party contest at all. Using the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project's 2016 survey, which includes within-subject responses from early June and November–December of 2016, I find support for both of these literatures in the context of the 2016 presidential election. Group attitudes, particularly with respect to race, were strongly associated with changes in voting behavior between 2012 and 2016. However, some voters, in some cases, seem to have deviated from their 2012 voting behavior based on policy issues they considered important to their vote. While issue cross-pressuring as measurable on the 2016 CCAP was relatively rare, I find that those who were cross-pressured were significantly more likely to change their voting behavior in 2016 relative to 2012.     

Reconsidering individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.     

Feelings about party leaders as a voter's heuristic – what happens when the leaders change? A note

Recent analyses of voting at British general elections deploy a valence theory according to which electors evaluate each party's performance and policies and vote accordingly. Many voters, however, avoid at least some of the effort involved in assembling and assessing information about parties' policies and instead use heuristics such as their feelings about the party leaders as major determinants of their decisions. When party leaders are changed, therefore, differences in voters' feelings about predecessor and successor could lead to changes in party choice. That argument is tested for the 2015 and 2017 British general elections in England, between which all three largest parties changed their leader, with results entirely consistent with the argument. In addition, there were significant changes in feelings about the new party leaders during the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, and these too were linked to final voting choices in the expected directions.     

How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia

Political parties in sub-Saharan Africa's developing democracies are often considered to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) among incumbent parties with greater access to resources and (b) where the scope for turnout buying is higher due to the higher costs of voting. Using postwar Liberia to test our argument, we combine rich administrative data with exogenous variation in parties' ability to monitor their brokers. We show that brokers mobilize voters en masse to signal effort, that increased monitoring ability improves the incumbent party's electoral performance, and that this is particularly so in precincts in which voters must travel farther to vote and thus turnout buying opportunities are greater.     

The Electoral Effectiveness of Party Organization: Norway, 1945–1977*

Latent Variable Partial Least Squares analysis has been used to model the impact of political party organization on stable and changing patterns of party vote in Norway from 1945 to 1977. For the Norwegian Labor Party, the elaboration of a strategy of organizational encapsulation is at least as important as the economic base for maintaining the stability of the party's electoral support; it also depresses support for the opposition parties. Short-run fluctuations around the long-run stability, however, are more influence by economic changes than party organizational strategies, with the exception of the divisive 1973 election, when party organization was important for maintaining the party vote. For the non-Labor parties, party organization is less important than economic variables.     

How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–2017

Until 2017, Germany was an exception to the success of radical right parties in postwar Europe. We provide new evidence for the transformation of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to a radical right party drawing upon social media data. Further, we demonstrate that the AfD's electorate now matches the radical right template of other countries and that its trajectory mirrors the ideological shift of the party. Using data from the 2013 to 2017 series of German Longitudinal Elections Study (GLES) tracking polls, we employ multilevel modelling to test our argument on support for the AfD. We find the AfD's support now resembles the image of European radical right voters. Specifically, general right-wing views and negative attitudes towards immigration have become the main motivation to vote for the AfD. This, together with the increased salience of immigration and the AfD's new ideological profile, explains the party's rise.     

Do parties perceive their voter potentials correctly? Reconsidering the spatial logic of electoral competition

Political parties strive for maximizing their vote shares. One way to achieve this goal is to attract voters from competitors. A precondition for strategies aiming at attracting these voters is that parties perceive their voter potentials among their rivals' electorates correctly. Yet, hardly anything is known about such perceptions. To fill this gap, we develop analogue measures of a party's perceived and its actual voter potential for each competitor in a party system. Combining elite and mass surveys conducted in Germany, we show that perceived and actual voter potentials depend on spatial considerations but also that not all parties are able to correctly evaluate their potentials. These deviations can be traced back to differences in the perceived placement of political actors between elites and citizens. This supports the spatial logic of party competition but it also points to potential pitfalls for strategic behavior of political parties.     

‘It's the quality of government stupid’ explaining patterns in support for far right in the 2022 French presidential election

One of the most important transformations of European politics in recent decades is the rapid expansion of the share of population that vote for parties characterized as populist radical right (PRR) parties. This research note suggests that declining quality of government increases support for populist radical right parties. Using the latest rounds of the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey data that sampled at the NUTS 2 regional level in France, and exploiting the fact that the French, presidential elections contained the same candidates (Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen) in 2017 and 2022, we show that regions increase their vote share for Le Pen where the quality of government decreases. We also show that this relationship holds at the individual level. Thus, supplying quality, impartial and fair public services seem to stifle demand for nativism, ethnic favoritism and authoritarianism and suppress support for the PRR party agenda.     

Vote-earning strategies in flexible list systems: Seats at the price of unity

In theory, flexible list systems are a compromise between closed-list and open-list proportional representation. A party's list of candidates can be reordered by voters if the number of votes cast for an individual candidate exceeds some quota. Because these barriers to reordering are rarely overcome, these systems are often characterized as basically closed-list systems. Paradoxically, in many cases, candidates are increasingly earning individual-level preference votes. Using data from Slovakia, we show that incumbents cultivate personal reputations because parties reward preference vote earning candidates with better pre-election list positions in the future. Ironically, the party's vote-earning strategy comes at a price, as incumbents use voting against the party on the chamber floor to generate the reputations that garner preference votes.     

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

Emigrants’ ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters’: overseas voters are ideologically self-selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas-enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant-enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters’ support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long-term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short-term, transactional support.     

Misleading ballot position cue: Party voting in Korea's nonpartisan local elections

In this study, I present evidence that ballot order can provide a misleading cue to voters. In South Korea, nonpartisan municipal legislative elections were held concurrently with other partisan local elections until 2002. The ballot order of the candidates running in nonpartisan elections was randomly determined, whereas it was determined according to a party's number of seats in the national legislature for candidates running in partisan elections. Therefore, if voters are fully informed, the vote share for the candidate listed first in the nonpartisan ballot should not be correlated with the vote share for the party listed first on the partisan ballot. However, I find that the vote share for a first-listed candidate increases when the first-listed party's vote share increases. I also find that the presence of an incumbent does not significantly reduce the degree to which voters mistakenly use ballot position as a party cue.