Preaching to the Choir: Americans Prefer Communicating to Copartisan Elected Officials

Past work suggests that partisan attachments isolate citizens from encountering elite messages contrary to their points of view. Here, we present evidence that partisan attachments not only serve to filter the information citizens receive from political elites; they also work in the other direction, isolating politicians from encountering potentially contrary perspectives from citizens. In particular, we hypothesized that Americans prefer expressing their opinions to politicians who share their party identification and avoid contacting outpartisan politicians. Three studies—drawing on a mixture of observational, field experimental, and natural experimental approaches—support this hypothesis: Citizens prefer to “preach to the choir,” contacting legislators of the same partisan stripe. In light of evidence that contact from citizens powerfully affects politicians’ stances and priorities, these findings suggest a feedback loop that might aggravate political polarization and help explain how politicians of different parties could develop different perceptions of the same constituencies.     

Party performance explains disagreement between politicians and their parties

Are politicians more likely to disagree with their party after an electoral defeat or during a spell in opposition? If so, are they likely to advocate a more moderate or a more radical position than their party? In order to evaluate this, the article analyses the absolute distance between candidates for parliament and their parties on the left–right dimension. The sample used consists of 5614 politicians from 11 countries (Comparative Candidate Survey). Controlling for party system differences and individual characteristics, the results demonstrate that politicians take more moderate positions than their party after an electoral defeat. Also politicians of government parties are surprisingly more likely to disagree than politicians of opposition parties. These results overlap with predictions of party position shifts and inform the discussion on how intra-party dynamics bring about changes in party position. In addition, the article finds evidence of loss aversion, and differences in the responsiveness of elite and non-elite candidates.     

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.     

Ideological representation in clientelistic democracies: The Indonesian case

Do parties represent the ideological preferences of voters in clientelistic political systems? We answer this question by studying the case of Indonesia, whose politics analysts usually describe as being based on patronage. We reassess this proposition using an original survey of over 500 Indonesian legislators. We show that, while party positions are similar on economic policy, they are differentiated on religious issues. To explore the implications of this cleavage, we develop a new measure of policy preferences about state-Islam relations, and match survey responses from legislators and citizens. Our analysis shows a high degree of congruence in party dyads of voters and politicians, which indicates that ideology is more salient than existing research suggests. We further suggest that clientelistic networks may have been pivotal in ensuring the survival of this religious-based ideological cleavage through decades of authoritarianism and democratic politics characterized by ideological moderation.     

Size and e-Democracy: Online Participation in Norwegian Local Politics

This study of municipal e-participation in Norway, comprising local politicians as well as citizens, explores the impact of municipal size on online participation. First, the analyses show that the conventional predictors of offline participation also influence online participation, but the Internet encourages more activity among young people. Second, the same digital divides are generally found within the local political elite as among the citizens. Municipal size is, however, an exception. In the case of the local politicians, higher online participation rates are found in populous municipalities. This territorial digital divide is absent among the citizens. The findings indicate that the relatively high level of traditional participation in small municipalities also promote e-participation.     

E‐communication: Strengthening the Ties between Councillors and Citizens in Norwegian Local Government?

This article examines the extent to which local politicians use digital channels in their contact with citizens and stakeholders, in comparison with traditional forms of communication (i.e. face-to-face and telephone contact) and which politicians are using digital channels the most. By analyzing a national survey of municipal politicians and mayors in Norway, findings show that e-mail has become an important channel of communication between local politicians and citizens, while e-debates have not. More surprisingly, the digital divides related to age and levels of education, which are reported in other studies, are less obvious in this study. Variations, however, in e-mail usage do exist in municipal hierarchies; Mayors, more than other politicians, use e-mail in work-related communication. The article also discusses whether digital channels are able to transfer the all important 'local' tacit knowledge from citizens to local politicians, and concludes that most politicians do not consider e-mail to be as capable at doing so as the traditional channels. The article indicates that the informality of e-mail lowers the threshold for contact, increasing the politicians' knowledge about the experiences, problems and preferences of the citizens, thus broadening their pattern of communication and reaching new interest groups. E-mail, therefore, seems to increase contact and strengthen the ties between politicians and citizens. Politicians are aware, though, of the relationship between the electorate's lack of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) competence and usage of e-communication channels, and they stress that their use of digital channels is a supplement to traditional channels – not a replacement.     

The changing representation interface: democracy and direct contact with politicians

The interface between politicians and the electorate is a vital component of the infrastructure of democracy and politicians now have many more tools available to communicate and engage with the electorate. Direct contact between politicians and the electorate is associated with increased levels of civic engagement. In this article, we examine the responsiveness of politicians in the UK by conducting: (i) an innovative test of responses to an undecided voter's email and (ii) follow-up interviews with electoral candidates. We found that a majority of electoral candidates had an identifiable email address and more than half responded to our undecided voter's email. However, there were considerable differences in the content relevance of the responses. There were also very few follow-up emails or further contact from the electoral candidates, suggesting only limited evidence of an integrated communication strategy. Electoral candidates also expressed concerns about communicating in a way that was ‘on record’. The findings provide a unique insight into the dynamics of communication between politicians and the electorate and the changing nature of the representation interface. Whilst the Internet has the scope for more personalized and two-way communication and for electors to hold politicians to account, it seems that politicians are more focused on campaign advantage rather than renewing the representation interface.     

Do technocrats boost the acceptance of policy proposals among the citizenry? Evidence from a survey experiment in Italy

Are policies proposed by technocrats more easily accepted by citizens than those proposed by traditional partisan actors? This is a crucial question, as politicians increasingly rely on technocrats for resolving “wicked problems” such as financial, environmental, and health crises. To answer this question, we conducted a survey experiment among 5000 Italian respondents. At the time of our experiment, Italy was governed by a “grand coalition” of various technocratic and partisan actors, enabling us to realistically vary the proponents of different policy proposals. Overall, citizens are more likely to accept policies proposed by technocrats as opposed to party leaders. In particular, we find that technocratic proponents boost policy acceptance even more for economic and valence issues. Furthermore, we find that this “technocratic effect” is generally stronger among citizens who are more likely to disagree with the policy content.     

The moment you decide,you divide: How politicians assess procedural fairness

Are politicians more rational decision makers than citizens? This article contributes to the ongoing debate by examining how politicians and citizens assess the fairness of the process leading to a controversial policy decision. It contains theories as to why it is tempting to match the favourability of policy decision with a fairness assessment of the preceding process, and how politicians and citizens differ in their approach to the task. Having derived three hypotheses, parallel scenario experiments are run in large samples of Swedish politicians and citizens, in which the outcome and fairness of a policy decision process are manipulated. As predicted, it is found that both politicians and citizens match the favourability of the decision with the assessment of the process, that these self-serving biases are stronger among politicians, and that policy engagement accounts for the group-level difference.     

Rewarding the Top: Citizens' Opposition to Higher Pay for Politicians

The rewards of politicians are a key part of the implicit contract between politicians and citizens, and the effect of these rewards on democratic legitimacy and political recruitment is a central concern in public debate and democratic theory. Using a survey experiment, we show how citizens respond to hypothetical changes in politicians’ pay. The results indicate that citizens express lower levels of trust in the politicians when these politicians award themselves higher pecuniary rewards. However, our results also show that a devious strategy in which the rewards for politicians are less transparent ensures lower opposition from citizens than open and transparent strategies. Based on this, we outline a reinvigoration of the research agenda on “rewards at the top.”     

Intra-Party Politics and Public Opinion: How Candidate Selection Processes Affect Citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Scholars often mention the centrality of parties for the democratic political system. Indeed political parties are indispensable institutions for the linkage between state and society, and should not remain absent in any comparative analysis of citizens’ political attitudes. Yet, only rarely do scholars study how parties shape people’s opinion about democracy. This article seeks to amend this lacuna and examine empirically how party level characteristics, specifically the nature of a party’s candidate selection procedure, relate to the level of satisfaction with democracy among citizens. The authors constructed a cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 130 political parties in 28 country-sessions to examine whether citizens that vote for democratically organized parties are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country. Additionally, this relationship is examined more closely in Israel and Belgium, two countries where candidate selection procedures show substantial variation and where politicians have made a strong claim for intraparty democratization. Both the cross-national as well as the country-specific analyses indicate that democratic candidate selection are indeed associated with greater satisfaction with democracy.     

Party competition and citizens' political attitudes in the American states

Democratic theorists argue that vigorous competition between candidates/parties is essential for democracy to flourish because it engages citizens' political interest and ultimately makes elected officials more accountable to their constituents. Using data on citizens' perceptions of government responsiveness to their political opinions from the American National Election Studies and the Ranney measure of party competition for control of state government, we examine the effects of competition on citizens' political attitudes from 1952 to 2008. Our analysis reveals that citizens feel government is more responsive to them when there is greater competition between the two parties for control of government in their state. However, this relationship is confined only to citizens who identify with the party that controls government in their state. We also find that the relationship between competition and efficacy is strongest among citizens with lower levels of education and income. These results suggest that vigorous competition for control of state government can have important implications for citizens' political attitudes.     

Normalization on the politicians’ messages level,equalization on the citizens’ discussions level: the 2015 Israeli elections campaign on Facebook

ABSTRACT

The question whether online social networks allow political challengers equal access to incumbents (equalization) or perpetuate the gaps between candidates (normalization) during an election campaign is central to political science studies. While so far, studies have relied on top-down analyses of citizens’ engagement with politicians’ messages to address the issue, we complemented this method with a bottom-up approach via analysis of independent citizen discussions of the different contenders on Facebook during the 2015 Israeli elections campaign. This approach is particularly relevant to social networks, where citizens are not only consumers but also producers of political information. Our study revealed that, whereas PM Netanyahu's posts attracted the most engagement, indicating normalization, on the citizen discussions realm contenders Herzog and Livni attracted more mentions, as well as Shares, Likes and participants than did PM Netanyahu. In addition, contender Bennett's posts managed to generate more Likes than PM Netanyahu, indicating equalization on the bottom-up level. These optimistic results highlight citizens’ discussion realms as a platform characterized by a more desired democratic discourse than that which can be found on politicians’ pages and emphasize the importance of including this realm in future analyses of equalization versus normalization.     

Migrants' remittances and economic voting in the Mexican countryside

This study advances and tests hypotheses about the effects of migrants' remittances on political behavior. Analyzing new survey data from Mexico, I find that despite being very poor, respondents who receive remittances tend to view their income as more stable than neighbors who do not receive this money. As a result, remittance recipients have relatively fewer economic grievances and tend to feel more optimistic about economic matters than neighbors who do not receive remittances. According to the economic voter thesis, citizens who are more satisfied with the economy are also less likely to pressure and oppose politicians, particularly incumbents. Analyses indicate that respondents in this sample who receive remittances are indeed less likely to lobby local officials for economic assistance. They were also less likely to mobilize against and punish the incumbent party in the 2006 Mexican presidential election.     

Political Partisanship and Welfare Service Privatization: Ideological Attitudes among Local Politicians in Sweden

This article ties in with a growing international literature examining the link between party politics and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states. In recent decades, a central aspect of policy change in Sweden is that private actors have come to produce publicly financed welfare services on a more regular basis. This overall privatization trend is furthermore characterized by substantial geographical variation across Sweden's 290 municipalities. The ideological attitudes of local politicians have been recognized as particularly important for understanding this development. This article examines the extent to which local politicians’ ideological attitudes regarding welfare service privatization are best explained with a partisan approach emphasizing between‐party polarization as opposed to a critical perspective that points to the proclaimed significance of ideological consensus between left and right parties in certain municipal contexts. Using multilevel modelling and survey data collected from elected politicians in municipal governments, the empirical findings show substantial differences in attitudes between Conservatives and Social Democrats, irrespective of municipal characteristics – most notably the degree of welfare service privatization. Hence, the results strongly indicate that the partisan approach is much more fruitful compared to the consensus approach as a general explanation for local politicians’ attitudes towards welfare service privatization in Sweden. Accordingly, a conclusion is that comparisons at the subnational level within countries are important as a complement to country‐comparative studies when attempting to understand the link between political partisanship and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states.     

When do you follow the (national) leader? Party switching by subnational legislators in Japan

In 1993, after 38 years of single-party control, more than 20% of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) House of Representatives members left the party to form new alternatives and create an anti-LDP coalition government. However, despite substantial popular support, the new parties attracted few subnational politicians. The effect of this lack of subnational party switching was substantial since the relatively small pool of subnational defectors meant that the new parties had difficulty forming the strong subnational bases of support that would help them to compete with the LDP in the future. In this paper, we consider why so few subnational politicians were willing to switch to these new party alternatives. Using case studies and conditional logit analysis of party affiliation pattern among prefectural assembly members in Japan, we find that party switching was most common among subnational politicians who had powerful patrons who had also left the LDP and had maintained especially good access to central government largesse. We also find that subnational politicians from urban areas, which depend less upon central government pork, were considerably less likely to switch parties, than their rural counterparts.     

Male and female politicians on Twitter: A machine learning approach

How does the language of male and female politicians differ when they communicate directly with the public on social media? Do citizens address them differently? We apply Lasso logistic regression models to identify the linguistic features that most differentiate the language used by or addressed to male and female Spanish politicians. Male politicians use more words related to politics, sports, ideology and infrastructure, while female politicians talk about gender and social affairs. The choice of emojis varies greatly across genders. In a novel analysis of tweets written by citizens, we find evidence of gender-specific insults, and note that mentions of physical appearance and infantilising words are disproportionately found in text addressed to female politicians. The results suggest that politicians conform to gender stereotypes online and reveal ways in which citizens treat politicians differently depending on their gender.     

The mobilising effect of political choice

Political choice is central to citizens’ participation in elections. Nonetheless, little is known about the individual-level mechanisms that link political choice and turnout. It is argued in this article that turnout decisions are shaped not only by the differences between the parties (party polarisation), but also by the closeness of parties to citizens’ own ideological position (congruence), and that congruence matters more in polarised systems where more is at stake. Analysing cross-national survey data from 80 elections, it is found that both polarisation and congruence have a mobilising effect, but that polarisation moderates the effect of congruence on turnout. To further explore the causal effect of political choice, the arrival of a new radical right-wing party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is leveraged and the findings show that the presence of the AfD had a mobilising effect, especially for citizens with congruent views.     

Treating Poorly Healed Wounds: Partisan Choices and Human Rights Policies in Latin America

Despite the common trauma of systematic human rights violations under military rule, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay have responded in markedly different ways to their troubling pasts. This paper explains differences in human rights policies over time and across countries by looking at varying domestic conditions, including the ideological orientation of the governing party and the structure of party competition, as well as constraints and opportunities presented by external events. Government support for human rights derives in part from ideological proclivity but even more from the ability to build popular support for such a policy. Conservative and center-right politicians lack credibility among voters on human rights and therefore have little political incentive to adopt an activist stance on this issue. Leftist politicians are ideologically predisposed toward championing human rights but may be hamstrung by concerns about alienating centrist voters. Leftist politicians will only come out strongly in favor of human rights when they enjoy a clear political majority; leftist leaders who rely upon centrist allies will adopt a low-profile approach to human rights. Conversely, centrist political leaders who rely upon leftist allies have a strong political incentive to emphasize human rights. Once political momentum begins to shift to the right, however, centrist politicians will downplay human rights. Finally, external events may significantly alter national discourse on human rights, allowing cautious governments to gain political cover for more progressive human rights policy. By drawing attention to the important role of ideology and the structure of party competition, this paper offers a more complete explanation of the sources of human rights policy. It also provides a novel perspective on the ways in which external and international influences are filtered through national political systems.