Political Reinforcement: How Rising Inequality Curbs Manifested Welfare Generosity

We propose a political reinforcement hypothesis, suggesting that rising inequality moves party politics on welfare state issues to the right, strengthening rather than modifying the impact of inequality. We model policy platforms by incorporating ideology and opportunism of party members and interests and sympathies of voters. If welfare spending is a normal good within income classes, a majority of voters moves rightward when inequality increases. As a response, the left, in particular, shift their welfare policy platform toward less generosity. We find support for our arguments using data on the welfare policy platforms of political parties in 22 OECD countries.     

The political consequences of uninformed voters

Americans fail to meet the democratic ideal of an informed electorate, and the consequences of this political ignorance are a topic of significant scholarly debate. In two independent settings, we experimentally test the effect of political information on citizens' attitudes toward the major parties in the U.S. When uninformed citizens receive political information, they systematically shift their political preferences away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrats. A lack of knowledge on the policy positions of the parties significantly hinders the ability of low-socioeconomic-status citizens to translate their preferences into partisan opinions and vote choices. As a result, American public opinion—and potentially election results and public policy as a result—is significantly different from the counterfactual world in which all voters are informed.     

Who is responsible? The effect of clarity of responsibility on voter turnout

Does voters’ ability to discern who is responsible for policy outcomes affect voter turnout? Although particular institutional arrangements which influence this ability – known as clarity of responsibility – appear to affect how voters form retrospective judgements, existing literature is less informed about its role on voter turnout. This article argues that voters tend to turn out less if they cannot discern who is responsible for policy outcomes. This lack of clarity hinders the process of retrospective evaluations, makes the electoral stakes less profound, and dampens the voters’ political efficacy. Using 396 elections in 34 established democracies between 1960 and 2015, it is found that lower clarity of responsibility is associated with lower voter turnout. This study highlights the importance of clarity of responsibility, as it enhances democratic accountability, not only by encouraging retrospective voting, but also by increasing political participation.     

Mystifying but not misleading: when does political ambiguity not confuse voters?

The purpose of political campaigns in democracies is to provide voters with information that allows them to make “correct” choices, that is, vote for the party/candidate whose proposed policy or “position” is closest to their ideal position. In a world where political talk is often ambiguous and imprecise, it then becomes important to understand whether correct choices can still be made. In this paper we identify two elements of political culture that are key to answering this question: (i) whether or not political statements satisfy a so-called “grain of truth” assumption, and (ii) whether or not politicians make statements that are comparative, that is contain information about politicians’ own positions relative to that of their adversaries. The “grain of truth” assumption means that statements, even if vague, do not completely misrepresent the true positions of the parties. We find that only when political campaigning is comparative and has a grain of truth, will voters always make choices as if they were fully informed. Therefore, the imprecision of political statements should not be a problem as long as comparative campaigning is in place.     

Political Competition and Voter Mobility

The existing model of political competition is extended to allow voters to live in different regions and to migrate between regions in response to an inter-regional transfer policy. We then show that regions have a different ``weight'' in the expected vote function of political parties. This gives parties an incentive to bias the transfer policy in favour of relatively high weight regions, with potentially adverse efficiency and equity effects. However, we then show that parties always propose efficient and equitable regional transfers, regardless of whether regions have different weights, if there is some mobility of citizens across regions. Mobility constrains parties to act efficiently and equitably even though they face an incentive to act otherwise. However, when voters are immobile political competition leads to inequitable though efficient outcomes.     

The Condorcet jury theorem and extension of?the?franchise with rationally ignorant voters

The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT), which provides a justification for democracy, is based on voters who are imperfectly informed insofar as they know the correct policy with a probability of less than one but greater than one-half. We reassess the consequences of the CJT for democracy when extension of the franchise adds equal numbers of non-distinguishable informed and uninformed voters to the collective decision making group. Uninformed voters vote correctly with probability one-half. We show that adding equal numbers of informed and uninformed voters maintains the CJT conclusion that enlarging the group of decision makers increases the likelihood of a correct collective decision.     

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

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

Politics,entertainment and business: a multisided model of media

We offer a model of media as a multisided platform, providing entertainment and news to viewers, commercial opportunities to advertisers, and political influence to politicians, thanks to the presence of influenceable voters among the media audience. We characterize a political economic equilibrium, determining simultaneously media choices and politicians’ electoral positions. We show that as the value of political influence increases, the media transitions from catering to commercial advertisers to selling political influence, resulting in policy choices that hurt influenceable voters.     

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.

     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

Do parties respond? How electoral context influences party responsiveness

How responsive are political parties to the issue priorities of voters? While there are numerous studies that examine policy position congruence between parties and voters or government responsiveness, we know little about the extent to which parties adjust their policy priorities to the issue concerns of voters. Following saliency and issue ownership theory, we argue that political parties listen to their voters by emphasizing policy issues in their election manifestos that have been prioritized by citizens. However, in line with second-order election theory, we expect that issue responsiveness varies with the electoral context. To test our theoretical expectations, we generated a novel dataset that combines data on issue attention of political parties from the Comparative Manifesto and the Euromanifesto projects with data on policy priorities of voters from the European Election Studies, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various national election studies. We empirically test our theoretical claims based on a comprehensive analysis of 104 parties from 17 countries competing in 84 national and European elections from 1986 to 2011. Our findings have important implications for political representation in Europe.     

Candidates’ policy strategies in primary elections: does strategic voting by the primary electorate matter?

Empirical research reports conflicting conclusions about whether primary election voters strategically account for candidates’ general election prospects when casting their votes. We model the strategic calculations of office-seeking candidates facing two-stage elections beginning with a primary, and we compare candidates’ policy strategies in situations where primary voters strategically support the most viable general election candidate against candidate strategies when voters expressively support their preferred primary candidate regardless of electability. Our analyses—in which the candidates’ appeal is based on their policy positions and their campaigning skills—suggest a surprising conclusion: namely, that strategic and expressive primary voting typically support identical equilibrium configurations in candidate strategies. Our conclusions are relevant to candidates facing contested primaries, and also to political parties facing the strategic decision about whether or not to use primary elections to select their candidates—a common dilemma for Latin American (and some European) parties.     

Policy voting in U.S. House primaries

ABSTRACT

This paper uses exit surveys of voters in four House primaries to ask how well voters are able to use primaries for the purpose of giving policy direction to their congressional parties. The surveys found that nearly half of voters could not recall the names of any candidate and that 11% were uncertain or could not recall for whom they had just voted. The surveys also found that nearly 40% of voters could not offer a political evaluation – that is, a like or dislike having political content – about any candidate, and that fewer than a quarter could offer political evaluations of as many as two candidates. The surveys found no evidence of policy-motivated voting in three of the four primaries, but substantial evidence of it in one. Yet even in that one race, voters split their support among three candidates sharing majority voter opinion on the key election issue and thereby opened the way for nomination of a candidate not sharing majority opinion. The paper concludes from this evidence that voters in these House primaries, and probably more widely, made little use of them for the purpose of giving policy direction to their parties.     

Conversion,Acquiescence, or Delusion: The Contingent Nature of the Party-Voter Connection

Normative theories of representative government posit congruence of opinion between the electorate and their representatives. However, not all political issues are equally salient, and agreement is expected to be greater on relatively salient issues. This paper employs balance theory to describe mechanisms which may produce congruence of opinion between voters and parties when an issue increases rapidly in salience. Panel data on Norwegian opinion during the debate on European Union membership are used to determine whether opinion congruence resulted from persuasion by political parties or policy voting by the electorate. Policy voters are found to differ systematically from voters who were persuaded by parties. Finally, the characteristics of parties which determine their success in persuading voters or attracting policy voters are evaluated.     

Partisan views on the economy

In this paper it is argued that political parties may have incentives to adopt a partisan view on the working of the economic system. Our approach is based on a dynamical spatial voting model in which political parties are policy oriented. This model revolves around two interrelated issues x and y. The policy maker sets x directly. There exist two views on the relationship between x and y. Model uncertainty confronts policy makers with the problem of the selection of a model to base their actions on. We show that if voters have imperfect information about the working of the economic system that model selection contains a strategic element. Policy makers are inclined to adopt a view on the working of the economic system which fits in with their preferences. There is no inherent logic that places monetarists to the right of New Economists. They have different models of economic mechanism, but they need not have different political values. A conservative can be a Keynesian and a liberal a monetarist. These combinations are in fact surprisingly rare. James Tobin, 1974,The New Economics One Decade Older, p. 62.     

Voter reactions to candidate background characteristics depend on candidate policy positions

Do personal background characteristics of a political candidate affect voter evaluations when voters also know the candidate's policy position? Several studies have shown that voters infer personal traits and policy positions from candidate characteristics such as gender, family background and occupation. However, in most elections, voters do not evaluate candidates absent of any policy information. We investigate whether the influence of personal background characteristics vanishes when policy information regarding a candidate is available to the voters. Using a survey experiment, we confirm that voters infer both personal traits and policy positions from the background characteristics of a candidate, and we furthermore show that explicit information on policy positions moderates the relationship between background characteristics and candidate evaluations. However, policy information does not simply crowd out the effects of candidate background characteristics. Instead, policy information can change the valence of background characteristics, turning otherwise disadvantageous characteristics into an electoral advantage.     

Valence,Elections, and Legislative Institutions

To the degree that voters care about competence, expertise, and other valence characteristics of their representatives and political parties care about winning elections, parties have an incentive to signal that their legislators have such characteristics. We construct a model of parties, motivated by both reelection and by policy, that attempt to signal individual incumbents' valences to voters through the assignment of these members to positions of authority. The model illustrates how electorally motivated party leaders will have an incentive to promote less competent incumbents than they would if voters did not make inferences from promotion decisions. We derive the model's empirical implications and test them with original data on the careers of Chilean senators serving between 1998 and 2013. In support of the model's insights, we find that promotion to a leadership position is an effective signal to voters only if the promoted incumbent has extreme views relative to the party.     

Testing Islam's Political Advantage: Evidence from Indonesia

Across the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win votes and popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties' popular support. We argue that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and only confer a political advantage when voters are uncertain about parties' economic policies. Using a series of experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non‐Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non‐Islamic parties. Our findings demonstrate that Islam's political advantage is real, but critically circumscribed by parties' economic platforms and voters' knowledge of them.     

Diffusion through Democracy

Many argue that international norms influence government behavior, and that policies diffuse from country to country, because of idea exchanges within elite networks. However, politicians are not free to follow their foreign counterparts, because domestic constituencies constrain them. This article examines how electoral concerns shape diffusion patterns and argues that foreign templates and international organization recommendations can shift voters’ policy positions and produce electoral incentives for politicians to mimic certain foreign models. Experimental individual‐level data from the field of family policy illustrates that even U.S. voters shift positions substantially when informed about UN recommendations and foreign countries’ choices. However, voters receive limited information about international developments, biased towards the policy choices of large and proximate countries. Aggregate data on the family policy choices of OECD countries show how voters’ limited information about international models shapes government decisions: governments are disproportionately likely to mimic countries whose news citizens follow, and international organizations are most influential in countries with internationally oriented citizens.     

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.