Can governments use Get Out The Vote letters to solve Europe’s turnout crisis? Evidence from a field experiment

Declining levels of turnout are a problem in European elections. Are Get Out The Vote campaigns the solution to the problem? While many studies have investigated such campaigns in the US, little is known about their effect in Europe. The article presents a field experiment in which encouragement to vote in an upcoming Danish election is delivered to more than 60,000 first-time voters using direct personal letters. Eight different letters are designed, based on the calculus of voting and prospect theory. The sample is randomly divided into treatment groups or the control group. Using validated turnout, small positive effects of receiving a letter on turnout are found, with little difference across letters. The letters mostly mobilised voters with a low propensity to vote and thus increased equality in participation. In sum, while letters have some effect, they are not likely to be a panacea for solving Europe’s turnout challenges.     

Trying not to lose: The electoral consequences of unilateral reform efforts and the social pact formation process

The existing social pact literature claims that governing parties offer social pact proposals because they anticipate they will receive an electoral benefit from social pact agreements. Yet the available data on social pacts inform us that in a substantial minority of cases social pact proposals fail to become social pact agreements. In an effort to better determine the political calculations made by governments before they propose a social pact, this article examines the effect of implementing reform legislation unilaterally, social pact proposals, social pact proposal failures and social pact agreements on the vote share of government parties in 15 Western European countries between 1981 and 2006. It is found that social pact proposals do not have any electoral consequences for governing parties, unilateral legislation and social pact proposal failures reduce the vote share of governing parties, and social pact agreements provide an electoral benefit to parties in minority governments only. These findings suggest that governing parties propose social pacts in a good faith effort to complete a social pact agreement; and that such an agreement is not a way for these parties to gain votes, but to avoid the electoral punishment associated with enacting unpopular reforms unilaterally.     

Clarity of responsibility and foreign policy performance voting

Do voters’ assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the ‘clarity of responsibility’ in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion‐inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi‐presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.     

Symposium on “The nationalization of electoral politics: Frontiers of research”

This editorial introduces the theme of the symposium which addresses the most recent advances in the field of the nationalization of electoral politics. After a decade of an increasing number of contribution in this field, the symposium takes stock of the diversity of applications of nationalization studies, the progress in data collection, and its innovative methods in designs including it as both a dependent and independent variable and analyzing it both for legislative and presidential elections. The editorial reviews the growth and diversification of the literature over time and illustrates in what directions it has evolved mapping out an increasingly rich and complex theory. It links the articles of the symposium to this evolution of the literature and discusses their innovative character.     

Gender,populist attitudes,and voting: explaining the gender gap in voting for populist radical right and populist radical left parties

Empirical studies have demonstrated that compared to almost all other parties, populist radical right (PRR) parties draw more votes from men than from women. However, the two dominant explanations that are generally advanced to explain this disparity – gender differences regarding socio-economic position and lower perceptions regarding the threat of immigrants – cannot fully explain the difference. The article contends that it might actually be gender differences regarding the conceptualisation of society and politics – populist attitudes – that explain the gender gap. Thus, the gap may be due, in part, to differences in socialisation. The article analyses EES 2014 data on voting for the populist radical right and the populist radical left in nine European countries. Across countries, the gender gap in voting for the PRR is indeed partly explained by populist attitudes. For populist radical left parties, the results are less clear, suggesting that populism has different meanings to voters on the left and on the right.     

Intra-Campaign Changes in Voting Preferences: The Impact of Media and Party Communication

An increasing number of citizens change and adapt their party preferences during the electoral campaign. We analyze which short-term factors explain intra-campaign changes in voting preferences, focusing on the visibility and tone of news media reporting and party canvassing. Our analyses rely on an integrative data approach, linking data from media content analysis to public opinion data. This enables us to investigate the relative impact of news media reporting as well as party communication. Inherently, we overcome previously identified methodological problems in the study of communication effects on voting behavior. Our findings reveal that campaigns matter: Especially interpersonal party canvassing increases voters’ likelihood to change their voting preferences in favor of the respective party, whereas media effects are limited to quality news outlets and depend on individual voters’ party ambivalence.     

Pushed by national politics or pulled by localism? Voting for independent local parties in the Netherlands

This study examines why citizens in the Netherlands vote for independent local parties. These are parties that run in municipal council elections, but do not run in elections at higher levels. This article examines a number of expectations: namely that voters vote for these parties out dissatisfaction with established parties, that they do so because they have a 'localist' political orientation or that they do so because their own national party is not running in the municipal elections. More support is found for the idea that voters vote for local parties because they are pushed away by national parties (either because they do not participate in some municipalities or because voters distrust them) than for the idea that voters vote for local parties for positive reasons, such as a localist political orientation. This article examines two surveys concerning voting behaviour in the 2014 Dutch municipal elections.     

Information Campaigns and (Under)Privileged Citizens: An Experiment on the Differential Effects of a Voting Advice Application

Information campaigns are key elements of elections. Past research has established the importance of campaigns in informing and educating citizens, and ultimately strengthening participatory democracy. While the Internet has increased the possibilities to disseminate information campaigns and eased access to political information, it is still debated whether online campaigns are effective in stimulating political interest and participation among the general public. The issue is not only one of access, but also of use of information. The investigation of main effects of campaigns obscures the fact that citizens may not use information in the same way and reap the same political benefits. In this study, I examine the conditional effects of a new type of Web information campaign, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), on the political engagement and electoral participation of citizens with varying levels of education. By investigating who benefits most from using these apps, I evaluate whether VAAs reinforce patterns of participation or mobilize new people in politics. Building on political behavior research, communication theory, and social psychology, I study the differential effects of VAAs with an innovative randomized field experiment design. The results confirm that VAAs can stimulate the political engagement of the public. However, there is no significant impact on electoral participation. In addition, the evidence shows that VAAs work differently for more or less educated citizens, and that the lower educated users benefit the most from VAAs as they become more interested in the election and more motivated to vote.     

The European lavender vote: Sexuality,ideology and vote choice in Western Europe

In many European democracies, political punditry has highlighted the attempts of political parties on the left to court the ‘lavender vote’ of lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals. This article examines the presence of a gay vote in Western Europe with a focus on assessing the role of sexuality in shaping individuals’ political preferences and voting behaviour. Empirically, the effect of sexuality on both ideological identification as well as party vote choice is analysed. Using a cumulative dataset of eight rounds of the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2017, this article demonstrates that partnered lesbians and gay men are more likely than comparable heterosexuals to identify with the left, support leftist policy objectives and vote for left-of-centre political parties. The analysis represents the first empirical cross-national European study of the voting behaviour of homosexual individuals and sheds new light on the importance of sexuality as a predictor of political ideology and voting behaviour within the Western European context.     

How do coalition signals shape voting behavior? Revealing the mediating role of coalition expectations

Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems.