Vote choices of left-authoritarians: Misperceived congruence and issue salience

Often lacking parties with a corresponding profile, citizens with economically left and culturally authoritarian, or nationalist, policy orientations face a trade-off between congruence on economic and on cultural issues. How such left-authoritarian voters resolve this trade-off depends on which issues are more salient to them, previous research argues. We extend this line of research by considering the role of (mis-)perceived party positions. Using a survey in the context of the 2017 German election, we show how perceived congruence and issue importance interactively shape the left-authoritarian vote. Our findings indicate that many left-authoritarians vote for a party simply because they misperceive it to hold a congruent left-authoritarian position. In this case, issue importance matters little. Yet when voters are aware that parties match their position on only one dimension, vote choices are shaped by whether they care most about the economy or immigration. We discuss several implications.     

An asymmetric partisanship effect: House price fluctuations and party positions

Political economy arguments on party behaviour usually address parties of the left and the right. This article introduces a novel argument that portrays house price changes as an economic signal that right-wing parties disproportionately respond to in their programmatic positioning. This asymmetric partisanship effect is driven by homeowners’ importance for right-wing parties as a core voter group. Increasing house prices improve homeowners’ economic prospects. Right-wing parties thus have some flexibility to reach out to undecided voters by targeting the centre of the political spectrum. Falling house prices, however, signal worsening economic outlooks for homeowners. Right-wing parties thus have a strong incentive to send out signals of reassurance and prioritise their core voters. For a sample of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from 1970 to 2014, the findings support this argument. Right-wing parties move programmatically leftwards with booming house prices and rightwards when house prices fall, while parties of the left do not respond systematically.     

Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions

A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011–2013. Two key findings extend previous work. First, voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a ‘coalition heuristic’ as a rule-of-thumb. These findings imply that under some conditions voters are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.     

It takes two: how Eurosceptic public opinion and party divisions influence party positions

Do parties respond to voters’ preferences on European integration in elections to the European Parliament (EP)? Following recent research that shows political party responsiveness to Eurosceptic attitudes during EP elections is conditioned by party characteristics, this article seeks to understand how party unity on European integration affects party responsiveness to Euroscepticism. It argues that when Eurosceptic attitudes among voters are high and the parties are divided in their position on European integration, parties will be more responsive to voters and take a more Eurosceptic position. To test the theoretical expectations, the study uses data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the Euromanifestos Project, and European Election Study for 1989–2009 for over 120 parties across 20 European Union member states. The findings have important implications for understanding the nature of democratic representation in the European Union.     

In the eye of the beholder: voters’ perceptions of party policy shifts

It is normatively desirable that parties’ policy positions match the views of their supporters, as citizens in Western democracies are primarily represented by and through parties. Existing research suggests that parties shift their policy positions, but as of today, there is only weak and inconsistent empirical evidence that voters actually perceive these shifts. Using individual-level panel data from Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, this article tests the proposition that voters perceive parties’ policy shifts only on salient issues while remaining oblivious to parties’ changing positions on issues that they do not consider important. The results demonstrate that issue saliency plays a fundamental role in explaining voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy shifts: according to this logic, democratic discourse between the elites and the electorate appears to take place at the level of policy issues that voters care about.     

Does anybody notice? How policy positions of coalition parties are perceived by voters

Does governing in coalitions affect how coalition parties’ policy positions are perceived by voters? In this article, the authors seek to understand the relationship between parties’ participation in coalition governments and their perception by voters. Policy positions are an important instrument through which parties compete for the support of voters. However, it is unclear to what extent voters can correctly perceive the positions of parties when they govern together with other coalition partners. It is argued here that because of the blurred lines of responsibility in multiparty cabinets, it is difficult for voters to correctly perceive the positions of coalition parties. What is more, it is expected that the internal functioning of coalition cabinets affects the extent to which coalition parties struggle to get their message out to voters. It is hypothesized in the article that intra‐cabinet conflict is negatively related to misperception. To test their theoretical expectations, the authors combine data on the left‐right policy positions of political parties from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on how these positions are perceived by voters gathered from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems from 1996 to 2011. The findings shed light on the relationship between party competition and coalition governments, and its implications for political representation.     

Finnish parties’ positions in 2007: A matter of equilibrium or voters’ projection?

According to the Finnish National Election Studies (FNES) the positions of Finnish parties in the years 2003 and 2007 were almost identical. In FNES, party placement is based on the voters’ perceptions and therefore it is assumed that either the voters have correctly guessed the positions of the parties or they have been wrong in their judgments. In the first case, the Finnish parties are likely to have reached a state of equilibrium where no party has an incentive for unilaterally changing its optimal position. On the other hand, if the voters are incorrect, it is likely that they have projected their own positions to the parties. The results reject the equilibrium hypothesis and confirm the projection hypothesis.     

Left–right ideology as an inferential device in multiparty systems: Can citizens overcome low information by imputing parties' policy positions?

This study examines the extent to which knowledge about parties' ideological Left–Right positions can be used schematically by voters to impute these parties' stances on specific policy issues. Can Left–Right familiarity help citizens, whose knowledge of political and societal issues is often limited, to overcome the low information problem? Based on two Swedish panel studies, we show that - in contrast to the American two-party context – the least knowledgeable voters benefit most from using inferences based on parties' Left–Right locations. The effectiveness of schema-based deduction is thus dependent on its place within a given political culture. In the Swedish multiparty context, the Left–Right dimension is meaningful for most voters, and can be used schematically to partly alleviate a lack of knowledge.     

Proxy documents as a source of measurement error in the Comparative Manifestos Project

This paper considers the issue of document type diversity in the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). For many years the CMP has been collecting and coding a variety of documents, such as speeches, pamphlets, newspaper articles and leaflets, as manifesto proxies. By using previously unexplored archival material to perform controlled comparisons between different types of documents, this paper argues that the coding of such documents introduced considerable measurement error to party position estimates. Statistical analyses indicate that this measurement error is systematic rather than random as it is often manifested as centrist bias in parties' left–right position estimates. Consequently, the paper argues that random error correction methods cannot always correct for error attributed to the coding of proxy documents. The paper concludes with some recommendations for third-party users of the CMP data and documents and a plea to the CMP research team.     

Estimating policy positions using political texts: An evaluation of the Wordscores approach

This paper evaluates a recently developed method for extracting policy positions from political texts, known as Wordscores. This computerized content analysis technique is a potentially powerful tool for scholars interested in the study of political elites, since it promises an easy and efficient way of inferring policy position from texts and speeches. In this article, we provide a systematic evaluation of this promising method. Using Danish manifestos and government speeches from 1945 to 2005, we compare the policy positions extracted using Wordscores with measures of positions from the well-known Comparative Manifesto Project and cross-validate these with party expert surveys. Our analysis shows that the word scoring technique arrives at largely similar estimates to independently derived position measures and produces time series of government positions with high face validity.