Ideological congruence between voters and governments is desirable, the wisdom goes, because it implies enactment of policies close to those preferred by voters. Party polarization plays a ...paradoxical role here: more polarization reduces voter-government congruence if parties making up a government move away from the center-ground where most individual voters are located; yet increasing polarization permits those governments’ policies to become more distinct in the eyes of voters. This paper investigates how political system clarity helps to resolve this paradox. We examine the interplay of several sources of clarity and, in particular, of the joint role of party and voter polarization. We argue and find that, if polarization of survey respondents increases in step with party polarization, this provides clarity that can override party polarization’s negative effect on voter-government congruence. But other types of clarity also play important roles in accounting for the range of values that congruence takes on.
How can we understand the low turnout seen in the 2004 European Parliament elections? One possibility would be that new member states were 'just different' either because of the post-communist legacy ...in some of them or because of an unexplicated 'low propensity to vote' in some of those. This article explicates the low propensity to vote in some post-communist countries by means of a general model of turnout that applies also to established EU member states. In this model low turnout is accounted for by party loyalties on the one hand, and affective and instrumental reasons for voting on the other. The latter factors are found to be lacking in European Parliament elections, which can nevertheless see high turnout due to party loyalty or compulsory voting. Where both of these are absent we see particularly low turnout, as we did in five of the new member countries in 2004.
In Britain in recent years the study of tactical voting has become something of a growth industry. Unresolved, however, is a key question: the number of tactical voters. Despite an election-night ...estimate of 17 per cent, a variety of later analysts have estimated that little more than one in twenty voters behaved tactically in 1987, a surprisingly low figure in the light of the efforts of various groups to encourage tactical voting in order to avoid fragmentation of the anti-Thatcher vote. Most recently, Heath, Curtice and Jowell, in their analysis of the British Election Study survey, report that ‘just 6.5% of major party voters indicated in their replies a tactical motivation for their vote’.
The Maastricht Treaty was supposed to capitalize on the triumph of the single European market by opening the way to a political union that would complement the economic union that was by then ...virtually complete. The reasons why the referenda turned out the way they did are examined. In addition to studying public response to the proposed treaty in Denmark and France, similar data for Ireland - the 3rd EC country in which a referendum was held in the same period to ratify the treaty - is studied. Three possible explanations are examined. The first is that popular sentiment on Europe was by no means as positive as had been believed, and that in fact people were never in favor of the Maastricht Treaty and remain skeptical about the European Union. The 2nd possibility is that voters changed their minds during the campaigns because they did not like what they heard about the Maastricht Treaty so that the votes against the treaty reflected this new public awareness. The 3rd possible explanation is that the Maastricht results can best be understood in terms of domestic party competition. Implications are discussed.
In 1999, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, was awarded a large grant to fund a survey-based study of the 2000 presidential election. In ...anticipation of that study, and to help in its design, a colloquium was held in the Fall of 1999, titled “What's a Good Election Study, and What Are Election Studies Good for?” The chapters contained in Election Studies: What's Their Use? are the product of that colloquium.
Economic conditions are said to affect election outcomes, but past research has produced unstable and contradictory findings. This book argues that these problems are caused by the failure to take ...account of electoral competition between parties. A research strategy to correct this problem is designed and applied to investigate effects of economic conditions on (individual) voter choices and (aggregate) election outcomes over 42 elections in 15 countries. It shows that economic conditions exert small effects on individual party preferences, which can have large consequences for election outcomes. In countries where responsibility for economic policy is clear, voters vote retrospectively and reward or punish incumbent parties - although in coalition systems smaller government parties often gain at the expense of the largest party when economic conditions deteriorate. Where clarity of responsibility for economic policy is less clear, voters vote more prospectively on the basis of expected party policies.
That citizens of European Union countries differ in their attitudes regarding Europe is a commonplace of political commentary. Some favor their country's membership in the EU, others oppose it. Some, ...while thinking that membership is generally a good thing, feel that steps toward unification have gone far enough – or even too far. Others believe that further steps should be taken.Citizens of EU countries also differ in terms of more traditional political orientations – attitudes to the proper role of government in society, welfare provision, and other matters which have increasingly over the past half-century come to be subsumed within a single orientation towards government action, generally referred to as the left/right orientation (Lipset 1960; Lijphart 1980; Franklin, Mackie, Valen, et al., 1992).These two orientations are often assumed to be orthogonal, with the newer pro-/anti-EU orientation cutting across the more traditional left/right orientation (see, e.g., Hicks and Lord 1998; Hooghe and Marks 1999). Our own research (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996; van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999; van der Brug, Franklin, and van der Eijk 2000) demonstrates that EU orientation does not currently have much impact on party choice at EU elections. Elections to the European Parliament have been described as “second-order national” elections at which the arena supposedly at issue (the European arena) takes second place to the national arena as a focus for issue and representational concerns (Reif and Schmitt 1980; Reif 1984, 1985; Marsh and Franklin 1996); and the national arena is quintessentially one in which left/ right orientations dominate.
PDF
