Suchergebnisse

Foreword -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Figures -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 The Role of Issue Importance in Voting Behavior -- 1.2 Existing Approaches Regarding Issue Importance -- 1.3 A Cleavage-Based Approach to Model Voting Behavior and Party Competition -- 1.4 The Spatial Theory of Party Competition -- 1.5 Plan of the Book -- References -- 2 The Evolution of Models of Party Competition -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 The Hotelling-Downs Model -- 2.3 Models Including Valence -- 2.4 Models Including Behavioral Factors -- 2.5 Models Considering Variation in Issue Salience -- 2.6 Summary -- References -- 3 A Theory of Issue Weighting -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Explaining Variation in Issue Salience -- 3.2.1 Insights from Cleavage Theory -- 3.2.2 Cleavage Theory and Voting Behavior -- 3.2.3 Cleavage Theory and Parties' Policy Strategies -- 3.3 Summary -- References -- 4 A Model of Voting Behavior and Party Competition -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Modeling Voting Behavior -- 4.2.1 The Baseline Model -- 4.2.1.1 Assumptions Regarding Policy Dimensions -- 4.2.1.2 Assumptions Regarding Loss Curves -- 4.2.1.3 Assumptions on the Relative Weighting of Policy Dimensions -- 4.2.1.4 Other General Assumptions -- 4.2.1.5 Final Baseline Model -- 4.2.2 Modeling Variation in Decision Weights -- 4.2.3 A Note on Party Identification -- 4.3 Modeling Party Competition -- 4.3.1 Equilibrium Concept -- 4.3.2 Analytic Solutions to Equilibrium Configurations -- 4.3.3 Tracking Equilibrium Configurations by Simulation -- 4.3.3.1 Alternative Approach -- 4.3.3.2 My Way: Optimization Algorithm -- 4.4 Consequences of Varying Decision Weights on Party Competition -- 4.5 Summary -- References -- 5 The Construction of Policy Spaces -- 5.1 Introduction -- 5.2 Conceptualizing Empirical Policy Spaces -- 5.2.1 A Common Policy Space -- 5.2.2 Policy Dimensions

For a number of Western democracies, it has been observed that the preferences of poor and rich citizens are unequally represented in political institutions and outcomes. Yet, the causes of this phenomenon are still under debate. We focus on the role of elections in this process, by disentangling biases towards different income groups that stem from the party system and from voters' behaviour. Our aim is to uncover whether elections as selection mechanisms contribute to unequal representation by analysing factors of the supply and demand sides of the electoral process. On the supply side, we focus on the congruence of parties' policy offers and voters' preference distributions. This shapes citizens' possibilities to express their policy preferences. On the demand side, we are interested in the extent to which citizens from different income groups base their vote decisions on their policy preferences. The empirical analysis relies on the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and covers 13 Western European countries. Our results indicate, first, that the economic and cultural preferences of poor and rich citizens differ significantly, and second, that party systems in the countries under investigation represent the lowest income groups the worst, and the middle income groups the best. This makes it difficult for citizens at both the lower and the higher end of the income distribution to voice their preferences in elections. Additionally, we show that low income citizens tend to take policy less into consideration when making an electoral choice than richer citizens. Thus, while the rich make up for their representation bias by taking policy more into account in their voting behaviour, the electoral stage poses another obstacle for the poor to overcome the representation bias. In summary it can be said that already on the supply side there is an unbalanced disadvantage in terms of representation for the very poor and the very rich, but the pattern leads to an even more asymmetrical misrepresentation of the poor due to the election act.

For a number of Western democracies, it has been observed that the preferences of poor and rich citizens are unequally represented in political institutions and outcomes. Yet, the causes of this phenomenon are still under debate. We focus on the role of elections in this process, by disentangling biases towards different income groups that stem from the party system and from voters' behaviour. Our aim is to uncover whether elections as selection mechanisms contribute to unequal representation by analysing factors of the supply and demand side of the electoral process. On the supply side, we focus on the congruence of parties' policy offers and voters' preference distributions. This shapes citizens' possibilities to express their policy preferences. On the demand side, we are interested in the extent to which citizens from different income groups take their preferences into consideration in their vote decisions. The empirical analysis relies on the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and covers thirteen Western European countries. Our results indicate, first, that the economic and cultural preferences of poor and rich citizens differ significantly, and second, that party systems in the countries under investigation represent the lowest income groups the worst, and the middle income groups the best. This makes it difficult for citizens at both the lower and the higher end of the income distribution to voice their preferences in elections. Additionally, we show that low income citizens tend to take policy less into consideration when making an electoral choice than richer citizens. Thus, while the rich make up for their misrepresentation by the party system by taking policy more into account in their voting behaviour, the electoral stage poses another obstacle for the poor to overcome the representation bias. In sum, while on the supply side the disadvantage in representation is already imbalanced for very poor and very rich, demand side factors turn the pattern into an even more asymmetric misrepresentation of the poor only at the electoral stage.

AbstractThis article presents an explanation for the success of the right in the 2015 Swiss parliamentary election based on the spatial model of voting. Since there is no party combining economically left with culturally authoritarian policy stances, voters with that preference combination face a difficult electoral choice. We show that they are more likely to abstain, and that those voters who turn out are more likely to cast votes for the right who represents them on cultural issues. We argue that this behavior is due to the fact that voters with this culturally conservative and economically left preferences attach more weight to cultural issues when making an electoral choice. On the aggregate, both findings imply an underrepresentation of economically left interests in the election result, and lead to a disproportional vote share for the right.

This article presents an explanation for the success of the right in the 2015 Swiss parliamentary election based on the spatial model of voting. Since there is no party combining economically left with culturally authoritarian policy stances, voters with that preference combination face a difficult electoral choice. We show that they are more likely to abstain, and that those voters who turn out are more likely to cast votes for the right who represents them on cultural issues. We argue that this behavior is due to the fact that voters with this culturally conservative and economically left preferences attach more weight to cultural issues when making an electoral choice. On the aggregate, both findings imply an underrepresentation of economically left interests in the election result, and lead to a disproportional vote share for the right.

This paper addresses two problems: how can we identify a verisimilar policy space and how can we detect Nash equilibria in this space for parties' policy positions? We argue that the ideological party positions that voters perceive are fixed during the time span of one electoral campaign and that they constrain the policies parties offer the electorate in search of optimal vote shares. We apply the valence model developed by Schofield to party competition during the German federal election campaign 2009. First three issue scales are combined with a left–right scale to form one homogeneous space in which equilibrium locations of parties are sought. The results show that local Nash equilibria in this combined space depend heavily on the start values and are implausible. Fixing the ideological dimension leads to a stable and meaningful equilibrium configuration in which large parties move to more central positions and smaller parties move to more peripheral positions in the policy space.

There is extant literature documenting the unequal representation of the interests of economically defined groups in democracies. One of the potential explanations for this phenomenon resides in the electoral behavior of different groups of voters. If more affluent citizens base their vote decision more strongly on policy considerations while the less affluent rely on more unconditional forms of electoral support, this pattern could influence the ability of political elites to represent the poor as well as their willingness to do. We make use of the integrated CSES to study how income affects the way in which voters rely on different voting heuristics like proximity voting, valence considerations and economic voting in their electoral choice across a diverse set of countries. Our findings suggest that these different considerations are used to similar extents by all income groups and no major differences exist in which cues poor and rich use when called to the voting booth. These findings have important implications for the literature on unequal responsiveness as they rule out one common narrative.