Suchergebnisse

"Ziel dieses Beitrages ist es, die Frage zu beantworten, inwiefern linke und rechte Wähler im Einklang mit ihrer ideologischen Einstellung wählen und wie sich diese Zusammenhänge seit der deutschen Wiedervereinigung entwickelt haben. Hierzu werden mehrere Hypothesen entwickelt und geprüft. Zum einen ist zu erwarten, dass ein Wandel des ideologischen Angebots der Parteien einen Einfluss auf die Stärke des ideologischen Wählens hat. Des Weiteren wird angenommen, dass die Kommunikationsfunktion der ideologischen Etiketten durch eine (hier empirisch dokumentierte) Bedeutungsverschiebung negativ beeinflusst wird. Überdies werden Salienzunterschiede zwischen Ost- und Westdeutschland vermutet. Die Längsschnittanalysen zeigen global relativ konstante, für die einzelnen Parteien jedoch wechselhafte Einflüsse der ideologischen Selbstverortung auf das Wahlverhalten." (Autorenreferat)

Party identification has been thought to provide the central organizing element for political belief systems. This article makes the contrasting case that core values concerning equality and government intervention versus individualism and free enterprise are fundamental orientations that can themselves shape partisanship. The authors evaluate these arguments in the British case using a validated multiple-item measure of core values, using ordered latent class models to estimate reciprocal effects with partisanship on panel data from the British Household Panel Study, 1991–2007. The findings demonstrate that core values are more stable than partisanship and have far stronger cross-lagged effects on partisanship than vice versa in both polarized and depolarized political contexts, for younger and older respondents, and for those with differing levels of educational attainment and income, thus demonstrating their general utility as decision-making heuristics.

AbstractDo voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller's influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller's model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes.