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This dissertation deals with a puzzle posed by how party competition and electoral behavior unfold in modern democracies: While voters are commonly thought of as relying on rather simple decision heuristics - one of them the left-right dimension - patterns of party competition, in many contexts, exhibit considerable levels of complexity. This seems to create a problem with regard to the left-right dimension: if parties compete in a multidimensional space, a single dimension should not function very well as a decision guide. I engage with this conundrum by posing three interrelated research questions: If parties compete such that their political offers cannot be summarized by a single dimension anymore, can voters still use that dimension as a reference? If they can, how exactly do they do it? Lastly, if voters decide by a unidimensional schema, how can we adjust the spatial model to reconcile this with multidimensional party competition? Based on findings in the literature and in the dissertation itself, I conclude that left-right still performs rather well as a voter heuristic. The solution I propose here for how it does that is `idiosyncratic unidimensionality', which means that each individual has a unique idea of left-right, and ignores or reinterprets issues that cross-cut this pattern. Chapter 2 and 3 examine the functionality of left-right in the face of multidimensional party competition - the former with observational, the latter with experimental data. Chapter 4 (prepared in cooperation with Berta Barbet) broadens the picture and looks at the implications of party system dimensionality for the quality of democratic representation. Chapter 5 combines the preceding chapters' findings with other conceptual and theoretical insights discussed in this dissertation and puts them to a sort of `theoretical consistency test' in an agent-based model. Kapitel 5 mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Springer Nature / Chapter 5 with kind permission by Springer Nature.

Spatial analogies are ubiquitous as a concept structuring political conversation. Assuming that political parties play an important role in shaping the make-up of the political space and that depending on their combination of issue emphases they give rise to more or fewer dimensions of political competition, this article tests whether party system dimensionality leads to a trade-off implied in the relevant literature: when parties constrict the political space too much, certain preferences may not be represented anymore, leaving citizens dissatisfied with the system. At the same time, multidimensional political spaces may become too difficult to navigate and leave citizens confused. Results from hierarchical regression models (based on European Social Survey and manifesto data), however, show that such a trade-off does not exist. Higher dimensionality does not confuse voters. At the same time, there is evidence that it increases satisfaction with the political system, albeit only for the most sophisticated citizens.