Suchergebnisse

AbstractPolitical accountability requires that voters understand the distribution of policy outcome responsibility among their vote choice options. Research on partisan‐motivated reasoning suggests that voters do not meet this requirement. The problem is that voters condition their attributions of responsibility to the government on their party identification. Government identifiers credit the government for desirable outcomes and blame external forces such as the global economy for undesirable outcomes. This paper draws a more optimistic conclusion. It argues that focusing on the perceived responsibility of the government and external forces is not sufficient for understanding whether voters meet the responsibility attribution requirement. It is also necessary to compare the perceived responsibility of government parties to the perceived responsibility of opposition parties because those are the options that voters get to choose from. This party distribution of perceived responsibility is analyzed with original survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. The results demonstrate that while party identification does indeed condition voters' responsibility attributions, both government identifiers and independents attribute systematically more responsibility to the government than to the opposition regardless of the desirability of the outcome. This suggests that voters tend to meet the responsibility attribution requirement of accountability despite the presence of partisan‐motivated reasoning.

Political parties have an electoral incentive to appear ideologically unified, but also to appeal broadly to different groups of voters with diverse preferences. This paper suggests that parties respond to both incentives through the distribution of candidate issue positions. Members of Parliament (MPs) are responsible for their party's national reputation and thus rarely take positions that diverge from those of their party. Non-incumbent candidates, on the other hand, are mostly visible within their electoral district and thus more likely to diverge from party positions that are unpopular among their constituents. These possibilities are tested with candidate position taking data from nine voting advice applications in Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland. The results are consistent with the theoretical expectations and have important implications for the way representation works in parliamentary democracies as well as for the broader literature on the topic.

Parliamentary party leaders have an electoral incentive to protect the informational value of their party's label by promoting unity, but recent research has shown that parties can also benefit electorally from appealing broadly through a wide distribution of candidate positions on political issues. This article suggests that party leaders with formal candidate nomination powers balance these incentives by nominating new candidates who are more congruent with the party when the distribution of issue positions among the senior candidates is wide, and, conversely, by nominating new candidates who are more divergent from the party when the senior candidate position distribution is narrow. These possibilities are tested with candidate survey data from six parliamentary democracies, and the results show that new party leader nominations are indeed conditional on the senior candidate distribution, but only on issues that are salient to the party's electoral brand.

AbstractPolitical parties have an electoral incentive to appear ideologically unified, but also to appeal broadly to different groups of voters with diverse preferences. This paper suggests that parties respond to both incentives through the distribution of candidate issue positions. Members of Parliament (MPs) are responsible for their party's national reputation and thus rarely take positions that diverge from those of their party. Non‐incumbent candidates, on the other hand, are mostly visible within their electoral district and thus more likely to diverge from party positions that are unpopular among their constituents. These possibilities are tested with candidate position taking data from nine voting advice applications in Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland. The results are consistent with the theoretical expectations and have important implications for the way representation works in parliamentary democracies as well as for the broader literature on the topic.

Parliamentary party leaders have an electoral incentive to protect the informational value of their party's label by promoting unity, but recent research has shown that parties can also benefit electorally from appealing broadly through a wide distribution of candidate positions on political issues. This article suggests that party leaders with formal candidate nomination powers balance these incentives by nominating new candidates who are more congruent with the party when the distribution of issue positions among the senior candidates is wide, and, conversely, by nominating new candidates who are more divergent from the party when the senior candidate position distribution is narrow. These possibilities are tested with candidate survey data from six parliamentary democracies, and the results show that new party leader nominations are indeed conditional on the senior candidate distribution, but only on issues that are salient to the party's electoral brand.

Research on parliamentary representation has traditionally assumed that political parties take clear and differentiated policy positions, but recent studies suggest that parties sometimes have an electoral incentive to present voters with a distribution of positions to select from at the ballot box. This article explores whether parliamentary parties pursue such a strategy through candidate position taking using unique elite and mass survey data from Denmark. The results illustrate that parties are highly unified on issues that are salient to their electoral brand, but that they develop a distribution of positions that is related to voter preferences at the district level on less salient issues. These findings have important implications for the way that representation works in parliamentary democracies.

Welfare state spending cuts are effective fiscal consolidation tools, but some policymakers use other fiscal policy tools to address high levels of government debt. I argue that the economic incentive to cut welfare spending when government debt is high is undermined by the political incentive to stay in power when the median voter opposes retrenchment. Using survey data to measure the policy position of the median voter as well as hard figures on government debt and government social spending from 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, I estimate a series of regressions that show that government debt has a negative effect on social spending, but only when the median voter does not oppose retrenchment. This holds true for broad measures of social spending as well as for unemployment spending and old-age pension spending.

AbstractVoters often face a complex information environment with many options when they vote in elections. Research on democratic representation has traditionally been skeptical about voters' ability to navigate this complexity. However, voting advice applications (VAAs) offer voters a shortcut to compare their own preferences across numerous issues with those of a large number of political candidates. As VAAs become more prevalent, it is critical to understand whether and how voters use them when they vote. We analyze how VAA users process and use VAA information about their district candidates with original survey data from the 2019 Danish parliamentary election in collaboration with the administrators of one of the most widely used Danish VAAs. The results demonstrate that VAAs have substantively large effects on their users' choices between parties and between candidates within parties.

Carey and Shugart's important personal vote seeking model has long dominated literature on electoral rules and district representation. Empirical support for the model is somewhat mixed, however. We think one reason may be that its applicability depends on the type of district‐focused representation. We present an alternative "clarity model," drawing from Lancaster, that may work better for one specific type of district‐targeted representation—pork provision. The clarity model posits district magnitude should be linked to less pork regardless of ballot type because it limits clarity of responsibility for pork outcomes. Legislators not directly responsible for goods and services allocated to the district can still claim credit for them in high magnitude districts. We test this theory with elite survey data on legislators' priorities toward pork provision in 14 Latin American and 10 Western Europe democracies and find empirical support for a clarity theory of pork priorities.

Legislative responsiveness to constituent demands is integral to the concept of representation. Yet, research on district-focused legislative behavior and priorities, such as allocating resources to districts, has largely ignored constituent demand as an explanatory variable. In this article, we propose a demand-based theory of district-targeted legislative resource allocation. The theoretical model suggests that district demand for legislative resources is determined by the district's relative deprivation of such resources and that legislators have an electoral incentive to respond to district demand due to the credit-claiming opportunities associated with doing so. These possibilities are tested with region-wide mass and elite survey data from Latin America, and the results suggest that constituent demand is not only a normatively but also an empirically important predictor of district-focused legislative behavior.

Although strategic voting theory predicts that the number of parties will not exceed two in single-member district plurality systems, the observed number of parties often does. Previous research suggests that the reason why people vote for third parties is that they possess inaccurate information about the parties' relative chances of winning. However, research has yet to determine whether third-party voting persists under conditions of accurate information. In this article, we examine whether possessing accurate information prevents individuals from voting for third-placed parties in the 2005 and 2010 British elections. We find that possessing accurate information does not prevent most individuals from voting for third-placed parties and that many voters possess reasonably accurate information regarding the viability of the parties in their constituencies. These findings suggest that arguments emphasizing levels of voter information as a major explanation for why multiparty systems often emerge in plurality systems are exaggerated.