Suchergebnisse

One of the most common critiques of political parties is that they no longer represent the interests of their voters. On one hand, representation literature tasks all parties equally to ensure high ideological congruence with their voters. On the other hand, party behaviour literature acknowledges that parties have legitimately different primary goals, in particular vote-maximisation or policy-seeking. Thus, this article analyses whether ideological congruence depends on the general goals that parties pursue. Furthermore, this article proposes a novel, distribution-based measure of party-voter ideological congruence that reduces the loss of voter information stemming from the many-to-one data relationship. This measure is applied to 470 data points from parties in 10 Western European countries from 1970 to 2009. The article finds that vote-maximising parties create higher levels of congruence than policy-seeking parties. On this basis, the article calls for evaluations of party behaviour considering party-type specificity.

The functioning of representative democracy is crucially dependent on the representative behaviour of political parties. Large parts of the party representation literature assume that voters expect parties to fulfil the promises of their election programs. What voters actually want from parties, however, remains largely unclear. Within the Australian context, this article investigates the preferences of voters regarding three ideal party representative styles: 'promise keeping'; 'focus on public opinion'; and 'seeking the common good'. Using a novel survey tool, this study finds that voters value promise keeping highly when it is evaluated individually. However, they rate seeking the common good as most important when the three styles are directly compared. A multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that, in particular, voters who have been involved in party grassroots activities prefer promise keeping. These findings have wider implications for our understanding of how representative democracy can and should work.

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on everyday life, where people feel affected both economically and health-wise by the spread of the novel virus, regardless of whether they have contracted it or not. At the same time, we know that populist attitudes influence how people perceive their individual situation, the political environment, and available policy solutions. Are these two factors interrelated? This article examines the role that populist attitudes play (a) in subjective feelings of being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and (b) in choosing policies to counteract its spread. Populist attitudes may lead people to reject the policy-making process during the COVID-19 pandemic, shaped primarily by experts. The article argues that this should increase the sense of concern among people with populist orientations and lead to a rejection of commonly discussed policies to contain the virus. To test this connection empirically, we conducted a representative survey in Austria in September 2020. Our analysis shows a significant and substantive correlation between populist attitudes and the subjective feeling of being affected by the crisis in the areas of health and the economy. Similarly, we find evidence that populist attitudes affect the acceptability of policies to combat the spread of COVID-19. These findings indicate that populist attitudes have such strong effects on individuals' perception of the world that they even influence the perception of the globally shared challenge of a pandemic.

AbstractThat parties fulfil their pre‐election pledges once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. This paper addresses the question of whether the government/opposition status of their party affects how much citizens want governments to fulfil their promises. We hypothesize that interest‐driven, rational voters are more likely to prefer their own party to keep its promises and investigate whether this rationale is impacted by public opinion and expert views. The analysis is based on a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that voters broadly adhere to the democratic principle of expecting pledge fulfilment but, at the same time, some take a rational approach to government promises. The opinions of the public and experts mitigate but do not change this effect. Another key finding is the significant difference in the preference for promise keeping versus promise breaking between government and opposition voters in the Austrian case, the country with the more heterogeneous and polarized political system. This paper contributes to the literature on voters' attitudes on democracy and pledge fulfilment by showing that voters are normatively driven but a significant number of voters deviate and instead follow the rational voter logic.

Radical right parties and their nativist ideas have gained considerable momentum, compelling non-radical parties to "engage" with this nativist "Zeitgeist." Yet, aside from general trends such as tougher stances on migration, we know little about the strategic choices of parties when balancing their commitment to core policy goals and the need to be "timely," that is, to respond to changing environments. Theoretically, parties may either adapt their ideological "core" to signal commitment or merely attribute nativist ideas to secondary issue areas to signal general responsiveness. Drawing on Austrian, German, and Swiss manifestos for over two decades and establishing a novel dictionary to assess parties' use of nativism, we find that while previous studies showing right-wing parties compete with RRPs using nativism in the same domains are correct, the strategic choices around this competition are more complex. How much commitment to nativist ideas parties show depends on whether radical right parties use the same domains to construct their nativist claims. For research on party competition, this means that more attention should be paid to how rather than if parties "engage" with their rivals.