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Influence of the Party Ideology Shift on Political Apathy INFLUENCE OF THE PARTY IDEOLOGY SHIFT ON POLITICAL APATHY by Panov Trajche Submitted to Central European University Department of Political Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Levente Littvay Budapest, Hungary CEU eTD Collection 2009 Table of contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................................................II ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................................................III INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................................1 1 POLITICAL APATHY – THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THIS PHENOMENON ........................................................................................................................................ 7 1.1 THE PHENOMENON OF POLITICAL APATHY: WHAT IS POLITICAL APATHY – THEORETICAL IMPRECISION..7 1.2 POLITICAL APATHY – THEORETICAL EXPLANATIONS ...............................................................................9 1.3 REVIEW OF THE FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE POLITICAL APATHY............................................................. 14 1.4 POLITICAL APATHY AND PARTY IDEOLOGY SHIFT ................................................................................. 22 2 METHODOLOGY, DATA AND OPERATIONALIZATION OF THE VARIABLES........................... 26 2.1 RESEARCH QUESTION AND HYPOTHESES............................................................................................... 26 2.2 DATA AND OPERATIONALIZATION OF THE DATA.................................................................................... 27 2.3 METHODS AND VARIABLES................................................................................................................... 29 2.3.1 Multi Level Modeling....................................................................................................................... 30 2.3.2 Logistic Regression ......................................................................................................................... 31 2.3.3 Aggregate Level............................................................................................................................... 32 2.4 VARIABLES .......................................................................................................................................... 33 2.4.1 Ideology Shift Score......................................................................................................................... 33 2.4.2 Political Apathy Variable................................................................................................................. 37 2.4.3 Control Variables............................................................................................................................ 38 DATA ANALYSES AND INTERPRETATION OF THE RESULTS .............................................................. 40 2.5 MULTI LEVEL LOGISTIC REGRESSION: RESULTS .................................................................................... 40 2.5.1 What can be concluded from the results – Discussion....................................................................... 43 2.6 PARTY LEVEL: RESULTS ....................................................................................................................... 46 2.6.1 Interpretation of the results: Are there enough arguments to support the hypothesis ......................... 48 2.7 SECOND HYPOTHESIS ........................................................................................................................... 50 2.7.1 Interpretation of the results: Labour Party in Great Britain and FIDESZ in Hungary ....................... 51 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................................................ 55 LIMITATIONS OF THE RESEARCH AND THE POSSIBLE SOURCES OF ERROR.............................................................. 60 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH IN THE FIELD ............................................................................... 62 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................................................... 64 REFERENCES:.................................................................................................................................................. 70 CEU eTD Collection i Acknowledgements I would like to thank Levente Littvay for supervising the process of writing this thesis and for the comments, advice and guidance during whole process. I would also like to express gratitude to my colleagues Paul Weith and Constantin Manuel Bosancianu for the help and advice with statistical models and to my colleague and friend Nevena Rsumovic for her moral support. At the end I would like to express special gratitude to the most important people in my life: my mother Todorka, my father Zaharin and my sister Ljubica for their unselfish and enormous support and understanding during this academic year. CEU eTD Collection ii Abstract The central aspect of the thesis is dedicated to party ideology and how a change in ideology of the parties measured, in their Manifestos and electoral programs, influences party apathy or results in a lower turnout. All of the theoretical and empirical researches in this work show that: First, the political apathy is not a strictly conceptualized political term and also refers to non- participation as well as low turnout. Second, there are various factors and determinants that influence political apathy, although that the exact effects of these factors remain unknown, and third the party ideology shift is already mentioned as a variable that influences political apathy or low turnout, but so far it is not adequately investigated by scholars. This thesis constructs two Multi Level Logistic Models and two Linear Regressions to test the influence of the party ideology shift on the individual as well as party level. The results from the MLM models and regressions provide enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the influence of the party ideology shift produces political apathy. Nevertheless, while the crucial variables are marginally or highly significant, variables and intercepts have low values, which show that these models have low explanatory power, although this is expected as a result of the fact that nonvoters are around 8% of the sample. The lack of significance in the second regression model, supports the claim that political parties will not necessary lose votes as a result of the apathetic behavior of their past supporters. Besides, some limitations of the research, the thesis contributes to the solving of the puzzle of political apathy or low turnout. CEU eTD Collection iii Introduction The topic of this thesis is the phenomenon of political apathy and reasons for its appearance. It will focus on political parties and how their behavior influences political apathy in voters. The central aspect of the thesis is dedicated to party ideology and how a change in the ideology of the parties, measured by their Manifestos and electoral programs, influences party apathy or lower turnout. This thesis will focus mainly on global democratic party’ systems and will analyze the main political parties of these countries and their ideology shift in the last two cycles of parliamentary elections. Parliamentary elections will be focused on because they provide the most adequate information about the change of party ideologies or programs. The problem with low voter turnout in Europe is very prominent. The last parliamentary elections in Romania confirmed that this trend has taken on even larger dimensions. In general, Romania is good example of the continuous decline of this turnout during last two decades. From a record of 86.18% in the first post-communist elections 1990 to the lowest turnout of 39.26% in the last Elections 20081, a very clear pattern of permanent decrease of the voters on elections has emerged. Other cases in Europe do not have such clear patterns as Romania does, but when the analysis over time is made, it can be confirmed that apathy is a common phenomenon in the modern world, worthy of a scholar’s analyses. These trends can only justify the need for research focusing on the reasons of the phenomenon of political apathy, but this paper is focused on the individual and party level, and not on the state level. CEU eTD Collection 1 For more see The Romania political System: After the Parliamentary Elections of November 30, 2008 publ. in Studia Politica nr 1/2009 http://cristianpreda.ro/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/partide.pdf 1 Despite the fact that the issue of low turnout has been investigated by many scholars, this issue has not been studied significantly in the way this research has approached it. Although many factors have influenced political apathy or low turnout, the originality of this paper is that it focuses on party ideologies and how ideology shift influences voter’s turnout. Many scholars have researched voting behavior, but few of them have focused on political programs or ideological shifts. This aspect of political apathy is especially important in Central and Eastern Europe 2(CEE) because during the transitional period
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