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No Shortcut to Voting

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No Shortcut to Voting NO SHORTCUT TO VOTING THE LIMITED INFLUENCE OF PARTIES ’ LEFT -RIGHT POSITIONS ON VOTING BEHAVIOR . Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln 2017 vorgelegt von Master of Arts Kathrin Barbara Busch aus Leverkusen Referent: Prof. Dr. André Kaiser Koreferent: Prof. Dr. Ingo Rohlfing Tag der Promotion: 25. Juni 2018 2 CONTENTS Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 4 State of the Art .............................................................................................................................................. 9 Contribution ............................................................................................................................................... 18 References ................................................................................................................................................... 30 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 35 Chapter 2: Estimating parties’ left-right positions: Determinants of voters’ perceptions’ proximity to party ideology 1 .......................................................................................... 36 Chapter 3: How much do voters know? Or do they need to? The importance of citizens’ conceptual differentiation of parties’ policy space. ....................................................... 84 Chapter 4: Voters’ Reactions to Parties’ Positions’ Shifts: Switching Parties means Acknowledgment .........................................................................................................................110 1 This chapter was already published as a Journal article with Electoral Studies 41, 159-178. 3 INTRODUCTION In democracies, citizens’ political sophistication is a normative requirement that most scholars would agree on. It is important for their active participation and the achievement of important normative principles. First, representativeness can only be satisfied if citizens vote for parties and candidates who have at least similar political preferences. Second, accountability is more likely to be achieved if citizens can understand political outcomes and can electorally punish parties and candidates if these do not meet their needs or do not keep their promises. Accordingly, citizens need to be cognitively aware and interested in following politics, to have own political preferences and to compare these preferences to what their representatives, parties and political candidates propose or enact. Also other, less conventional kinds of political participation, such as taking part in demonstrations or signing a petition presuppose that citizens are informed. At the very least they need to know about their civic and political rights and have information about the issues at stake. Therefore, political information and cognitive abilities are necessary for an active citizenry. However, political sophistication is especially important for their ability to rationally vote as expected particularly in models of spatial voting. Spatial voting theories rely on the assumption that voters base their vote choice on parties’ positional locations in (policy) space. This is the case for both the “proximity model” of voting (Downs 1957) that expects voters to choose the party that is closest to them, and the “directional model”, that assumes that apart from the parties’ and their own position(s), voters also take account of the status quo of (governmental) position(s). Voters then choose the party of which they would expect to change this status quo in a preferred direction (e.g., Rabinowitz and MacDonald 1989; Rabinowitz et al. 1991). For both models, it is essential that voters know candidates’ or parties’ positions in political space – being it one- or multi-dimensional. If voters do not know any positions or perceive all to be the same, they cannot decide about their party preferences due to spatial considerations. Knowledge of party positions (or their ideology) and voters’ rational choice according to positions are hence two important, common assumptions of spatial models. However, while theoretical concepts of voting have largely concentrated on 4 modeling the way how voters get from positions to vote choice (e.g., Merill and Grofman 1999, Rabinowitz and MacDonald 1991), the knowledge assumption is mostly implicit. Voters are simply expected to know the candidates’ or parties’ positions that are salient to them – or parties’ ideological locations that may work as a shortcut (Downs 1957) to bundles of issues. In reality, rational choice assumptions about voters are idealistic as we know that not all voters have such levels of sophistication, and thus this calls into question some of the basic premises underlying an ideal rational choice. Empirical studies show that it is unlikely that even a single voter will meet all criteria to vote in this idealized way: users of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) often confuse party positions (Schultze 2014); retrospective voters often do not even know the current cabinet composition (Fortunato and Stevenson 2013). For one thing, if the rational choice model applied to all, it is possible that few people would vote at all, given that it assumes a rational voter should only cast a ballot if their ballot will be pivotal, an unrealistic assumption in electorates totaling millions. Otherwise, the costs of voting would be too high, and the rational voter should abstain (Downs 1957) 2. However, as we know, many, and indeed most people do vote in elections, despite the original model positing that it is irrational to do so. Having made it to the ballot box, citizens often do not choose rationally. They do not necessarily vote for the party that they should expect most utility from, even if this utility measure includes a multitude of aspects like partisanship and spatial positions (Lau and Redlawsk 1997; Lau et al. 2014). The second problem of spatial voting models is that they are not very dynamic. They expect parties to take equilibria positions, "i.e., sets of platforms that, once adopted, will remain more or less the same because no candidate (or party) believes that she can improve her vote share by shifting her proposed issue position as long as the other candidates/parties do not change theirs" (Merill and Grofman 1999, 164). They hence do not answer what happens to voters’ rationality if parties shift their positions. Deducing from the theoretical premises, this may still happen if parties have not yet 2 This so-called “paradox of voting” was the topic for a substantial scientific debate and has inspired many to change the original model of voting or its interpretation. Examples are Riker and Ordeshook’s (1968) inclusion of a “feeling of duty” and Aldrich’s (1993) explanation that elections evoke a low-cost-low- benefit situation. However, the “feeling of duty” and other selective incentives to turnout contrast the logic of “rational choice” (Aldrich 1993). 5 adopted their optimal platform – for example relatively new parties and if older parties react to these new party platforms or compete for “issue ownership” (Meguid, 2008). My dissertation seeks to fill this research gap: it examines whether the implicit assumption holds that voters have objectively correct perceptions that lead to rational voting behavior. In particular, I strive to answer what happens if parties shift their left- right positions. I investigate in three successive chapters, how parties’ position shifts determine voters’ perceptions of parties’ left-right positions (chapter 2), which kinds of political sophistication – factual knowledge, the differentiation between parties’ left- right positions and the precision of perceptions – determine citizens’ electoral participation (chapter 3), and if the precision of left-right perceptions increases rational reactions to parties’ position’ shifts (chapter 4). The overarching contribution of the dissertation is to show the role of positional perceptions vis-à-vis other kinds of political knowledge. The focus on perceptions of left-right positions and not of single issues allows me to test the assumption that voters use these as a heuristic for voting, following Downs (1957). If left-right positions informed about underlying position bundles, they should facilitate vote decisions and rational reactions to parties’ changed proximity to the voter in cases of shifting positions. In my view, party competition on issues that consistently match their left-right position, and voters’ orientation towards these left-right “clusters” is normatively preferable to focusing on only single issues that may or may not match to the left-right logic. Being consistent with left-right positions would allow citizens to have a clearer and more stable long-term view of how well a candidate or party would represent them by the mean and not only on the one, maybe only temporarily important issue. Therefore, the dissertation focusses on left-right positions although it is acknowledged that party systems can differ in how parties usually cluster left and right positions on the economic sub-dimension with left and right positions on the cultural sub-dimension (Kitschelt 1995, Markowski 1997, Marks et al. 2006). However, in European democracies, most political issues seem to be consistent
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