Comparing Party-Voter Linkages Across Parties and Party Systems: Ideological Partisanship in Voterss Minds

Abstract

This study answers the question of why an ideological party system emerges in some democracies but not in others. Despite the importance of ideology in party competition, the relationships between parties and voters in developing democracies and how these are different from, or similar to, that of established democracies with respect to ideology have received relatively less attention. Scholars have long agreed that parties of late democratizers have failed to develop ideological linkages to the same extent as their well-established Western counterparts, with the comparability between the two worlds often questioned. Even recent efforts to account for the party-voter relationships in developing democracies fall short of providing valid measures for cross-national comparison. To address these theoretical and empirical gaps, I investigate the cross-national variations in the nature of party-voter linkages and the underlying conditions for the development of ideological linkages. First, I provide novel measures of ideological linkages at the party and the party system level in 46 established and developing democracies, by using the public opinion survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (1996-2011). Next, I evaluate competing theories of party-voter relationships: institutional, socioeconomic and democratic. I find that neither being a third wave democracy nor being a less matured democracy is as critical for the development of ideological linkages as institutional and socioeconomic factors. By providing a basis for both cross-party and cross-national comparisons for future research in party-voter relationships, this study challenges the 'incomparability thesis' in the study of party politics.