Do ideologically extreme voters have extreme perceptions of political parties?

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Increasingly, electoral politics are not only about differences in opinion but also about differences in perception. In this paper, I analyze how ideologically extreme and moderate voters perceive political parties of different ideological outlooks. I aim to determine whether ideological polarization has a double component: Ideologically extreme voters are farther away from their non-supported parties not only because of their extreme positions but also because they allocate these parties more to the extremes than moderate voters. By using cross-sectional data from several elections over more than 20 years and comparing more than one million three hundred thousand respondents’ perceptions of more than 1200 parties, I find that ideologically extreme and moderate voters have different views of political parties: Extreme voters perceive parties to be more extreme than moderate voters. This difference in perceptions leads extreme voters to have more biased perceptions of parties’ positions on the left–right dimension than moderate voters. In all, the results suggest that voters’ perceptions of parties differ from what would be expected from models in which voters try to diminish cognitive dissonance by rationalizing their decisions: More ideologically extreme voters perceive parties on the other side of the ideological spectrum as more extreme. Beyond showing that extremism should be considered a key variable to understand voters’ perceptions of parties and subjective polarization, the existence of a double component of ideological polarization suggests that reconciling different policy preferences will be categorically harder for those ideologically in the extremes.