The effect of valence and ideology in campaign conversion: panel evidence from three Spanish general elections

Enrique García-Viñuela,Ignacio Jurado,Pedro Riera

doi:10.1007/s11127-018-0522-8

Abstract

This paper studies changes in voting preferences over election campaigns. Building on the literature on spatial models and valence issues, we study whether (1) ideological distance to political parties, (2) assessments of party competence to handle different policy issues, and (3) voter-updated candidate evaluations are factors that explain shifts in voter choices in the weeks preceding the election. To test our hypotheses, we use data from three survey panels conducted for the 2008, 2011 and 2015 Spanish general elections. Our findings show that valence factors are more influential than ideological indifference to account for campaign conversion.

Highlights

If we consider elections to be “critical democratic instruments” (Powell 2000, p. 2) and parties as mainly vote-seekers (Downs 1957), election campaigns become one of the most important phenomena in the democratic process
Our results show that campaign conversion has become more consequential and this result connects very well with the dealignment process registered in established democracies in recent years
11 Information about left-right salience is taken from the Comparative Manifesto Project

Summary

Introduction

If we consider elections to be “critical democratic instruments” (Powell 2000, p. 2) and parties as mainly vote-seekers (Downs 1957), election campaigns become one of the most important phenomena in the democratic process. Previous studies have found valence effects in the context of the decline of ideological voting for Canada (Bélanger and Meguid 2008), the United Kingdom (Clarke et al 2004) and the United States (Stone and Simas 2010). If this pattern is clear for first-past-the-post systems where the Downsian model predicts an ideological convergence of parties, its application to multi-party contexts remains an empirical open question. We contribute to the existing literature by framing the conversion effect of election campaigns on swing voters during a period of political transformation from a two-party system to a multiparty system.

The effect of election campaigns

The Spanish system

Data and Methods

Results

Conclusions and future research