Comparative Study Of Electoral Systems Research Articles

Winners, losers, and affective polarization

We analyze the winner-loser gap in affective polarization. Using data from 37 countries over years 1996 – 2016 from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we find that winners’ affective polarization is significantly greater than losers’, and the difference is due to winners’ consistently higher in-party favoritism. These findings are robust when controlling for partisanship and ideological distance to winning party. Although much of the literature focuses on the impact of out-party dislike on affective polarization, our results align with research in social identity theory indicating that intergroup discrimination is driven primarily by in-group favoritism rather than out-group dislike. Given that winners are more likely than losers to support their favored party’s violation of democratic norms, our work suggests that in-party favoritism is an important but overlooked contributor to problematic implications of affective polarization.

Political Knowledge in the Context of Changing Institutions

Citizen political knowledge is conventionally measured with survey questions developed for use in the industrialized wealthy democracies. In this paper, we argue that certain characteristics of political institutions and party systems that are relatively common in unconsolidated democracies and mixed regimes are likely to constrain the acquisition of political knowledge as traditionally measured. Using data from Latin America, Africa, and the countries included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we examine the relationship between contextual factors and average levels of political knowledge across countries, measured both through civics knowledge and the ideological placement of political parties. We provide evidence consistent with the idea that citizens have fewer opportunities and are less motivated to acquire political knowledge in contexts where political institutions and actors frequently change and where young and nonprogrammatic parties are the norm.

Looking around the neighborhood: how subnational electoral politics affects voters’ perceptions of parties’ positions

ABSTRACT Local context has been shown to influence political attitudes and behaviors. We extend this research to argue that when a party performs better in a voter’s region or the region is more competitive, she will have more information on the parties and be better able to correctly identify the party’s positions. In addition, we argue that the strategy the party takes will also have an effect. To test our argument, we combine individual- and party-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and data on the party’s regional electoral performance from the European NUTS-Level Electoral Database from 1996 to 2021 for five federal or quasi-federal West European countries. Our results confirm our expectations. Our findings have important implications for understanding the multilevel nature of representation more generally, and how a voter’s local context shapes how she perceives parties’ positions and how parties can use local context to their advantage, more specifically.

Proximity or Directional Model of Voting for the Turkish Voter?

Voting behavior is a very complex type of political behavior. Therefore, understanding why voters vote for a particular political party or a candidate requires developing complex models. In 1957, Anthony Downs, who built his model on Hottelings’ and Smithies’ models, argued that political parties’ and candidates’ ideological and issue positions can be expressed on a one-dimensional space. On one hand, it was highly reductionist to argue that political ideas on a particular issue can be expressed this way, on the other, it was highly practical from analytical point of view. Locating parties, candidates and voters on a one-dimensional space according to their ideological or issue positions was then a revolutionaly idea and helped comparing party, candidate and voter ideological and issue positions within and across countries. These models, which were called spatial models of party competition were further developed over time and helped understanding voting behavior. Currently, spatial models of party competition have two major competing models linking voter ideological positions with party ideological positions. Simply, while the proximity model proposes that voters vote for the parties or candidates that hold ideological positions in the political space that are closest to their own, the directional model suggests that the voters vote for the parties or candidates that are on their side of the two-dimensional political spectrum and more extreme than their own while being within the acceptability region. This research aims to test the applicability of these two voting models for the Turkish voter. Türkiye constitutes an interesting case study with its long-term PR electoral system as it was suggested in the extant literature that proximity model is a more appropriate tool to explain voting behavior in Proportional (PR) systems. Thus, we hypothesize that in Türkiye, where a PR electoral system is in effect for parliamentary elections, voter electoral preferences are better explained by the proximity model than the directional model. Our research analyzes Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) data for voters of the four major political parties in Türkiye, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), the Republican People’s Party (RPP), the National Action Party (NAP), and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). A series of Multiple Linear Regression Analyses were conducted to reveal associations between the dependent and the independent variables. Voter embracement, as expressed as like-dislike of each political party for each voter, is seperately used as the dependent variable for each analysis. Issue distance and issue scalar product were used as key independent variables representing the formulas for the proximity and the directional models, respectively. Additionally, education, age, gender and income were recruited as classical control variables. Comparing explanatory powers of the statistical models showed that, contrary to the findings of MacDonald and his colleagues, the proximity model of voting is a more appropriate tool than the directional model to explain voting behavior in Türkiye. From a macro-political perspective, this finding supports Westholm’s (1997) argument that the PR provides a more appropriate tool to explain voting behavior in PR systems. Yet, it should be noted that further multi-country comperative analyses required for certain results.

Why do majoritarian systems benefit the right? Income groups and vote choice across different electoral systems

Abstract This research note investigates how the voting behavior of middle-income citizens explains why right-wing parties tend to govern under majoritarian electoral rule. The growing literature that investigates the ideological effects of electoral systems has mostly focused on institutional explanations. However, whether the electoral rules overrepresent parties with some specific ideologies is also a matter of behavior. Building on Iversen and Soskice (2006), we test two arguments. First, middle-income groups are more likely to vote for the right under majoritarian rules because they fear the redistributive consequences of a victory of the left in these contexts. Second, middle-income earners particularly concerned with tax rates are particularly prone to vote differently across electoral systems. Combining survey evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the New Zealand Election Study, we show that the voting behavior of middle-income citizens is indeed responsible for the predominance of the right under majoritarian systems.

Electoral Messiah or Party Label? Quantifying and Investigating Leader-Party Relationships in German Federal Elections 1998–2021

While the personalization of politics thesis has received support when exploring the supply side of politics and the media's coverage of elections and campaigns, the unmediated impact of leaders on vote choice (demand-side behavioral personalization) is debated. Most scholars agree that leaders can and do influence the vote, but the extent, circumstances, and pathways for this to occur, notably distinct from voter assessments of the party, remains contested. Using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we explore demand-side behavioral personalization in German Federal elections between 1998–2021, with a particular focus on the 2021 contest, where leadership was arguably an especially salient feature of the campaign. We offer a quantification of the phenomenon – first in the form of a vote-leader/party favorite alignment index and second by separating the impact of leader and party popularity on the vote in the 2021 contest, including provision for temporal and reciprocal dynamics. In doing so, we comprehensively examine leader-inclined voting while testing whether the 2021 contest represented a “Crossroads” contest on this dimension. Our results show leaders directly influenced vote choice in 2021, support for leader-inclined voting. Nevertheless, we find little evidence that 2021 marked a “Crossroads,” with few voters aligning their vote solely with their favorite leader, a pattern detected in all German elections between 1998 and 2021. Conspicuously, substantially more voters report aligning their vote with their favorite party. Further, our analysis illustrates that the association between leader popularity and the vote mostly trails the impact of party popularity’s connection with the vote. These results align more with the leaders minimalist school of demand-side behavioral personalization.

Issue salience and affective polarization

ABSTRACT Which voters hold polarized affects for political parties in Western Europe? We consider distinct characteristics of different political issues that shape political actors’ behaviors and argue that voters are more affectively polarized when they put salience on cultural issues because their stances on the issues are embedded in their deep-seated identity, value, belief, and morality. Empirically, we use measures of affective polarization that incorporate the multiparty systems of Western European countries. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (Module 3), we find that voters who put salience on cultural issues are more affectively polarized than others. The result implies that rising affective polarization in the past decades might have been related to increasing priorities on cultural issues. It also implies that political parties may potentially weaken voters’ affective polarization by manipulating their issue agenda.

Introducing the comparative study of electoral systems in Tunisia: populist attitudes, political preferences, and voting behavior

ABSTRACT Although public opinion research has gained prominence in the Middle East and North Africa region since 2011, data on electoral behaviour and political attitudes are scarce and rarely have a comparative focus. This research note introduces a new post-election survey conducted after the 2019 Tunisian elections. The project contributes to the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) database. In its 26-year history no country other than Israel was ever part of the CSES from the Middle East and North Africa region. Tunisia is the first Arab country to be covered in the CSES. We introduce this new research resource, its methodology, and its themes. We also provide some preliminary results from the main topic of the CSES between 2016 and 2021: populist attitudes. Using a three-dimensional model, we find that people who score high on the populist attitudes measures do not necessarily have a higher preference for populist parties or candidates. Contrary to consistent results from advanced industrial democracies, we also find that people who endorse nativism are more likely to support left-wing parties. This research note illustrates the importance of such datasets and how they contribute to a specific topic: understanding populism across multiple contexts.

Patterns of Affective Polarization toward Parties and Leaders across the Democratic World

Research indicates that affective polarization pervades contemporary democracies worldwide. Although some studies identify party leaders as polarizing agents, affective polarization has been predominantly conceptualized as a product of in-/out-party feelings. This study compares levels of party affective polarization (PAP) and leader affective polarization (LAP) cross-nationally, using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Applying like–dislike scales and an identical index to both concepts, we reveal that while the two strongly correlate, LAP is systematically lower than PAP. The United States emerges as an exceptional case, being the only country where LAP significantly exceeds PAP. Drawing on regime input/output and institutions as theoretical building blocks, we explore cross-national variations and show that the relative strength of LAP vis-à-vis PAP is increased by presidential regime type, poor government performance, and low party system fragmentation. The findings of this study contribute to the thriving research on affective polarization and personalization of politics.

Het effect van sociaaleconomische status en politieke kansenstructuren op protestparticipatie: een multilevel analyse van 17 Europese landen

The effect of socioeconomic status and political opportunity structures on protest participation: a multilevel analysis of 17 European countries In recent years, protesting has become an increasingly pertinent form of political participation. Within the literature on political participation, both socioeconomic status (SES) and political opportunity structures (POS) have been shown to affect protest participation, but not often have these factors been studied in relation to each other. This study addresses this gap in the literature by analysing the effects of both SES and openness of POS on individual protest participation, as well as the moderating effect of POS on the effect of SES. Multilevel models were estimated using data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. The results show that both SES and openness of POS positively affect individual protest participation. The moderating effect of POS openness was not significant, indicating that the positive effect of SES on protest participation remains consistent across different political opportunity structures. Thus, we have shown that political inequality based on socioeconomic status is persistent across European countries, however, it does not depend on political opportunity structures.

Election Frequency and Voter Turnout

In recent decades, liberal democracies have considerably expanded the scope for citizen participation, calling their citizens to vote in a growing number of popular votes. This research investigates the effects of the rising election frequency on electoral participation. It expands on the voting calculus and theorizes which, when, and how past votes affect current voter turnout. We argue that all election types contribute to a common factor of election frequency, whose high values depress turnout and reduce the effectiveness of party mobilization even in the most important elections. We find support for the new theory using an original database of all significant elections and referendums held in 22 European democracies between 1939 and 2019, two natural experiments, and survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Our findings shed light on contemporary participation trends and have major implications for democratic citizenship and democratic institutional engineering.

Patterns of (party competition in) democracy: Voter certainty and party strategy in different institutional settings

AbstractObjectivesWhile some argue that parties reduce voter uncertainty to attract more votes, others claim that parties increase vote shares when beclouding their policy positions. To address the puzzle, I argue that as the degree of consensual characteristics increases, strategic uncertainty is electorally more helpful because parties in consensus models should consider the governing coalition and facilitate cooperation with other parties due to multiparty systems.MethodsUsing the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I employ multilevel modeling to analyze 335 parties in 32 countries including both advanced and postcommunist democracies.ResultsI find empirical evidence that as the political institutions have more consensus models, it is more beneficial (or less costly at least) for parties to pursue voter uncertainty with broad appealing strategies primarily in advanced democracies.ConclusionThe findings suggest that democratic institutional settings shape the incentives for parties to adopt either broad or narrow appeals in the context of party competition.

Determining decidability: How issue salience divergence structures party systems and affects citizens

AbstractThis paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents’ satisfaction with democracy and self‐reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience‐based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior.

From ideological congruence to satisfaction with democracy: how leverage can mitigate the ill-effects of party polarization

ABSTRACT The impact of party polarization on voter satisfaction is disputed. While a direct negative effect is expected, polarization has also been found to clarify party policies, with indirect positive impact. This Note proposes a more direct source of positive effects for polarization through an interaction with congruence. We use citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SwD) as the evaluation of interest; we take ideological polarization among parties and citizen-government left-right congruence as independent variables; and we use data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. We find that higher polarization, while indeed detrimental to satisfaction with democracy, gives rise to countervailing effects of congruence. We borrow the geometric concept of leverage to characterize the way this interaction enhances congruence’s positive effect on SwD.

Are leftist or rightist voters better substantively represented? The effects of variance in district magnitude on party-voter ideological congruence

How does the variation in district magnitude in districted proportional representation systems affect congruence between a voter and their party of choice? I argue that voters in large-magnitude districts will have higher levels of party-voter congruence than voters in small-magnitude districts, due to stronger strategic incentives and reduced party options in small-magnitude districts. Furthermore, I argue that this relationship will be stronger among leftist voters compared to rightist voters, due to the concentration of rightist voters in rural, small-magnitude districts and leftist voters in urban, high-magnitude districts. These expectations are tested using data that from 45 elections in 12 districted proportional representation systems included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results support the expectation that party-voter ideological congruence will be higher for voters in larger electoral districts, and lower for voters located within smaller districts. Leftist voters do appear to suffer a congruence penalty in smaller districts, whereas the congruence of rightist voters is less affected by district magnitude. An examination of the mechanisms behind this finding suggests that leftist-voters in small-magnitude districts are faced with a smaller and more right-leaning set of party options.

Cleavage politics, polarisation and participation in Western Europe

Polarisation over cultural issues and the emergence of radical, often populist, challenger parties indicate a fundamental restructuring of political conflict in Western Europe. The emerging divide crosscuts and, in part, reshapes older cleavages. This special issue introduction highlights how the transformation of cleavage structures relates to the dynamics of polarisation and political participation. The contributions to the special issue innovate in two ways. First, they adapt concepts and measures of ideological and affective polarisation to the context of Europe’s multi-party and multi-dimensional party competition. Second, they emphasise electoral and protest politics, examining how ideological and affective polarisation shape electoral and non-electoral participation. Apart from introducing the contributions, the introduction combines different datasets – the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the European Social Survey – to sketch an empirical picture of differentiated polarisation with types of polarisation only weakly associated cross-arena, cross-nationally and over time.

Partisanship, Electoral Autocracy, and Citizen Perceptions of Party System Polarization

This paper examines how partisanship and electoral autocracy (vis-à-vis democracy) influence people’s perceptions of party system polarization in their country. Although partisanship generally enhances subjective party system polarization, I posit that this relationship depends on who is in power and the nature of political regime. Cognitive dissonance between losing an election and believing that one’s party is the best motivates partisans of parties out of power to see their country’s parties as less ideologically distinct compared to partisans of governing parties. Political regimes matter too because higher stakes of political competition and skewed information environment in electoral autocracies not only encourage all citizens to see parties as more polarized, but also magnify the positive impact of partisanship—particularly co-partisanship with governing parties—on subjective party system polarization. Using individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (1996–2019), the empirical analyses support these expectations, even when accounting for party system polarization based on expert party placements. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates on partisanship, electoral autocracy, and the nature of subjective electoral supply in contemporary electoral regimes.

GÖÇMENLERE KARŞI TUTUMLARIN PARTİ TERCİHLERİNE ETKİSİ: TÜRKİYE ÖRNEĞİ

2011’de Suriye İç Savaşı’nın başlamasıyla bugüne kadar Türkiye’ye göç eden 3 milyon 750 bin civarındaki sığınmacı ile birlikte Türkiye siyasetinde göçmenlere karşı tutumlar da araştırılmaya başlanmıştır. Önceki çalışmalar göçmenlere karşı tutumların çeşitli boyutlarını analiz etmiş olsa da bu tutumların parti tercihlerine etkisi diğer ülkelere kıyasla Türkiye’de daha az çalışılmış bir konudur.
 Amaç: Bu çalışma 2018 yılında toplanan Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (2019) verisini kullanarak Türkiye’de göçmenlere karşı tutumların parti tercihine olan etkisini nicel yöntemler ile analiz etmektedir.
 Yöntem: Göçmenlere karşı tutumların parti tercihine etkisi farklı lojistik regresyon modelleri ile yapılan analizlerle ölçülmüştür. Kontrol değişkenleri olarak Türkiye siyasetinde daha önceden çalışılmış dindarlık ve sol-sağ düzlemindeki konum gibi merkez-çevre teorisine dayanan ve ekonomik oy verme davranışını ölçen değişkenler ile demografik değişkenler kullanılmıştır.
 Bulgular: Sonuçlar göstermektedir ki göçmenlere karşı olumsuz tutumlar arttıkça İyi Parti’ye oy verme olasılığı artarken, AK Parti’ye oy verme olasılığı azalmaktadır. Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi’ne oy verme tercihi ile göçmenlere karşı tutumlar arasında sadece demografik değişkenlerle kontrol edildiğinde olumlu bir ilişki varken, dindarlık ve seçmenin sol-sağ düzlemindeki konumu ile birlikte kontrol edildiğinde ise bu etki istatistiksel olarak anlamsızlaşmaktadır. Son olarak ekonomik değerlendirmeler de regresyona eklendiğinde göçmenlere karşı tutumların parti tercihine etkisi tüm modellerde istatistiksel olarak anlamsız hale gelmektedir. 
 Özgünlük: Veri setindeki diğer ülkeler ile kıyaslandığında Türkiye’de göçmenlere karşı olumsuz tutumlar oldukça yüksekken bu tutumların parti tercihini belirlemede zayıf kalması yanıtlanması önemli bir soru olarak ortaya çıkmaktadır.

Spatial and valence models of voting: The effects of the political context

Spatial and valence models are the workhorses of research on electoral behaviour. Yet, little is known about the common factors that influence the strength of both these determinants of the vote. I argue that the political context affects the prevalence of spatial and valence considerations in voters' minds. I investigate this by combining all the available data of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) with information on the political context. The results of models based on more than 160 elections in 56 countries show that ideological considerations are more important for the vote when all party leaders are disliked, incumbent coalitions are large, and polarisation is high. Valence evaluations are more important when all parties are ideologically distant from the voter, there are few parties to evaluate, and polarisation is low. These results indicate that the political context needs to be taken into account when interpreting voters’ electoral signal.

Recalibrating populism measurement tools: Methodological inconsistencies and challenges to our understanding of the relationship between the supply- and demand-side of populism.

The analysis of the congruence between the demand- and supply-side of populism is key to understand the relationship between citizens and populist parties, and to what extent this is mainly a “pull” or “push” phenomenon. Although the study of populism has experienced an unprecedented growth across social sciences during the last decade, research directly addressing this connection remains scarce. Moreover, most existing tools used to measure populism have not been created paying much consideration to their compatibility with those applied in the other side of this demand-supply divide. This article critically revisits the influential Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Module 5 dataset to illustrate shortcomings regarding current efforts to measure the demand- and supply-sides of populism. We show that according to CSES data the, often presumed, correspondence between “populist” attitudes and likelihood of voting for “populist parties” is only partial and country specific. But more importantly, we identify three main potential sources of such mismatch linked to instrumental issues: (i) problems with the choice, design and operationalization of attitudinal survey items; (ii) problems in the assessment of parties' populism; and (iii) instrument biases that make them more effective with some varieties of populism than with others. These methodological limitations are hindering our ability to settle longstanding theoretical debates concerning the correspondence between the demand- and supply-side, the relative centrality of attributes, and varieties of populism. Therefore, we invite scholars working in this field to update existing measurement tools, or develop new ones, considering the multidimensionality of this latent construct, the diversity of movements, and the need to apply consistent criteria and operationalization techniques when assessing degrees of populism in citizens and parties.