Left-wing Voters Research Articles

Mainstream partisans’ affective response to (non) cooperation with populist radical right parties

What is the role of elite-level inter-party strategies in promoting or reducing negative affective evaluations of citizens? This article explores this puzzle by focusing on the decision of mainstream parties to exclude or cooperate with populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs) in Western European countries. The analysis is based on CSES cross-national data and the LISS Dutch panel data merged with the record on whether PRRPs are subject to a cordon sanitaire or (in)formally cooperate with mainstream parties in a government coalition. The findings suggest that political exclusion fuels loathing for PRRPs among mainstream party supporters, while cooperation reduces dislike of PRRPs both among supporters of PRRP coalition partners and left-wing voters. Distinguishing between informal and formal coalitions, the cross-national data shows that only formal cooperation has a significant effect. However, the longitudinal Dutch data shows a temporary decrease of dislike also during informal cooperation.

The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns Versus Belief Confirmation Motives

Abstract We examine the relative importance of accuracy concerns and belief confirmation motives in driving the demand for news. In experiments with US voters, we first vary beliefs about whether an outlet reports the news in a right-wing biased, left-wing biased or unbiased way. We then measure demand for a newsletter covering articles from this outlet. Right-wing voters strongly reduce their demand for left-wing biased news, but not for right-wing biased news. The reverse patterns hold for left-wing voters. These results suggest a trade-off between accuracy concerns and belief confirmation motives. We quantify this trade-off using a structural model and find a similar quantitative importance of both motives.

A false divide? Providing information about inequality aligns preferences for redistribution between right- and left-wing voters

A false divide? Providing information about inequality aligns preferences for redistribution between right- and left-wing voters

Partisanship, blame avoidance behaviours and voter reactions to allegations of political misconduct

Politicians often engage in blame avoidance behaviours in order to evade electoral punishment following allegations of misconduct. A key question concerns the (in)effectiveness of such behaviours in mitigating voter opinions about the alleged misconduct and the appropriate punishment. In this article, we examine how this (in)effectiveness may be shaped by: (1) the characteristics of blame avoidance behaviours, and (2) voters' partisan (mis)alignment with the alleged offender. We address this question using a between-subject survey experiment among a sample of Norwegian citizens (N = 1996). Our main findings suggest that blame avoidance behaviours can be effective in mitigating voters' assessment of the alleged misconduct and of the punishment the politician should face. This is particularly true when it concerns politicians from respondents' most-preferred party, and among left-wing voters. These findings help explain when and why scandals may (fail to) affect politicians’ electoral fortunes.

The Italian left at a critical juncture: disanchoring the past, embracing the present

ABSTRACT On September 25, 2022, the Italian left faced a significant electoral setback as the centre-right coalition, led by Giorgia Meloni, secured a remarkable electoral win. Historically, the left had been represented by major parties like the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.) and the Italian Socialist Party (P.S.I.). Their demise in the 1990s, for various reasons, gave rise to new left-leaning ‘umbrella’ entities such as the Ulivo and the Democratic Party (P.D.). Despite some electoral successes by these newer groups, left-wing parties and coalitions have failed to dominate the Italian political scene in recent years. A decline in the definitive meaning of ‘left’ in Italian politics has led to a more fragmented left-wing. As traditional leftist ideologies have waned, some of the emerging left-leaning parties have faced criticism for prioritizing civil rights over socioeconomic issues. Articles in this special issue delve into different facets of the Italian left. Pasquino highlights the stagnation in the left’s political culture since the cold war’s conclusion, while Newell critiques the weakness of the P.D.’s party organization and ideology. Ventura analyses both the P.D.’s organizational challenges and its leadership decisions, whereas Musella emphasizes the P.D.’s shortcomings in updating communication strategies. Pasini, Fasano, and Cerruti dive into the evolving preferences of left-wing voters, while del Palacio touches upon the radical left’s challenges. Mulè and Toso offer insights into the left’s efforts in poverty alleviation. In summary, this special issue underlines the pressing need for the Italian left to refresh its ideologies and strategies to stay relevant and present a competitive alternative to conservative agendas in Italy’s shifting political scene.

The psychological partisan effect of electoral systems: How ideology correlates with strategic voting

Districted proportional systems give an edge to right-wing parties that are more popular in rural areas where district magnitude is small and large parties are mechanically advantaged. In this paper, we explore the role played by voters in this bias by looking at how ideology correlates with strategic voting. We analyze survey data from 44 elections in Western Europe and find that left-wing voters are more likely to support a party that is not viable ( p < 0.01), but once in this position they seem less likely to desert this party for one that is viable ( p < 0.1). Further, we find that this pattern is likely driven by the intensity of partisan preferences as left-wing voters are on average more attached to their favorite party and thus more reluctant to desert it ( p < 0.01). Our study thus demonstrates that the psychological effect of districted proportional systems amplifies the mechanical one in advanced industrial democracies.

Choosing Women in Postwar Elections: Exposure to War Violence, Ideology, and Voters’ Gender Bias

AbstractThe level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing a unique data set containing information on nearly 7,000 candidates running in three elections with preferential voting in postwar Croatia. Our analysis demonstrates that voters’ gender bias is conditional on the local electorate’s ideology and exposure to war violence, with voters of right-wing parties and voters in areas more affected by war violence being more biased against female candidates. These effects of ideology and exposure to war violence also exhibit a strong interactive relationship, suggesting that bias against women is strongest among right-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence and reversed among left-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence. Our findings highlight the need to better understand the relationship between gender, ideology, and violence in postconflict societies.

Mozgósítási inkongruencia a magyar önkormányzati választásokon

In local elections, national voting patterns are often not repeated as results show significant incongruence in terms of turnout, party performance and seat shares. Political science explains these various differences with several distinct theoretical frameworks that approach this incongruence from the aspect of voter behavior. The aim of this study is not to provide an alternative for these conventional explanations but to complement them with the detailed analysis of mobilization in an attempt to clear up certain gaps in the models. My main proposition is that parties can mobilize their supporters for the local elections with differing effectiveness producing incongruence in voter turnout and seat shares. In the capital and in the larger cities there is a mobilization gap mainly affecting left-wing voters that causes lower turnout and weaker electoral performance by these parties. This gap can most probably be explained by a combination of social and institutional factors and has a profound effect on election outcomes.

Subverted expectations and social democratic austerity: How voters’ reactions to policies are conditional on the policy-implementing actor

It is well-established that voters care about policies when they go to the voting booth. However, we argue that voters' reaction to the policies are conditional on the actor implementing them. Voters have different expectations towards political parties regarding the policies they are expected to implement, and subverted expectations can have electoral consequences. This is particularly the case when they are related to issues central to the party's ideological agenda. We supply experimental evidence of this in the case of social-democratic austerity policies: Left-wing voters punish social democrats much more for implementing such policies than they punish a mainstream right party for the same actions. Our findings have important implications for several ongoing debates in the literature such as the demise of social democratic parties in the wake of the Great Recession, the interplay between parties and citizens, as well as the general effect of austerity on electoral outcomes.

Management of terror in stalemate. The consequences of political emancipation for the mechanisms of power in Spain

The main problem of this article is constructed in the form of the question “How has the political emancipation of citizens affected the mechanisms of power in Spain after 2011?” and focuses on the analysis of the changes taking place in the local political order as a consequence of individuals’ aspirations to secure their own political subjectivity. The transfer of votes to the Podemos party is treated as a result of seeking a new framework for political action by the left-wing voters under the conditions defined by terror management theory as a existential terrorism of globalization.

Perceptions of Inequality and Political Participation: The Moderating Role of Ideology

While much research has been devoted to the effects of inequality on political participation, little attention has been paid to how different kinds of subjective perceptions of social inequality affect citizens’ political behaviour. This is important since these perceptions shape the message that reaches political decision-makers when addressing concerns over social inequalities. This article differentiates between sociotropic and egocentric perceptions of social inequality and explores to what extent individuals’ perceptions of such inequality affect engagement in institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation between elections. Engagement was evaluated with a survey among a segment of the Finnish population (n = 1673). Our results indicate that citizens with sociotropic concerns are more likely to get involved in both institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of political participation, whereas egocentric perceptions have less of an impact. Furthermore, the associations are moderated by left–right ideology: sociotropic concerns are more strongly expressed among left-wing voters, whereas right-wingers are more likely to be propelled to action by egocentric concerns.

Demand without supply? Mass partisanship, ideological attachments, and the puzzle of Guatemala's electoral market failure

The demand for an ideologically based party system is not always met with a supply. As a country where a large majority of adults identify on the ideological scale but whose weak political parties primarily function as short-lived personalist platforms, Guatemala represents an extreme case of a demand supply mismatch. Using six AmericasBarometer surveys from 2008 to 2018, we analyze the supply-side (partisanship) and demand-side (ideological identification) effect on voter turnout to identify whether the manifestation of this market failure applies evenly to voters across the ideological scale. We report a nuanced outcome: partisanship and identification on the right of the ideological scale increase turnout, but identification on the center or the left display no significant effect. The absence of parties that effectively represents left-wing or centrist voters—or that at least induce them to turn out to vote—points to a supply-side problem in Guatemala's political representation market.

Elite Cues and Economic Policy Attitudes: The Mediating Role of Economic Hardship

Do voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller’s influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller’s model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes.

Spanish Adaptation of the Left-Wing Authoritarianism Index

Notwithstanding long-simmering controversies around the construct, several studies have gathered consistent evidence of authoritarian attitudes among left-wing voters and activists. Recently, Costello et al. (Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021) validated, in the English-speaking context, a three-factor scale to measure left-wing authoritarianism, as well as two shortened versions of the same scale (Costello & Patrick, Development and initial validation of two brief measures of left-wing authoritarianism: A machine learning approach, 2021; composed of 39, 25 and 13 items, respectively). In this article, we used three samples (total N = 2586) to validate the structural and construct validity of a Spanish adaptation of these three versions. The resulting scales exhibited an analogous three-factor structure, adequate internal consistency, and convergent and discriminant validity regarding sex, religion, moral exporting, conspiracy theories, social and economic conservatism, and right-wing authoritarianism.

Il disallineamento tra orientamenti elettorali e posizioni sui temi: una questione giovanile o di famiglia politica?

The transformation of politics in contemporary democracies has led to the emergence of a new ideological conflict, alongside the traditional left-right scheme, described as liberal–authoritarian or cosmopolitan–nationalist cleavage (Kriesi et al. 2008; Hooghe and Marks 2002). This change brought to a redefinition of the linkages between issue and voting preferences, as many voters decide to support a party regardless of their positions on issues while voting for the same party. Within such framework, the contribute of the new generations to the growth of the electoral dealignment and volatility has been largely analysed (Miller et al. 1996; Franklin 2004; Plutzer 2002). Issue incongruency is part of the process. Young people are often considered to be tolerant and inclusive because they grew up under prosperous and secure conditions and developed post-materialist values of freedom, multiculturalism, progressivism (Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Janmaat and Keating 2019). However, the perspective of left-cosmopolitans engaged in electoral politics contrasts with the image of economically-insecure left-behind group of young people who don’t share the same progressive values (Bartle et al. 2020; Sloam and Henn 2019) and support right-wing political parties. What is still unknown is the extent to which extreme ideological traits and attitudes (e.g. negative discourses on immigration) combine with positions of openness on individual freedom. Likewise, the same contradiction can be found among left-wing voters who assume liberal position on economy or those economically left and culturally conservative. The article aims at analysing the relationship between issue positions and vote (propensity to vote). We test the hypotheses of a coherent vs incoherent ideological space by looking at the structure of voters’ preferences on economic (State vs. free market) as well as cultural issues (individual rights, attitudes towards minorities, European integration) and the differences between young people and older component of the electorate. The analysis is focused on the Italian case. Data are taken from the 2020 Itanes survey.

Preferences, vote choice, and the politics of social investment: Addressing the puzzle of unequal benefits of childcare provision

AbstractResearch on the politics of social investment finds public opinion to be highly supportive of expansive reforms and expects this support to matter for the politics of expanding social investment. Expanding social investment, it is argued, should be particularly attractive to left-wing voters and parties because of the egalitarian potential of such policies. However, few studies have examined to what extent individual preferences concerning social investment really matter politically. In this paper, I address this research gap for the crucial policy field of childcare by examining how individual-level preferences for expanding childcare provision translate into voting behavior. Based on original survey data from eight European countries, I find that preferences to expand public childcare spending indeed translate into electoral support for the left. However, this link from preferences to votes turns out to be socially biased. Childcare preferences are much more decisive for voting the further up individuals are in the income distribution. This imperfect transmission from preferences to voting behavior implies that political parties could have incentives to target the benefits of childcare reforms to their more affluent voters. My findings help to explain why governments frequently fail to reduce social inequality of access to seemingly egalitarian childcare provision.

How Do Coronavirus Attitudes Fit into Britain’s Ideological Landscape?

Coronavirus upended British politics in 2020 but where does it fit into the ideological map of party competition? Recent British elections have seen a shift from economic left–right competition between the major parties to competition on the cultural (liberal–authoritarian) dimension, most notably in terms of the issues of immigration and membership of the European Union. Using British Election Study data from June 2020, we find that coronavirus attitudes fall primarily onto the traditional economic left–right dimension, with left-wing voters more willing to make economic sacrifices of various types to reduce infections. However, more draconian coronavirus measures (such as fining or imprisoning those who violate the coronavirus rules) are most supported by voters who score high on authoritarianism. We show that the structure of coronavirus attitudes puts the Conservative government in a difficult position where many steps it takes to reduce infections risk alienating its core economic right-wing vote.

Resistance and Repetition: The Holocaust in the Art, Propaganda, and Political Discourse of Vietnam War Protests

The Western European protest movement against the American War in Vietnam stands out as something unique in contemporary history. Here finally, after all the senseless horrors of the twentieth century, reason speaks, demanding an end to Western atrocities against the poor South. But in the rosy fog of humanistic idealism and youthful revolution lies the unanswered question, why did this and not any other conflicts, before or after, render such an intense, widespread reaction? Taking Sweden as a case in point, this article employs the concepts of resistance, trauma, memory, and repetition to explore why the Vietnam movement came into being just as the buried history of the Holocaust resurfaced in a series of well-publicized trials of Nazi war criminals. It suggests that the protests of the radical young Leftists against American “imperialism” and “genocide” were informed by repressed memories of the Holocaust. The Swedish anti-war protests had unique and far-reaching consequences. The ruling Social Democratic Party, in order not to lose these younger Left wing voters to Communism, also engaged actively against the Vietnam War. And, somewhat baffling for a political party often criticized for close ties to Nazi Germany during WWII, its messaging used the same rhetoric as the Far Left, echoing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

Who's in power matters: System justification and system derogation in Hungary between 2002 and 2018.

The present study employed European Social Survey (ESS) data collected between 2002 and 2018 to investigate system justification versus derogation in Hungary. In all nine ESS rounds, system derogation was stronger than system justification. System justification was consistently at its strongest among those who had voted for the ruling party, be it left-wing MSZP (until 2008) or right-wing Fidesz (2010 onward). This pattern can be explained by ego and group justification motives alone, with no need to posit an autonomous system justification motive. Voters of Jobbik, who were as right-wing as Fidesz voters, but whose party was not in power, did not believe the system to be any more just than did left-wing voters. Much of the research supporting system justification theory has been conducted in stable Western democracies. Our results highlight the need for research in more politically volatile contexts.

Climate Change Denial among Radical Right-Wing Supporters

Political right-wing orientation correlates with climate change denial in several Western countries. Politicians and voters of far-right (i.e., radical and extreme right-wing) parties seem to be particularly inclined to dismiss climate change but the reason for this is unclear. Thus, the present paper investigates if and why climate change denial is more common among voters of the radical right-wing party Sweden Democrats as compared to voters of a mainstream right-wing party (the Conservative Party, Moderaterna), and compares both these voter groups with center-left (Social Democrat) voters. In four regression analyses, distrust of public service media (Swedish Television, SVT), socioeconomic right-wing attitudes, and negative attitudes toward feminism and women were the strongest predictors of climate change denial. These variables outperformed conservative ideologies (Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation), anti-immigration attitudes, distrust of the Parliament and courts, and belief in conspiracies, in predicting denial. Party preferences explained only a small or zero part of variance in denial over and above these variables. The results suggest that even though radical and mainstream right-wing parties emphasize different sociopolitical issues and anti-establishment messages, similar psychological factors seem to explain why these voter groups differ from each other and from left-wing voters in climate change denial. However, the included independent variables were intercorrelated, which calls into question to what degree they can be separated when explaining psychological underpinnings of climate change denial.