Party Attachments Research Articles

Split Ticket Voting and Social Networks in New and Established Democracies: A Quasi-Experiment in the 1990 German Unification Elections

When deciding to cast a split ticket ballot, voters in established democracies can rely on their experience with democracy and long term party attachments to guide their voting behavior. However, voters in new democracies do not have these individual level sources of information and motivation, and may instead rely on information from their social networks. Using the 1990 Cross-National Election Project German Unification election study, I examine the information sources West and East Germans use when splitting their ballot. I find that political disagreement within a social network is much more influential in decisions to cast a split ticket ballot for East German voters, while individual-level traits, particularly party attachment, play a greater role for West German voters. These findings indicate that, in absence of competition between individual-level information sources, network characteristics may have a profound impact on political decision-making.

Why are there Independents in Ireland?

Although the clichéd status of the phrase ‘the party’s over’ makes it almost redundant, the esteem in which parties are held has never been lower. One facet of party decline is the renewed interest in independents. Previously confined to transition states and non-democracies, they have begun to make some political headway in more established states. This is a worrying development for both political parties and those who profess their normative value. This article examines the source of the re-emergent independent presence via a case study of Ireland, a party democracy where they have had the greatest impact. Using constituency-level data, the influences of political, cultural and institutional factors are examined. It is found that independents are a product of both a small political system and declining party attachment. They are a protest option for those not drawn to ideological anti-establishment parties, while there is mixed evidence concerning the influence of a centre–periphery socioeconomic divide.

Sense or sensibility? Political attitudes and voting behaviour of party members, voters, and supporters of the Italian centre-left

We consider the effect of primary elections on party membership and electoral behaviour. Direct democracy instruments trigger significant changes in the role and behaviour of grassroots members. The case of the Italian centre-left parties, and particularly the Democratic Party, is in this sense relevant, as for over a decade these parties have been reaching out to supporters in order to include them into decision-making processes, such as the selection of party leaders and candidates to legislative and executive offices. The distinction between members and supporters has blurred. The article focuses on voting behaviour and party attachment of three different groups of primary voters – namely, party members, supporters, and external voters. What is the difference between these three groups with regard to voting behaviour and motivations in primary elections? And what is the difference with regard to voting intentions in general elections? We examine these issues using original survey data collected in 2012 during the centre-left coalition’s primary elections. We highlight the consequences of the differences between members and supporters with regard to their voting behaviour and motivations.

Democratic Consolidation: Participation and Attitudes Toward Democracy in Taiwan and South Korea

In this paper, I consider the transitions of Taiwan and South Korea to democracy. Specifically, I study why citizens in these newly democratic systems engage in conventional forms of participation as an indicator of consolidation. Using much of the existing literature on participation, I test hypotheses that frame the decisions to participate through conventional forms as a function of internal feelings of efficacy, or political engagement, mobilization by parties and social capital. I use a series of hierarchical linear models to assess Waves 2 and 3 data from the 2005–2010 Asian Barometer and find considerable support for political engagement, party attachment, and social connections in spurring on participation. In addition, while respondents offer limited support for democratic institutions, they espouse liberal attitudes; this reflects the large presence of “critical citizens” in these places (Norris 1999; Chu and Huang 2010). Though fragile, there are indications of meaningful democratic progress in Taiwan and South Korea.

Multi-Level Voting: A Stabilising Force or a Push towards Increasing Voter Volatility?

Germany has witnessed a drastic decline in turnout and, at the same time, a clear increase in voter volatility, late deciding and party switching. These changes affected all layers of the federal system to different degrees and with varying speed. While standard explanations refer to processes of modernisation and value change to explain the decline of stable and loyal partisanship, this article focuses on the role of an – until now – neglected aspect: the significance of multi-level voting in both maintaining voter stability and fostering its decline. After all, party loyalty needs to be re-activated and mobilised across individuals' life-cycles. Electoral campaigns are the prime occasion for parties to revive the link with ‘their’ core clientele. When campaigning is frequent, as in federal systems, mobilising takes place almost constantly. This article argues that multi-level voting contributed considerably to the stability which characterised German party politics for decades after World War II. However, since parties increasingly use campaigns to recruit new voter segments at the expense of mobilising core voters, today, multi-level voting has negative effects on stable party attachments and thus contributes to the increase in fluidity and volatility we witness today.

Do Ads Add Up? The Impact of Parties' Advertisements on the Stability of Vote Choice at the Swiss National Elections 2011

AbstractOur contribution analyses the influence of campaign advertisements on vote choice in the 2011 elections to the Swiss National Council. Concretely, we ask whether and to what extent the relative exposure to party ads of a preferred party exerts a reinforcing effect on an individual's party choice. We make use of the two‐wave panel structure contained in the RCS survey data of the Selects 2011 and combine it with data on advertisements in 20 important national and regional newspapers. We find that increasing exposure to the campaign of one's preferred party may reinforce individuals with strong party attachment in their initial vote choice. Yet this effect only materializes with substantial campaign duration and exposure. Additional and exploratory analyses revealed that particularly the two recently emerged parties, the GLP and BDP, might have made a slight difference by potentially persuading defecting voters with the help of their campaign.

Brand Dilution and the Breakdown of Political Parties in Latin America

Why would a national political party that has been competitive for decades collapse overnight? In recent years, parties across Latin America went from being major contenders for executive office to electoral irrelevance over the course of a single electoral cycle. The author develops an explanation that highlights the impact of elite actions on voter behavior. During the 1980s and 1990s leaders across the region implemented policies that were inconsistent with their traditional party brand, provoked internal party conflicts, and formed strange-bedfellow alliances with traditional rivals. These actions diluted the brands of their parties, eroding voters' partisan attachments. Without the assured support of partisans, parties become more susceptible to retrospective voting. Voters who now had no party attachments deserted incumbent parties when they performed poorly. The author tests this interactive hypothesis using matched comparisons of six party-election cases from Argentina and Venezuela.

Party Labels and Vote Choice in Judicial Elections

The vast majority of states use elections to select at least some of their judges. The chief institutional variation in these contests is whether the candidates’ partisanship appears on the ballot. This article expands on the extant literature with new data to examine how providing a party label influences voters’ decisions. Using a survey experiment involving a low-visibility state appellate court, we find that affixing party labels to judicial candidates often helps our subjects select the candidate who is most aligned with their own party attachment and with their policy interests—an outcome that is especially notable for self-identified independents. We also show that the presence of party labels reduces the effect of another cue, gender. The results add context to the debate over the merits and drawbacks of partisan versus nonpartisan elections.

Black Tea, Green Tea, White Tea, and Coffee: Understanding the Variation in Attachment to the Tea Party Among Members of Congress

The Tea Party is the most significant political movement in 21st century American politics. First, it has had an extraordinary effect on the Republican Party. A boon to conservative Republicans, it has made life difficult for moderate Republicans, particularly those who are elected officials. Somewhat surprisingly, given the burgeoning literature on the mass-level Tea Party, the Tea Party in government has generated relatively less interest (or scholarship). And what research there is on the Tea Party in government suggests that the foundations of the movement in the mass public are not easily translatable into Tea Party legislators’ incentives or their actions (see, for example, Arceneaux and Nicholson 2011 and Gervais and Morris 2012). One reason for the dearth of research on the Tea Party in government is the difficulty associated with identifying which legislators are “true” Tea Party members. While Tea Party Caucus membership has been used to identify Tea Party members, it is a flawed measure, and now that it is dormant, it has lost even the limited usefulness it once had. In this paper, we address this limitation of the current literature. We use an array of different types of data to tap into a politician’s connection to the Tea Party. This data include campaign contributions from organizations explicitly tied to the Tea Party movement, endorsements from Tea Party organizations, and the prevalence of joint media references to individual politicians and the Tea Party. These data suggest that Tea Party attachment is a multi-dimensional variable. We label the various types of Tea Party supporters as Black Tea, Green Tea, White Tea, and Coffee, and we demonstrate that the ideological dispositions and institutional positions of members vary according to their type of Tea Party attachment. We conclude with a discussion of our future research and the significance of organized variation in Tea Party attachment for legislative policymaking.

Enhancing Voter Choice in Judicial Elections

The vast majority of states use elections to select at least some of their judges. The chief institutional variation in these contests is whether the candidates’ partisanship appears on the ballot. This paper expands on the extant literature with new data to examine how providing a party label influences voters’ decisions. Using a survey experiment involving a low visibility state appellate court, we find that affixing party labels to judicial candidates often helps our subjects select the candidate who is most aligned with their own party attachment and with their policy interests — an outcome that is especially notable for self-identified independents. We also show that the presence of party labels reduces the effect of another cue, gender. The results add context to the debate over the merits and drawbacks of partisan versus nonpartisan elections.

Party Polarization and Mass Partisanship: A Comparative Perspective

Scholars view polarization with trepidation. But polarization may clarify voters’ choices and generate stronger party attachments. The link between party polarization and mass partisanship remains unclear. I look to theories of partisanship to derive implications about the relationships among polarization, citizens’ perceptions of polarization, and mass partisanship. I test those implications using cross-national and longitudinal survey data. My results confirm that polarization correlates with individual partisanship across space and time. Citizens in polarized systems also perceive their parties to be more polarized. And perceiving party polarization makes people more likely to be partisan. That relationship appears to be causal: using a long-term panel survey from the United States, I find that citizens become more partisan as they perceive polarization increasing.

DEFEAT THAT WAS TREATED FOR VICTORY: REASONS BEHIND THE GOOD PERFORMANCE OF A. KUBILIUS’ GOVERNMENT PARTIES IN SEIMAS ELECTIONS

Scientific and non-scientific forecasts of 2012 Seimas elections were very unfavourable for the XV Lithuanian government head by Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius. Loss against all three opposition parties was predicted for the HU-LCD, dominant party of government. Both its junior partners, liberal parties LiCS and LRLM were expected not to exceed the legal threshold (5 percent of votes). However, despite the adverse circumstances governing coalition managed to perform very well in 2012 Seimas elections: according to the joint received vote share (25.71) it was the most successful government since the restoration of Lithuania’s independence. HU-LCD finished in second place according to parliamentary mandates, and LRLM even managed to improve its vote share if compared to the previous elections. This article aims to explain this defeat that for some politicians and observers appeared as victory: why the government of A. Kubilius performed so well (relatively, in the Lithuanian context) in Seimas elections?Two main theories are employed in the article. Party identification is theory centred about idea that voting behaviour is determined by stable psychological-emotional attachment to some party (party family) that is formed in the early socialization. In the Lithuanian context this theory is usually modified: majority of party identification traced to the excommunist-anticommunist cleavage (particularly prominent in early independence years, 1990–1992) and less rigid term “party attachment” is used. Existing research on subject reveals that HU-LCD has a stable core of voters, therefore it is expected for them to account for the most part of 2012 success. In the case of LRLM, since the party is very young (established in 2006), party attachment is supposed to work only if the rationalistic approach to party identification is also employed: that LRLM in the short life-span developed a reliable image and mobilized voters with liberal leaning attachment. According to these theoretical considerations, hypothesis is raised that electoral success of A. Kubilius’ government was mainly determined by party attachment factor.On other hand, party identification theory is not alone sufficient if loss of faithful voters and entrance of those without party attachment is considered. It is showed that despite overall unpopularity, A. Kubilius’ government enjoyed more positive evaluations than the XIV Lithuanian government of Gediminas Kirkilas. Moreover, economic situation in Lithuania improved the year before election. Therefore, economic voting theory is also employed: it asserts that voters make their decision on accounts of retrospective (prospective) evaluations of their own (egotropic voting) or country’s (sociotropic voting). It must be emphasized that this theory is completely compatible with the party identification theory, because it is able to explain shortterm losses and gains. Second hypothesis is raised that is treated as complementary to the first one: it asserts that the parties in A. Kubilius’ government attracted new voters according to the logic of retrospective economic voting.Individual level data from the 2012 post-electoral survey is employed for the quantitative analysis (crosstabs, correlations and binary logistic regression), presented in second and third section of article. Empirical data provides support for both hypotheses: though there is a certain effect of party attachment, alone it could not determine such a good performance of government parties. The article concludes that party identification was necessary, though not sufficient condition of good government performance in the 2012 Seimas elections: part of the faithful voters was lost, but these losses were compensated by new voters that positively (and retrospectively) evaluated the economy of Lithuania. Analysis reveals four main types of government voters: 1) Positive identifier (51.24 percent of government electorate); 2) Sceptic identifier (17.91); 3) Rational independent (16.42); 4) Others (14.43).

Parties, conditionality and leader effects in parliamentary elections

Attention in the study of leader effects in parliamentary elections has shifted from the question of whether party leaders do indeed have an electoral impact to that of the conditions under which their impact is greater or lesser in magnitude. Criticizing existing scholarship in this area for its assumption that the traditional notion of party identification captures the full range of electorally relevant party attachments in democratic electorates, this article demonstrates that parliamentary party leaders have their strongest impact not when, as is usually the case, they are conceptualized as electoral forces in their own right, but when evaluations of them as individuals are moderated by voters’ matching evaluations of the parties contesting the election. Comparing (aligned) Australia and (dealigned) Britain, it is shown that election-time party evaluations condition the magnitude of leader effects independently of the strength of party identification in the electorate.

Partisan Sorting and Niche Parties in Europe

Earlier research has concluded that European citizens do not update their Left–Right policy preferences or their party attachments in response to the content of parties’ election manifestos – i.e. partisan sorting is not observed in the mass public in response to shifts in the Left–Right tone of these manifestos. Here we extend this research to analyse whether we observe partisan sorting patterns that correspond with political experts’ perceptions of parties’ Left–Right policy shifts. Given that these experts plausibly consider all pertinent information when estimating parties’ Left–Right orientations – including party elites’ speeches, elite interviews, coalition behaviour, and legislative voting patterns – such a finding would imply that citizens do weigh the wider informational environment when updating their Left–Right orientations and their party support, even if they do not attach great weight to the parties’ policy manifestos. Our analyses provide support for this hypothesis with respect to niche parties, i.e. green, communist, and radical right parties, but not for mainstream parties.

District Complexity and the Personal Vote

Incumbents tend to win with higher margins in less ideologically constrained districts. I argue that incumbents are advantaged by this electoral landscape in part because they work harder to cultivate a personal vote. Utilizing data on earmarks, I find that despite winning with a larger margin of victory, these incumbents act much like their colleagues who narrowly escaped electoral defeat. By more accurately measuring perceptions of electoral vulnerability, we also see stronger evidence linking district marginality to distributive politics. Such incentives appear to stem not from the risks of position taking, but from the weaker party attachments among constituents.

Compulsory voting and the dynamics of partisan identification

AbstractCompulsory rules are known to have far‐reaching effects beyond boosting electoral participation rates. This article examines the relationship between compulsory voting and partisan attachments. A theory of attachment formation and strength is engaged that argues that compulsory voting boosts the likelihood that one will identify with a party and, in turn, the strength of party attachments among identifiers. The statistical model accounts for both the hierarchical structure of the data (individuals in elections) and the dual nature of the dependent variable (individuals report a strength of attachment only for the party with which they identify). Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, it is demonstrated that compulsory voting does indeed increase both the incidence and the strength of partisanship.

The Politics of Causes: Mass Shootings and the Cases of the Virginia Tech and Tucson Tragedies

ObjectiveWe employ theories of causal reasoning to understand attributions about the 2007 Virginia Tech and 2011 Tucson shootings. We argue that attributions stem from two motives: (1) a partisan motivation to perceive events consistent with party attachments, and (2) a drive to minimize the cognitive burdens associated with extensive reasoning processes. The latter motive is expected to produce a fundamental attribution bias: the least educated respondents attribute blame for the shootings to the individual assailant while the most educated attribute blame to environmental conditions.MethodsWe test hypotheses using 2007 and 2011 national surveys reported just after the shootings.ResultsOur findings suggest a major partisan divide on the causes of tragedy; Democrats believed social and political forces were responsible whereas Republicans blamed individual gunmen. Considerable differences between the least and most educated respondents were also discovered. Greater educational attainment was associated with environmental attributions. Finally, the analyses revealed that education had virtually no influence on Republican attributions, but enhanced Democrats’ penchant to blame the tragedy on environmental factors.ConclusionOur study highlights the utility of using motivational theories of causal attributions to understanding and modeling the cognitive processes involved in perceived causes about gun‐related tragedies.

Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina

Scholars disagree about the nature of party attachments, viewing partisanship as either a social identity or a rational maximization of expected utility. Empirically, much of this debate centers on the degree of partisan stability: findings of partisan fluctuations are taken as evidence against the social‐identity perspective. But drawing such conclusions assumes that the objects of identity—parties—are fixed. If we instead allow party brands to change over time, then partisan instability is consistent with a social‐identity conception of partisanship. To demonstrate this, I develop a branding model of partisanship in which voters learn about party brands by observing party behavior over time and base their psychological attachment to a party on these brands. The model suggests that convergence by rival parties, making their brands less distinguishable, should weaken party attachments. I test this implication using a survey experiment in Argentina and find evidence consistent with the model.

If Everyone Votes Their Party, Why Do Presidential Election Outcomes Vary So Much?

Despite mountains of election returns, opinion surveys, and controlled experiments, political scientists have not offered a particularly compelling explanation for the most important conundrum facing students of U.S. elections: how could we have had such different election results across the past decade when the electorate is so polarized along partisan lines? Relying mostly on data from the American National Election Studies, this article examines the nature of party attachments and presidential voting in the 2000s, with an eye towards estimating the relative importance of persuasion and mobilization for variation in electoral outcomes. I also consider the most obvious source for future party system transformation: the mobilization of Hispanic-American and Asian-American voting cohorts.

The Representative Roles of MPs: A Citizen Perspective

From the normative point of view, there is a general agreement that representatives should act in line with the interests of those being represented. The knowledge about citizens' preferences for representation is very limited, however. This study examines MP's representative roles from the perspective of the citizens. It utilises a task definition approach in the Finnish institutional setting, which substantially differs from the context of earlier investigations in terms of open‐list electoral systems with mandatory preferential voting. Based on the 2007 Finnish National Election Study (n = 1,422), voters' preferences concerning four different representational roles are analysed: as representatives pursuing the interests of their electoral district, party, individual voters or being independent actors. Next, voters' preferences are accounted for by the factors related to each type of representation: citizens' regional electoral context, party attachment and electoral supply, political engagement and political competence, respectively. The results show that citizens living in electoral districts located far away from the political centre or in constituencies where it is more difficult for small parties to win political representation are most prone to prefer regional representation. Similarly, voters who have closer ties with political parties prefer party‐centred representation while those who feel less politically efficient favour close ties with their MPs. Education in turn increases the support for a political representative to act independently from the electorate or the party.