Valence Issues Research Articles

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on support for the SNP and Scottish independence

ABSTRACT The retrospective model of voting holds that parties are elected based on their perceived competence in government and punished for incompetence. This theory is complicated in contexts of multilevel governance as it requires attributing responsibility to a particular party in a particular level of government. This paper tests the extent to which this model explains public opinion in a multilevel context (Scotland) on a high-stakes valence issue (the coronavirus pandemic). Using British Election Study Internet Panel data from 2019 to 2021, it assesses how the public responded to the perceived competence of the Scottish Government and British Government. The results find that for each Government those voters who rated their handling of the pandemic more highly increased their liking of the governing party and its leader. Further, those voters who thought a Government had performed well were more likely to switch towards supporting the party in power, but this depended on how much they previously liked that party. Similarly, increases in support for Scottish independence from the UK came from those voters who not only judged the Scottish Government to have handled the pandemic well, but also previously liked the SNP prior to the pandemic.

Hidden contestation: valence issues, methodological blindness and the politics of development in Nigeria

ABSTRACT Political competition in Africa is often characterized as suffering from a number of deficiencies at the level of political discourse and electoral campaigns, which together paint a picture of an essentially vacuous political life. This article contends that these absences are to some degree methodologically generated. If African political actors appear to have little substance to say about the most pressing social and economic issue of the day, then perhaps as scholars of politics we are looking at what they say in the wrong way? This article points to the limitations of an increasingly popular method of discourse analysis in African politics based on coding political statements within a framework that contrasts valence politics with a position-based appeals framework. It argues for an alternative more contextualized, inductive method of analysing political discourse as the struggle to control the meaning of key terms, using the example highly contested gubernatorial election in Nigeria’s southwest. Debates over “stomach infrastructure” and a “hierarchy of needs” reveal the possibility that political discourse and electoral campaigning that on more mechanistic methodologies look devoid of substantive political contestation in fact contain competing conceptions of development and what the state should do.

Forecasting elections with October surprises

October Surprises are the bane of election forecasting, especially for models that post their forecast early. In 2020, several surprises occurred well before October, beginning with the onset of the Covid Pandemic, followed by the economic depression triggered by the lockdown, and sweeping changes of voting procedures along with racial strife in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. These surprises, the evidence shows, derailed Trump's re-election prospects. In so doing, they also upended the forecast of the Primary Model, posted March 2, 2020, that gave Donald Trump a 91% chance of winning the 2020 presidential election. It was a once-in-a-century miss of the Primary Model. The lesson for forecasting with that model: Update the early forecast all the way until the last primary is over! It is a tribute to Harold Clarke that the main surprise, the Covid Pandemic, is the kind of issue whose electoral power he has tirelessly demonstrated in his studies of voting around the world: a “valence issue.”

Policy mood and thermostatic representation in developing democracies: taking the temperature in Uruguay

ABSTRACT The dynamics of aggregate public opinion – particularly James Stimson’s measure of policy mood – have long been used to explain electoral outcomes and government responsiveness in the United States. However, we still know little about policy mood outside the US and a few Western European countries. Understanding the relationship between policy and preferences outside the pool of advanced democracies is crucial as voters outside that context are often depicted as outcome oriented; that is, they are depicted as voting based on valence issues, where there is shared agreement on the preferred outcome, instead of on a set of coherent policy preferences. We argue that this depiction of voters is attributable to the absence of data in these countries and not to the absence of coherent policy preferences. We test our argument by analyzing nearly three decades of Uruguayan public opinion data including 78 different questions administered 295 times. Our analysis shows that policy preferences across related issues in Uruguay largely move in tandem, suggesting that a coherent policy mood indeed exists. Further, we provide evidence that this policy mood is distinct from symbolic political ideology and that it responds thermostatically to changes in government. This thermostatic responsiveness suggests that Uruguayans do not merely focus on whether the economy is good or bad but, rather, update their policy preferences in response to the direction of government policy. Together, these results offer a much more nuanced depiction of public opinion outside advanced industrial democracies than previous research suggests, with important implications for democratic accountability in Latin America and other developing economies.

Illiberal democracy and nutrition advocacy

AbstractMotivationAcross the world, illiberal democracy is on the rise. These majoritarian polities limit individual rights and undermine protections for minorities. Civil society organizations (CSOs) that support human rights and freedom of speech and association in these settings can be repressed.PurposeHow does illiberal democracy impact CSOs that lobby for economic and human development? We examine how illiberal democracy affects organizations advocating for nutrition. Ostensibly, improved nutrition is a valence issue that does not threaten a government's hold on power. But nutrition advocacy may mean criticizing a government's policies and programmes, and hence be seen by governments as hostile.Methods and approachWe focus on India, where illiberal democracy has become more pronounced over the last decade. Structured interviews were conducted in 2021 with three dozen advocacy organizations, donors, and government stakeholders who work on nutrition policy in India. We analyse how the financing of nutrition organizations, access to policy‐making, and advocacy have been affected under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).We divide CSOs into organizations that focus on the design of nutrition programmes, those that prioritize evidence‐based nutrition policies, and those that advocate for the food and nutrition rights of certain communities, including those who are often marginalized.FindingsNutrition advocacy organizations' access to finance has been hampered by amendments to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). Partisan ideology and low tolerance of policy accountability affects nutrition CSOs' access to policy debates and decision‐making. Fears about freedom of expression and its impacts on renewal of organizational registrations make the CSOs more timid in their advocacy.These changes disproportionately affect CSOs that focus on evidence and, above all, those that stand up for rights.Policy implicationsAssessments of enabling environments for nutrition policy need to consider better how partisan ideologies and political settlements exclude some groups in society. Moreover, given that illiberal democracy further weakens the value of evidence in policy‐making, donors need to consider how they present evidence and policy feedback when governments see criticism as hostile and politically motivated. Donors also need to consider what illiberal democracy implies for their efforts to support local CSOs: they should be aware that their support can sometimes undermine the legitimacy of CSOs in the eyes of national governments.

Ideology and Party Positions on Gender Issues in Spain: Evidence from a Novel Data Set

AbstractThis article introduces new quantitative fine-tuned indicators to objectively measure political parties’ preferences on gender issues. We assess the validity and reliability of these new empirical indicators by analyzing the relationship between ideology and gender positions in decentralized Spain. Using data collected by the Regional Manifestos Project, which for the first time has incorporated a fully fledged gender domain into its coding scheme for content analysis of regional manifestos, we analyze parties’ gender positions on four fundamental dimensions: welfare and the labor market, violence, representation, and values and identity. The results suggest that there is a persistent left-right divide on the last three dimensions: Spanish left-wing parties score significantly higher than right-wing and regionalist parties. However, ideology does not drive parties’ gender positions on welfare and labor market policies; support for gender equality policies on this dimension is so widespread that it can be considered a “valence issue”—all parties, irrespective of their ideology, endorse the same (positive) position.

Professionalization of Campaign Communication beyond Communication Forms. An Analysis of Poland’s Political Spots

Previous studies on the professionalization of campaign communication concentrated on forms of communication, ignoring the important question of how election campaigns vary in terms of the content of their election messages. The article intends to partially fill this breach by dealing with the case of Poland’s parliamentary election campaigns in the years 2005–2019. Therefore, it not only describes the main groups of determinants (systemic, competitive, technological, and social) influencing the speed and direction of the process of professionalization in Poland but also attempts to verify the extent to which a party’s electoral messages include certain content that can be treated as manifestations and effects of professionalization. Based on an analysis of audiovisual political advertising during five parliamentary campaigns, the study shows the dominance of valence issues (comparing them to position issues) in spots and the presence of centralized personalization (but not beyond simple party labeling). No linear increase or decrease of trend intensity has been observed regarding the above issues during the five elections. While the overall occurrence of these phenomena remains stable in the campaigns under study (meaning a significant, usually predominant share of party spots in a given year), their intensity varies.

Electoral earthquake: Local shocks and authoritarian voting

A growing literature has highlighted the role of economic grievances, global transformations, cultural cleavages and long-term trends of isolation and decline in engendering political discontent. However, this literature is silent on the potential role of unanticipated local shocks in fuelling support for authoritarian parties. We fill this gap by using comprehensive data at a fine spatial scale and a comparative natural experiment approach. Our study documents that the occurrence of two destructive earthquakes in Italy resulted in sharply diverging electoral outcomes: while the 2012 Emilia quake did not alter voting behaviour, the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake paved the way for an impressive and persistent authoritarian backlash in the most affected areas. Such heterogeneous patterns originate from a stark contrast in post-disaster reconstruction processes and shifts in institutional trust. These findings suggest that valence issues generated from local shocks can turn “places that don't recover” into authoritarian hotbeds.

Making the Public Work: Geography, Externalities, and Preferences for Mass Transit

AbstractIn much of the world, public transportation infrastructure is sorely needed. Political economy models suggest that provision lags because uneven access and use of public transit fragments political coalitions. Yet, traditional survey techniques tell us little about who supports valence issues, such as mass transit. I instead adopt a novel survey approach from economics designed to elicit preference intensity. I then sample households at different distances from a subway project in Bogotá, Colombia. Contra conventional expectations, I find little evidence that local geography shapes preferences. Those who use public transit the least and pay the most for its construction—the upper class—are its strongest supporters. An experiment and focus groups suggest that middle- and upper-class groups want others to take public transportation to reduce congestion and shorten their commutes. One implication is that a growing middle class might help to strengthen urban public goods provision.

Do technocrats boost the acceptance of policy proposals among the citizenry? Evidence from a survey experiment in Italy

Are policies proposed by technocrats more easily accepted by citizens than those proposed by traditional partisan actors? This is a crucial question, as politicians increasingly rely on technocrats for resolving “wicked problems” such as financial, environmental, and health crises. To answer this question, we conducted a survey experiment among 5000 Italian respondents. At the time of our experiment, Italy was governed by a “grand coalition” of various technocratic and partisan actors, enabling us to realistically vary the proponents of different policy proposals. Overall, citizens are more likely to accept policies proposed by technocrats as opposed to party leaders. In particular, we find that technocratic proponents boost policy acceptance even more for economic and valence issues. Furthermore, we find that this “technocratic effect” is generally stronger among citizens who are more likely to disagree with the policy content.

From green crap to net zero: Conservative climate policy 2015-2022.

This article outlines the Conservative Party's approach to climate change from 2015 to 2022; focusing on its governing policy record and the wider political considerations that shaped it. During this time, the Conservatives' mixed performance reflected competing political incentives for its leaders and internal party division on the issue. A detailed exploration of Conservative climate policies allows for two broader contributions. European centre-right parties often face common strategic challenges, such as competition from the radical right, but the UK Conservative Party case study shows that responding to these challenges does not necessarily demand the abandonment of climate commitments. We also find evidence that in this period climate change embodied characteristics of both a positional and a valence issues.

The nation of the people: An analysis of Podemos and Five Star Movement's discourse on the nation

AbstractThis article empirically explores how populist actors talk about the nation. This is a research area mostly tackled in studies on right‐wing populism, with other forms of populist politics usually left out of the analysis. To fill this academic gap, we focus on the Spanish party Podemos and the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S). The former is a paradigmatic example of radical left populism, whereas the latter is commonly considered as a catch‐all populist party with no clear ideological connotation. Through a discourse analysis on leaders' speeches and official public declarations, we focus on the role that national identity plays in the strategies of Podemos and M5S and on the type of nation they discursively construct. Whilst Podemos' populist strategy purposely aims at contending to the right ideologically loaded concepts and signifiers to construct an idea of nation fitting the party's leftist values, M5S's strategy mostly aims at appropriating valence issues, such as the “Made in Italy” brand and the concept of “national interest”. Thus, our analysis contributes to clarify the differences between the leftist political culture of Podemos and the “post‐ideological” one of M5S, as also reflected by survey data confirming strong differences in “nationalist” attitudes between their respective electorates.

Presidential Influence and Public Opinion During Crises: The Case of COVID-19 in Brazil

Abstract Can presidential messages influence public opinion? The scholarship shows that common features in developed democracies such as fragmented audiences and partisan reasoning tend to limit the persuasive effects of the bully pulpit. In this article, we argue that the effectiveness of the presidential rhetoric is context dependent. Presidents will be the most likely to persuade public opinion when they seek to break consensus by using messages that activate defection among their supporters. To examine this framework, we focus on the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, where the outbreak was initially a valence issue, but quickly it became a divisive matter among the public. We use a survey experiment conducted days before the President Bolsonaro’s national televised address to show that cueing subjects with one of his earlier denialist remarks about the outbreak polarized opinions. We then use Bayesian change-point models to demonstrate how his major televised speeches affected daily trends in online searches related to the pandemic during the first and the most crucial weeks of the outbreak. The findings shed light on the circumstances in which presidential influence can not only be most powerful, but also most harmful.

Monotone comparative statics in the Calvert–Wittman model

In this paper, we show that when policy-motivated parties can commit to a particular platform during a uni-dimensional electoral contest where valence issues do not arise there must be a positive association between the policies preferred by candidates and the policies adopted in expectation in the lowest and the highest equilibria of the electoral contest. We also show that this need not be so if the parties cannot commit to a particular policy. The implication is that evidence of a negative relationship between enacted and preferred policies is suggestive of parties that hold positions from which they would like to move from yet are unable to do so.

Climate change: Will the parties unite or divide?

Climate change: Will the parties unite or divide?

Consider your companions carefully: How voters perceive (coalition) governments’ poor valence images

Numerous studies of comparative political behavior examine how voters perceive parties’ ideological positions on various policy issues, either in a standard uni-dimensional space or on single issues. These studies assume these ideological positions to be representative of the entire governing coalition, classifying the government as unitary. While a common assumption when assessing coalition governments’ ideological positions, it is unclear whether this logic of shared accountability holds for voters’ perceptions of valence. To fill this gap, I use a conjoint experiment to assess the perceptual influence of valence issues on coalitional accountability. Overall, my results show that unlike standard left-right ideological positions, voters project the prime minister’s and (junior) cabinet members’ low valence bidirectionally onto each other. This research has implications for the prime minister’s selection process for (junior) cabinet members and junior parties’ own calculus of whether to participate in a coalition or not.

Im Schatten von Covid-19: Thematisierungsstrategien der Parteien in der Bundestagswahl 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences had a significant impact on the social, politi- cal, ecological, and economic life over the past nearly two years . How the political parties’ handled the Covid-19 crisis was therefore also said to have significantly influenced the 2021 federal elections in Germany-not least because of the strong focus on the pandemic during the election campaign . Based on fundamental assumptions of saliency theory, issue ownership theory, and issue framing, the issue competition strategies of political parties represented in the German Bundestag during the 19th electoral period regarding the Cov- id-19 pandemic are examined . For this purpose, it is analyzed how important it was pro- grammatically for the Bundestag elections in 2021 by means of content- and frequency- analytical methods, focusing in particular on party-specific differences and commonalities with regard to thematization strategies . The results show that in the 2021 federal election programs, the Covid-19 pandemic was an important valence-issue and that the established parties prioritized Covid-19 issues in areas of their own issue ownership . The Covid-19 crisis is apparently not only to be understood as a valence issue but also as a positional issue - an aspect that future work could take up and examine in more detail .

The Valence Side of the EU: EU Issue Voting in the Aftermath of the Eurozone Crisis

AbstractIn the aftermath of the Euro crisis, EU issues have increasingly affected electoral behaviour, explaining a sizable shift in votes from the Europhile to Eurosceptic parties. This paper advances the argument that EU issue voting is not entirely encompassed in a divisive (pro‐/anti‐) EU dimension, testing the hypothesis that a EU valence voting is currently conditioning electoral behaviour. In particular, we posit that voters support parties evaluating their credibility in achieving not only EU positional goals (‘leave/remain’ in the EU), but also EU valence ones (i.e., making the country count more in Europe). Furthermore, we assess which parties – pro‐/anti‐EU – are more likely to be supported on the basis of this valence issue. Based on survey data from France (2017) and Italy (2018), we found that the EU valence issue is an important voting predictor, with pro‐EU parties mainly benefitting from it.

Opposition fragmentation facilitates electoral accountability: Evidence from a survey experiment

Which is better for electoral accountability: a fragmented opposition that gives plenty of alternatives or an opposition with fewer stronger parties? While oppositions play a key role in democracies, the effect of opposition fragmentation on accountability remains unclear. On the one hand, fragmentation may enhance accountability by providing voters with ideologically close alternatives. On the other hand, increased fragmentation could make coordination over strong viable alternatives more difficult. In this study, I present an original survey experiment designed to test whether fragmentation of the opposition enhances accountability. Moreover, to assess the specific conditions under which fragmentation may enhance accountability, I distinguish between ideologues and pragmatic voters, and differentiate between ideological and valence issues. Results show that opposition fragmentation enhances accountability, particularly for ideologues. Lastly, I present a direct test of the mechanisms that demonstrates that fragmentation improves accountability because marginal gains in ideological proximity outweigh losses in viability.

When growth is not enough: inequality, economic gains, and executive approval

AbstractA robust economy is assumed to bolster leaders' standing. This ignores how benefits of growth are distributed. Extending the partisan models of economic voting, we theorize executives are more likely rewarded when gains from growth go to their constituents. Analyses of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries support our pro-constituency model of accountability. When economic inequality is high, growth concentrates among the rich, and approval of right-of-center presidents is higher. Leftist presidents benefit from growth when gains are more equally distributed. Further analyses show growth and inequality inform perceptions of personal finances differently based on wealth, providing a micro-mechanism behind the aggregate findings. Study results imply that the economy is not purely a valence issue, but also a position issue.