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Electoral effects of candidate valence
... Regarding candidate's characteristic, personal elements such as gender or age and social characteristics like ethnic belonging or economic well-being all belong to this category of qualities that cannot be either modified or hidden, but which some electors may appreciate and some may not (see Hinich 1982, 1984). 14 Interestingly, ascriptive issues share with positional policy issues the same kind of electors' assessments, because they are both (Nyhuis 2016;Cutler 2002;Sanbonmatsu 2002). 15 However, even though the sociodemographic status is independent of candidates' policy profiles, it should not be considered part of candidates' comprehensive valence advantages as it does not have a definitive effect on vote choices, that is candidate gender or race does not suggest an inherent quality differential, but rather a quality that is dependent on the spectator. ...
... 16. See Nyhuis (2016), for works that show how the perceptions of competence are positively related to electoral outcomes. ...
This book investigates the ideological conditions inducing political actors to highlight corruption issues through valence campaigns. Using case studies and comparative analyses of party programmes, legislatives speeches and social media data, the author demonstrates that the more parties and/or candidates present a similar policy programme, the more they rely on valence campaigns. In other words, as the ideologies of parties have become increasingly similar over recent decades, the content of political competition has substantially shifted from policy to non-policy factors, such as corruption issues. These dynamics, and the ideological considerations underpinning them, also provide a novel perspective on recent phenomena in contemporary democracies, such as the growth of negative campaigning, as well as populist strategies based on anti-elite rhetoric. The book will appeal to students and scholars interested in political corruption, valence politics, and electoral campaigning.
... Regarding candidate's characteristic, personal elements such as gender or age and social characteristics like ethnic belonging or economic well-being all belong to this category of qualities that cannot be either modified or hidden, but which some electors may appreciate and some may not (see Hinich 1982, 1984). 14 Interestingly, ascriptive issues share with positional policy issues the same kind of electors' assessments, because they are both (Nyhuis 2016;Cutler 2002;Sanbonmatsu 2002). 15 However, even though the sociodemographic status is independent of candidates' policy profiles, it should not be considered part of candidates' comprehensive valence advantages as it does not have a definitive effect on vote choices, that is candidate gender or race does not suggest an inherent quality differential, but rather a quality that is dependent on the spectator. ...
... 16. See Nyhuis (2016), for works that show how the perceptions of competence are positively related to electoral outcomes. ...
In this chapter the relationship between ideological proximity and the incentives of parties to highlight non-policy valence issues in their campaign is explored in a two-dimensional world. Also distinguished is the tone or direction (positive or negative) of such valence campaigning and the theoretical consequences thereof. The hypotheses are then tested by analysing the electoral strategies of parties during the 2014 European elections. To this end, all the messages published during the last week before the election day on the official Twitter account of all main parties from five European countries have been manually codified according to their policy and/or valence content.
... The above argument hinges on the assumption that voters consider issue positions when they cast their vote ( egotropic congruence) or when they evaluate the whole party system ( sociotropic congruence). In that regard, it is important to acknowledge that non-issue-related factors, such as candidate traits, religion, and so on, also affect electoral choice (Nyhuis, 2016;Raymond, 2018). Yet, these other determinants of electoral choice notwithstanding, the empirical evidence for spatial voting, including within the 2019 Belgian context, is quite robust (see, e.g., Flavin & Law, 2022;Jessee, 2009;Lachat, 2012;Shor & Rogowski, 2018;Walgrave et al., 2020). ...
Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in the context of citizens’ relations to politics in Belgium—a nation that has experienced political instability and protests as well as social mobilization and democratic vitality in recent years.
This timely and compelling volume offers new, empirical evidence on the state of trust, democracy and representation in Belgium; it further introduces an innovative methodological and conceptual framework to study this ‘crisis’, specifically by developing the concept of political resentment. The essays in this collection span diverse topics, from citizens’ conceptions of democracy itself and the expression of political resentment among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, to the influence of different emotional dimensions of resentment on protest behaviours. By adopting a distinctive affective lens and by building upon the specific case of Belgium, this volume contributes to the broader conversation on political resentment and the critical role of emotions in contemporary politics.
Bitter-Sweet Democracy will be invaluable for scholars researching the relationship between emotions and politics, political representation and democracy, and citizen-led conceptualizations of politics. It will also appeal to decision-makers and citizens seeking to understand the challenges facing democracy, as well as a wider audience of academics and students in the fields of political science, political psychology and sociology.
... Regardless of this context dependency, however, we argue there are three pathways that could link combat service to electoral success: valence, experiential closeness, and ideology. First, it would be reasonable to assume that candidates' military service is viewed as an indicator of their valence (Nyhuis 2016) in the eyes of the voters supporting the same side in the ended conflict. Service in combat could signify for these voters a number of positive traits such as courage, patriotism, initiative, leadership, and sacrifice. ...
Electoral competition in postwar societies is often dominated by war veterans. The question whether voters actually reward candidates' records of war service, however, remains open. We answer it using a unique dataset with detailed information on the records of combat service of nearly four thousand candidates in two cycles of parliamentary elections held under proportional representation rules with preferential voting in Croatia. Our analysis shows war veterans' electoral performance to be conditional on the voters' communities' exposure to war violence: combat veterans receive a sizeable electoral bonus in areas whose populations were more exposed to war violence, but are penalized in areas whose populations avoided destruction. This divergence is particularly pronounced for candidates of nationalist rightwing parties, demonstrating the importance of the interaction between lived war experiences and political ideology in postwar societies.
... But in plenty of parliamentary elections, voters cast a vote for a party, not for the leading candidate. Nonetheless, the evaluation of the leading candidates should matter for voters that care about the personal qualities of the elected officials (Arnesen et al., 2019;Bean and Mughan, 1989;Bellucci et al., 2015;Brettschneider, 2002;Garzia, 2012;Laustsen and Bor, 2017;Lobo, 2008;Nyhuis, 2016;Norpoth, 1977). Combining these two points, televised debates change the perception of the front-running candidate and as a result, influence the preference for the party. ...
During campaigns for legislative elections, a large portion of the general public follows televised debates between the front-running candidates. How can the candidates use the public interest in the debates to increase the support for their party? In this article, we argue that especially challenger candidates can improve the public perception of their valence qualities, such as personal integrity, leadership, and competence, and can - as a result - raise the support of their party. We expect that the perceived policy stances of the candidates matter less. Building on televised debate experiments during the German Federal Elections of 2009 and 2013, we analyse the effect of the debates on party vote and in how far this relationship is mediated by changes in valence and policy evaluations of the candidates. Results show that changes of candidate valence, but not changes in policy perceptions, of the social-democratic front-running candidates mediate the vote intention for the party. Respondents who perceived the candidates more competent, empathetic and have integrity as a result of the debate are more likely to vote for the candidate's party. Our analysis further reveals, however, that this valence effect is not long-lasting and does not carry-over to vote intention briefly before the election.
... This approach to studying emotion has been adapted by scholars studying reactions on Twitter (e.g., Himelboim et al., 2016;Shin & Thorson, 2017). Valence has been found to push policy agendas (e.g., Butler & Powell, 2014), strengthen partisan divisions (e.g., Serra, 2010;Stone & Simas, 2010), and shape election outcomes (Nyhuis, 2016). In this study, we assessed the valences-emotional reactions-specifically directed toward journalists and Trump. ...
When U.S. President Donald Trump called the press the “enemy of the American people” and “FAKE NEWS” in a February 2017 tweet, his statement inspired a robust debate about the credibility, institutional norms, and national significance of the press, which were debated on social media by both journalists and non-journalists using the popular hashtag #NotTheEnemy. Because previous research suggests that elite discourse of “fake news” decreases public trust in the press, this tweet presented a unique danger to the journalistic paradigm and public trust in American journalism. Through a mixed-method approach combining quantitative content analysis and qualitative textual analysis, this research explores the major themes and dominant sentiments of this public discourse about the press and analyzes #NotTheEnemy’s contributions to reinforcing the journalistic paradigm in the wake of the president’s attack and its impact on American public opinion of and trust in the media.
... Empirically, this can result in campaign posters that simply show a face and a name rather than a party label or a policy statement. This can also result in campaign content that highlights personal traits which demonstrate candidate valence, that is, characteristics that are unequivocally perceived as desirable independent of party-political convictions (Buttice & Stone, 2012;Clarke et al., 2011;Green, 2007;Nyhuis, 2016). This, too, should come with a price tag for parties. ...
Personalized campaign styles are of increasing importance in contemporary election campaigns at all levels of politics. Surprisingly, we know little about their implications for the behavior of successful candidates once they take public office. This paper aims to fill this gap in empirical and theoretical ways. It shows that campaign personalization results in legislative personalization. Legislators that ran personalized campaigns are found to be more likely to deviate in roll call votes and to take independent positions on the floor. These findings result from a novel dataset that matches survey evidence on candidates’ campaign styles in the 2009 German Federal Elections with the legislative behavior of successful candidates in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–2013). Combining data from the campaign and legislative arenas allows us to explore the wider consequences of campaign personalization.
... We argue that recent advances in spatial modeling provide us with the necessary analytical tools. According to an increasingly prominent view, citizens form party preferences by relying on parties' latent ideological positions on the one hand, and competitors' valence characteristics on the other (Mondak 1995;Nyhuis 2016;Sanders et al. 2011;Stone and Simas 2010). ...
A number of studies recently have investigated party position-taking in multilevel polities. Given the attempts of federally organized parties to tailor their messages to their audiences, we investigate the voter side of the equation: Are voters sufficiently politically sophisticated to pick up on highly differentiated policy signals? Following common conceptions of political preferences, we argue that citizens have a heuristic view of party competition that is shaped by ideological and valence factors, where the latter are much less challenging to process than the former. Accordingly, citizens are able to differentiate only between the national and the regional party on the valence dimension. We argue that a valence delta between different party branches is most likely to be perceived in contexts of high media exposure, particularly when parties are in government. Results from an analysis of survey data covering 21 German state-level elections support those expectations.
... Fiorina 1977) and valence politics Buttice and Stone 2012;Sanders et al. 2011). Authors writing in these traditions not only perceive non-partisan voter markets as incentives to stress non-partisan vote getting strategies but also portray such strategies as means to cultivate broad based support coalitions (Nyhuis 2016). One specific approach that falls into this category concerns efforts to mobilize federal support for local public works projects and to thus cater to the infrastructural demands of local constituents (Fiorina 1977;Fenno 1978: 91 -99). ...
Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.
... As observed both by psychologists and political scientists, when making their choice, voters base their judgment, in part, on candidates' character traits such as perceived competence, warmth and integrity (Clark 2009;Chen et al. 2014;Nyhuis 2016;Laustsen and Bor 2017). 12 As voters typically cannot comprehensively assess these characteristics, they often rely on heuristics and on indirect criteria such as a candidate' face (Todorov et al. 2005;Poutvaara et al. 2009) or name (Daniele and Geys 2014). ...
Politicians often rely on family members both during electoral campaigns and once elected. In France, during the 2008 and 2014 municipal elections, individuals with the same family name—a proxy for family network—are observed in approximately 40% of lists of candidates. I suggest that observing several individuals from the same family in a list may constitute a negative signal to voters about some characteristics of the (main) candidates, such as integrity, competence and responsiveness. During municipal elections, I observe that lists with homonyms obtain fewer votes than lists without homonyms (− 1.6 in the favorite specification). The effect is stronger when the list’s leader (and possible future mayor) relies on her family network: such lists obtain 3.5% fewer votes. Both results hold for various empirical specifications, including models that control for lists’ leader time-invariant characteristics with fixed effects.
... Cumulating these datasets for each election year provides enough respondents per district to estimate a mixed conditional logit model of candidate-vote choice with intercepts that vary on the district × party level. 9 Following Nyhuis (2016Nyhuis ( , 2018, we interpret the random intercept as a proxy for the valence of a district candidate. Parameter estimates and the distribution of district candidate valences are reported in the appendix (Table 3 and Figure 6). ...
How does competition for first (candidate) and second ballot (party-list) votes affect the strategic positioning of parties in mixed-member proportional systems? We study this question in a simulation study of multiparty competition in the two tiers. In the first step, we use data from elections for the German Bundestag to estimate individual vote function for each tier based on ideology, policy, and valence incentives. We then use these parameter estimates to calibrate a model in which parties compete for either first- or second-tier votes. Results suggest that parties may face a dilemma when adopting a positional strategy. When national parties and their candidates hold significantly different valences, large valence advantages generate centripetal incentives whereas smaller valences exert a centrifugal pull. Overall, centrifugal incentives dominate the German mixed-member system.
... In much the same way, a number of factors are likely to guide electoral decisions that are independent of ideological considerations (Clark 2009;Nyhuis 2016). Yet, non-ideologically driven surpluses would similarly not create clusters in the matrix. ...
This paper investigates the potential for estimating policy positions from electoral results in elections with multiple votes. When voters can spread their votes across multiple party lists in open list elections, they are more likely to select candidates from parties with similar policy positions. The electoral results can therefore be exploited to infer parties’ preferences based on the structure of vote combinations. The proposed data provide a valuable tool for analysing party behaviour in circumstances where ordinary methods for estimating policy positions fail, most importantly in electoral contexts with local competitors. Applying an ideal point model for count data, party preferences are estimated for a German municipality.
... By relying on the valence concept that has taken a prominent place in the recent literature on candidate and party preferences (Adams et al., 2011;Clarke et al., 2009;Johns et al., 2009;Sanders et al., 2011;Stone and Simas, 2010), it is shown that coalition preferences fall along two aggregate dimensions-an ideological and a nonideological dimension. This work is thus related to several recent contributions that have proposed moving beyond proxy measures of valence in favor of a more comprehensive view (Nyhuis, 2016;Shikano and Käppner, 2016). ...
Recent research on political attitudes has emphasized that coalition preferences determine electoral choices, prompting scholars to investigate the sources of coalition preferences. While it is not surprising that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations, several studies have drawn attention to additional nonideological factors. Relying on this insight, the present study aims to systematically investigate the nonideological or valence component of coalition preferences. In order to decompose attitudes into their principal ideological and nonideological components, we apply a Bayesian unfolding model to coalition sympathy ratings. We find that coalitions differ strongly with regard to their valence component. This surplus cannot be reconstructed as a linear combination of the coalitions’ constituent party valences and is predominantly structured by campaign valence.
The competence, integrity, and experience of political candidates, i.e., their character valence, play an important role in voter decision-making. As character valence reflects the ability of a candidate to govern effectively and honestly – traits all voters generally value regardless of partisanship – candidates with higher valence should have an advantage in elections, yet 2016 saw candidates struggle to capitalize on their valence. Further, rhetoric in 2016 focused on the politics of resentment, the idea some groups were getting more than they deserve. We suspect the increased saliency of resentment in political campaigns affects valence evaluations of candidates, particularly when the candidates are a member of groups outside of power in our political system, including racial and ethnic minorities and women. Leveraging data from the American National Election Study, we find individuals with higher levels of resentment will more negatively assess the valence of candidates associated with the non-dominant groups, even among co-partisans, overriding their partisan tendency to view their candidate’s traits more favorably. These results suggest if resentment renders us unable to assess quality with any objectivity, candidates with less experience, acumen, and integrity may ride a wave of resentment sweeping more competent challengers away.
Can voters learn meaningful information about candidates from their electoral campaigns? As with job market hiring, voters, like employers, cannot know the productivity of candidates, especially challengers, when they elect them. The real productivity of representatives only reveals itself after the election. We explore if the information revealed during the “hiring process” is a good signal of the legislative effort of elected representatives. In the incomplete information environment of election campaigns, candidates should turn to credible signals to indicate their “type” to voters. Campaigns—and campaigning—are means by which candidates can, in principle, signal their motivations to voters. Is a candidate’s behavior on the campaign trail informative about his or her behavior and effort as a legislator? Does it, for example, reveal whether a candidate will be more hard working and legislatively active? Using evidence from the European Parliament, we show that campaign activity prior to the election is not related to policy‐seeking behavior in the legislature post‐election. The finding also holds in two national‐level settings and across a variety of measures of legislative effort. Those who campaign harder do seem more likely to win the election, but campaign effort seems to provide a poor guide to what the winner does once elected.
Ziel des Beitrages ist eine Analyse der politischen Landschaft zur Bundestagswahl 2017. Dazu werden sowohl Daten aus gängigen Expertenbefragungen als auch aus Wahlhilfen („Voting Advice Applications“; VAAs) herangezogen. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die politische Landschaft 2017 in zwei Lager, das „bürgerliche“ und das „linke“ Lager, gespalten war, was im Wesentlichen auch der Ausgangslage der Bundestagswahl 2013 entspricht. Weiterhin können wir zeigen, dass die Nutzer der VAA „Bundeswahlkompass“ sich tendenziell näher an der politischen Mitte verorten als die von ihnen präferierten Parteien. Abschließend identifizieren wir anhand einer Analyse der Kandidatendaten zur Bundestagswahl mithilfe der Daten der VAA „Kandidaten-Check“ Themen, die auf einen hohen innerparteilichen Konsens bzw. Dissens hinweisen.
Full Text Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-658-25050-8_12
Elections are one of the most popular issues in the social agenda. Local elections in particular include elements that directly affect the lives of people rather than the country's agenda. The perceptions and concerns of the young people about the governance of the near-life environment where they can encounter to the polital life through local elections is very important. In particular, the level of political participation of young people worldwide is around 30 out of 100. This makes it necessary to study on the reluctance of young people on political participation. In this study, voting behaviors of young people in local elections were evaluated on the basis of previously collected data. Our analysis is expected to further the research about the topic and create the possibility of comparison with the future studies.
Özet
Seçimler, toplumsal gündemi en çok meşgul eden konulardan birisidir. Özellikle yerel seçimler ülke gündeminden ziyade halkın yaşamını direkt etkileyen unsurları içermektedir. Gençlerin, yerel se-çimlerle siyasal hayata başladıkları yakın yaşam çevresinin yönetimine yönelik algıları ve ilgileri çok önemlidir. Özellikle dünya genelinde gençlerin siyasal katılımı düzeyi % 30 düzeyindedir. Bu durum, gençlerin siyasi katılım konusundaki isteksizlikleri üzerine çalışmalar yapılmasını gerektirmektedir. Bu çalışmada, yerel seçimlerde gençlerin oy verme davranışları hazır veriler üzerinden değerlendi-rilmiştir. Bu analizin, bu alanda yapılacak gelecek çalışmaları teşvik etmesi ve sonraki çalışmalarla karşılaştırma fırsatı oluşturması beklenir.
Elections are one of the most popular issues in the social agenda. Local elections in particular include elements that directly affect the lives of people rather than the country's agenda. The perceptions and concerns of the young people about the governance of the near-life environment where they can encounter to the polital life through local elections is very important. In particular, the level of political participation of young people worldwide is around 30 out of 100. This makes it necessary to study on the reluctance of young people on political participation. In this study, voting behaviors of young people in local elections were evaluated on the basis of previously collected data. Our analysis is expected to further the research about the topic and create the possibility of comparison with the future studies.
ÖZET
Seçimler, toplumsal gündemi en çok meşgul eden konulardan birisidir. Özellikle yerel seçimler ülke gündeminden ziyade halkın yaşamını direkt etkileyen unsurları içermektedir. Gençlerin, yerel se-çimlerle siyasal hayata başladıkları yakın yaşam çevresinin yönetimine yönelik algıları ve ilgileri çok önemlidir. Özellikle dünya genelinde gençlerin siyasal katılımı düzeyi % 30 düzeyindedir. Bu durum, gençlerin siyasi katılım konusundaki isteksizlikleri üzerine çalışmalar yapılmasını gerektirmektedir. Bu çalışmada, yerel seçimlerde gençlerin oy verme davranışları hazır veriler üzerinden değerlendi-rilmiştir. Bu analizin, bu alanda yapılacak gelecek çalışmaları teşvik etmesi ve sonraki çalışmalarla karşılaştırma fırsatı oluşturması beklenir.
This chapter is devoted to linking the literature on political corruption with that on valence issues. It discusses how the former literature has generally focused on understanding the consequences of political corruption, as well as the reasons for its diffusion in different countries, while discarding (with few exceptions) the reasons that could explain why political actors may have an incentive to campaign (in a stronger or weaker way) on political corruption issues, thereby precluding the possibility of investigating the consequences of that choice. It is argued that looking at political corruption using the framework provided by the valence issues literature helps to fill this gap.
This chapter extends the previous theoretical framework to consider explicitly also the multi-partisan case, while including in the analysis all the parties competing in a given election (both incumbent and opposition parties), as long as their incentive to highlight corruption issues is involved. The empirical part is focused on a large number of countries and elections in a comparative perspective (basically all Western democracies since post-WW2), while also investigating whether the impact of ideological considerations on campaigning on political corruption is mediated by some intervening variables (at the party level and/or electoral ones). The ‘valence outreach’ of the theory is then controlled for, by seeing whether it can be extended to cover non-policy valence issues other than corruption.
We point to a popular yet underresearched platform of political information, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Considering the supply side of the marketplace, we argue that personal biographies on the platform are an attractive medium for politicians to enhance their appearance. We trace changes to biographies coming from the parliament using data that cover the entire edit histories for biographies on all German members of parliament for the three last legislative periods. Our findings show editing of personal biographies to be a persistent phenomenon. Moreover, type, timing, and driving factors of editing behavior highlight the importance politicians’ attribute to Wikipedia for pursuing reelection. Our results speak to the domains of political professionalization, voting behavior, and the general measurement of communicative patterns.
This article transfers the concept of competitive advantage from management theory to party competition. Competitive advantage as a party's ability to sustainably outrival any competitor in a given voter segment involves not only a superior appeal in that segment but also a resource or efficiency dimension. The effort involved in achieving distinctiveness and increasing one's attractiveness on an issue means that a party's competitive advantage is hard to challenge by its competitors. Investing in certain issues and attacking parties on “their” issues is therefore only promising under certain conditions. Whether a competitive advantage can be gained or sustained and whether a party can be challenged depends on the larger competitive situation, which is characterized by five kinds of influences: potential new competitors, existence of substitutes, voter influence, ideational suppliers, and intensity of rivalry. Together, these forces mark competitive pressures that are key to understanding parties’ issue portfolio and policy changes.
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Seit den frühen 90er Jahren haben mehr als 30 Länder Wahlsysteme eingeführt, die die Mehrheitswahl in Einerwahlkreisen mit Elementen der Verhältniswahl verbinden. Es vermag daher nicht zu überraschen, dass die wissenschaftliche Zurückhaltung, mit der solchen kombinierten Wahlsystemen anfangs vor dem Hintergrund der idealtypischen Unterscheidung zwischen Verhältnis- und Mehrheitswahlrecht begegnet wurde, inzwischen einem erheblichen Forschungsinteresse gewichen ist (Massicotte und Blais 1999; Shugart und Wattenberg 2001; Ferrara et al. 2005). Nicht nur die Entstehung solcher Wahlsysteme (Bawn 1993; Shugart 2001), sondern auch deren Bedeutung für strategisches Wählen und den Eintritt neuer Parteien in den politischen Wettbewerb wurden dabei ausgiebig untersucht (Bawn 1999; Gschwend et al. 2003; Moser und Scheiner 2005). Die Literatur hat inzwischen auch den Einfluss kombinierter Wahlsysteme auf das Verhalten des Gesetzgebers (Lancaster und Patterson 1990; Stratmann und Baur 2002; Bawn und Thies 2003) und die Entwicklung von Parteiensystemen (Shugart und Wattenberg 2001; Ferrara et al. 2005) analysiert.
Previous scholarship has provided ample evidence that non-spatial considerations can trump voters’ policy preferences in candidate selections. The literature has been less successful, however, in providing a sense of the factors that raise candidates’ non-policy appeal. Faced with the challenging task of separating policy and non-policy aspects of individual vote choices, empirical research has frequently relied on shorthand measures like candidate incumbency. This paper separates the valence component from policy-based candidate selections by explicitly supplying voters with information on the policy agreement between themselves and their district candidates. Relying on the distinction between campaign valence and character valence by Stone and Simas, it is shown that candidate valence is driven by candidate visibility in a party-dominated political system.
Theories of low-information voting are used to examine the effect of candidate demographic characteristics on voting behavior, specifically candidate gender. For voters in low-information elections, candidate gender operates as a social information cue signaling that women candidates are more liberal than men candidates of the same party. As a result, the gender of a candidate affects ideological voting. Logistic regression analysis is performed on data from the 1986 through 1994 American National Election Studies. Women Democratic candidates fare better than men Democratic candidates among more liberal voters and worse among conservative voters, especially those with minimal knowledge of the candidates. The effect is less clear with Republican women candidates who provide conflicting informational cues (woman and Republican).
The average voter falls far short of the prescriptions of classic democratic theory in terms of interest, knowledge, and participation in politics. We suggest a more realistic standard: Citizens fulfill their democratic duties if, most of the time, they vote ''correctly.'' Relying on an operationalization of correct voting based on fully informed interests, we present experimental data showing that, most of the time, people do indeed manage to vote correctly. We also show that voters' determinations of their correct vote choices can be predicted reasonably well with widely available survey data. We illustrate how this measure can be used to determine the proportion of the electorate voting correctly, which we calculate at about 75% for the five American presidential elections between 1972 and 1988. With a standard for correct vote decisions, political science can turn to exploring the factors that make it more likely that people will vote correctly.
Online voting advice applications (VAAs) have become very popular and may significantly influence voting behaviour. It is therefore important to ask which model of party choice VAAs follow. We establish that VAAs see party choice largely as proximity-based issue congruence, with some elements of the directional and salience models. We then assess how well VAAs follow the proximity model by comparing policy positions extracted from 13 VAAs in seven European countries with established policy measures from expert surveys and party manifestos. Party positions extracted from VAAs show strong convergent validity with left-right and economic positions, but compare less favourably with immigration and environment measures. The voting advice given to users is also inherently limited: VAAs mostly disregard accountability, salience, competence and non-policy factors; they treat policy positions and not outcomes as paramount; and they can be subject to strategic manipulation by political parties. As recommended by their designers, voters should treat these applications as tools and guides rather than as stringent recommendations.
We connect three characteristics of political candidates: their preferences, their platforms, and their valence. To do so, we define and study three types of elite polarization: preference polarization, valence polarization, and platform polarization. In our model, policy is represented as a position in a unidimensional space; candidates are policy motivated; valence is represented as a dimension orthogonal to policy; and candidates can increase their valence by paying a cost We find that candidates will in general not converge to one another in the policy dimension or in the valence dimension. A candidate's preferences are positively, but not perfectly, correlated with her platform. Strikingly, under some circumstances, candidates' platforms will diverge when their preferences converge. And there is an unfortunate trade-off regarding candidates' attributes: they will display high valence or low polarization, but not both. One of our empirical predictions is a positive correlation between campaign spending and platform polarization.
A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice. However, spatial effects still have sizeable indirect effects on the vote via their influence on valence judgements. The results of exogeneity tests bolster claims about the flow of influence from spatial calculations to valence judgments to electoral choice.
Mixed-member proportional election systems give voters two choices – one for a party candidate in a first-past-the-post single-member constituency election and the other for a party list in a multi-member constituency. Some will vote a straight ticket (i.e. vote for the same party at each contest); others may vote a split-ticket. Although such an electoral system has been operating in Germany since 1953, very little work has been done on variations between constituencies in either the volume of split-ticket voting or the direction of the switching involved. Using an entropy-maximizing method, this article reports estimates of the pattern of straight-ticket and split-ticket voting in each of Germany's 328 constituencies at the 1998 federal elections.
Analyses of the variations show that the patterns are consistent with patterns of party strength at the constituency level: the stronger a party's performance at the 1994 election, the better its ability to retain the support of straight-ticket voters in 1998, to limit the out-flows of split-ticket voters, and to attract split-ticket voters who supported another party in the list contest.
The question how dierent electoral systems aect the represention of voters in parliaments has been a thorny issue for a considerable time. While some research suggests that rst-past-the-posts systems should lead to a closer correspondence between the preferences of the electoral dis- trict's median voter and of its representative, other work concludes that in proportional representation systems, especially with open lists, candidates have an incentive to cultivate a strong personal vote. To study this question we take advantage of two peculiarities of the Swiss political system, namely that in the same chamber of the parliament some members are elected in PR- and some in plurality elections and that direct democratic instruments play an important role. The second element, given that for a series of votes in parliament voters have had to decide the same issue, allows us to estimate the policy positions of MPs and the median voter of each electoral district in the same policy space. We nd
This paper presents the results of analyses of forces shaping electoral choice in the 2010 British general election. The analyses are based primarily on data gathered in the Campaign Internet Panel Survey (CIPS) that was conducted as part of the 2010 British Election Study (BES). Tests of rival models of electoral choice reveal that, as in earlier British elections, a valence politics model provides a strong explanation of voting decisions. However, as in those earlier contests, a model based on the spatial modelling tradition also contributes to understanding how voters made up their minds in 2010. The paper concludes by reprising major findings and discussing why the Conservatives failed to secure a majority in a context seemingly ideally suited for them to do so.
Fundamental questions about incumbent safety have been difficult to answer because of the absence of adequate measures of incumbent prospects and incumbent quality. If incumbents retire because they are vulnerable, high reelection rates do not necessarily mean that electoral accountability is absent. Moreover, if the electoral success of incumbents reflects their high quality, high reelection rates do not necessarily indicate pathology in the system. Using explicit measures of incumbent prospects and personal quality based on district informant ratings, we find evidence of strategic retirement by incumbents in the 1998 elections, when standard prospects measures show no evidence of strategic withdrawal by incumbents. We also find an impact of incumbent quality on vote share consistent with the idea that high quality incumbents are rewarded in the electoral process. Although many are skeptical about the implications of incumbent safety in House elections, our results suggest a more optimistic reconsideration of incumbent electoral security.
Using Petrocik's (1996) theory of issue ownership as a point of departure, I develop and test a theory of "trait ownership" that provides an explanation for the origins of candidate trait perceptions and illustrates an important way that candidates affect voters. Specifically, I argue for a direct connection between the issues owned by a political party and evaluations of the personal attributes of its candidates. As a result, the American public views Republicans as stronger leaders and more moral, while Democrats hold advantages on compassion and empathy. I also draw on "expectations gap" arguments from psychology and political science to demonstrate how a candidate may gain an electoral advantage by successfully "trespassing" on his opponent's trait territory. National Election Studies data from the 1980-2004 presidential elections are used to demonstrate the existence, durability, and effects of trait ownership in contemporary American political campaigns.
Vor dem Hintergrund der Wahlrechtsreform zur Bundestagswahl 2013 werden mögliche Effekte auf das Stimmensplitting untersucht. Ausgehend von der Überlegung, dass Stimmensplitting bei der Bundestagswahl 2009 zusätzliche Einflussmöglichkeiten auf die Zusammensetzung des Bundestages bot, die bei der Wahl 2013 nicht mehr bestanden, werden Erwartungen über die Änderung des Wahlergebnisses und des Wahlverhaltens formuliert. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass die Wahlsystemänderungen keinen Einfluss bezüglich des Stimmensplittings bei der Bundestagswahl 2013 hatten.
Obwohl es nicht viele empirische Studien gibt, die sich mit der Wirkung der physischen Attraktivität von Politikern bei Wahlen beschäftigen, kann es inzwischen als gut abgesicherter Befund gelten, dass die äußere Anmutung von Kandidaten den Wahlerfolg beeinflusst.
What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in contemporary Britain. © Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart and Paul F. Whiteley 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Political Choice in Britain uses data from the 1964 to 2001 British election studies (BES), 1992 to 2002 monthly Gallup polls, and numerous other national surveys conducted over the past four decades to test the explanatory power of rival sociological and individual rationality models of electoral turnout and party choice. Analyses endorse a valence politics model that challenges the long-dominant social class model. British voters make their choices by evaluating the performance of parties and party leaders in economic and other important policy areas. Although these evaluations may be largely products of events that occur long before an election campaign officially begins, parties' national and local campaign activities are also influential. Consistent with the valence politics model, partisan attachments display individual- and aggregate-level dynamics that reflect ongoing judgements about the managerial abilities of parties and their leaders. A general incentives model provides the best explanation of turnout. Calculations of the costs and influence-discounted benefits of voting and sense of civic duty are key variables in this model. Significantly, the decline in turnout in recent elections does not reflect more general negative trends in public attitudes about the political system. Voters judge the performance of British democracy in much the same way as they evaluate its parties and politicians. Support at all levels of the political system is a renewable resource, but one that must be renewed. © Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, and Paul Whiteley 2004. All rights reserved.
If mixed-member systems are 'in vogue', then the choice of many electoral reformers in Germany is the archetype for this system. Electors have two votes, one for a candidate in a single member district and one for a party on a closed party list. Voters can, and increasingly do 'split their tickets', voting strategically for different parties on the two ballots, with the possible aim of influencing coalition formation. The electoral system has enjoyed strong support and is unlikely to be changed.
A widely held belief concerning democratic elections is that the votes of many individuals are influenced by their assessments of the competing candidates’ personalities and other personal characteristics and that, as a consequence, the outcomes of entire democratic elections are often decided by ‘personality factors’ of this type. Experts on the electoral politics of six countries – the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Russia – set out to assess how far this emphasis on personality and personal characteristics is actually warranted by the available empirical evidence. Using a variety of methodologies, the authors seek to isolate and weigh the role played by personality both in influencing individual voters’ behaviour and in deciding election outcomes. They conclude that, even with regard to the United States, the impact of personality on individual voters’ decisions is usually quite small and that, more often than not, it cancels out. They also conclude that, largely for those reasons, the number of elections whose outcomes have been determined by voters’ assessments of the candidates is likewise quite small : much smaller than is usually supposed. Moreover, there are no signs that the importance of personality factors in determining election outcomes is increasing over time.
Using election returns, public opinion surveys, and legislative roll-call data from many mixed systems in every world region, the authors show that contamination systematically affects party strategy, voting behaviour, legislative cohesion and overall structure of partisan competition.
Bei der Entwicklung der räumlichen Modelle des Parteienwettbewerbs spielt die Valenz eine wichtige Rolle. Trotz der theoretischen Relevanz bleibt die Mess- und Schätzmethode der Valenz unterentwickelt. Angesichts dieser Forschungslücke schlägt dieser Beitrag ein statistisches Modell vor, das die gleichzeitige Schätzung der Kandidatenpositionen und der Valenz ermöglicht. Ein wichtiger Vorzug dieses Modells liegt darin, dass man nur die Kandidatenbeurteilungen per Skalometer benötigt, der in den meisten Umfragedaten verfügbar ist. Dieses Modell wird auf Daten angewendet, die in Rahmen der Konstanzer Oberbürgermeisterwahl 2012 erhoben wurden.
This research develops and tests hypotheses on the citizen and candidate characteristics that moderate utilization of candidate gender for forming impressions of House candidates' ideological orientations. High candidate visibility-attained through incumbency or campaign expenditures-enhances citizens' categorization of candidates on the basis of gender to infer ideological orientation. The effects of candidate gender are conditioned by political awareness for perception of Republican candidates' ideological positions because citizens receive conflicting cues about their orientations. In contrast, the relatively easy information process task for forming an impression of a Democratic female candidate allows for categorization on the basis of gender to occur among the most and least politically sophisticated. Finally, citizens draw on stereotypes of women to assign attributes to female candidates, not on stereotypes of men to infer attributes of male candidates.
It is well established that legislators from highly professionalized bodies are more likely to win reelection than members of less professionalized legislatures. We find that the effect of professionalization on incumbent electoral success is far more pervasive. As the level of professionalism of a legislature increases, the effects of external political and economic forces (such as coattails from higher level elections and national economic conditions) on a legislator's chances for reelection diminish in strength. This implies that legislative professionalization promotes institutionalization by establishing boundaries that insulate members from external shocks. We reach these conclusions by specifying and testing a district-level model of state legislative election outcomes, using as dependent variable the probability that an incumbent will win reelection. The model is estimated with probit using data for more than 42,000 state legislators from 1970 to 1989.
There are two distinct bodies of research on candidate gender. The first argues that voters are not biased against female candidates. These studies are usually based on aggregate analyses of the success rates of male and female candidates. The second body of research argues that voters employ gender stereotypes when they evaluate candidates. These studies are usually based on experiments which manipulate candidate gender. This study seeks to unite these literatures by incorporating gender stereotypes and hypothetical vote questions involving two candidates in one model I argue that many voters have a baseline gender preference to vote for male over female candidates, or female over male candidates. Using original survey data, I find that this general predisposition or preference can be explained by gender stereotypes about candidate traits, beliefs, and issue competencies, and by voter gender. I also argue that this baseline preference affects voting behavior.
I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple “running tally” of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of “objective” politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on “the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.”
This investigation distinguishes interpersonally oriented social competence from intrapersonally oriented competence. It examines the influence of voters' individualism and collectivism orientation in affecting the roles of these two dimensions in predicting electoral outcomes. Participants made judgments of personality traits based on inferences from faces of political candidates in the U.S. and Taiwan. Two social outcomes were examined: actual election results and voting support of the participants. With respect to actual electoral success, perceived competence is more important for the candidates in the U.S. than for those in Taiwan, whereas perceived social competence is more important for the candidates in Taiwan than for those in the U.S. With respect to subjective voting support, within cultural findings mirror those found cross-culturally. Competence is valued more among voters who are more individualistic, and social competence is valued more among voters who are more collectivistic. These results highlight important omissions in the social perception/judgment literature.
Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.
We reexamine voting choice in congressional elections by using panels of district experts to identify the ideological positions and leadership qualities of candidates running in a national sample of districts. We show that: (1) candidate-quality differences affect voting choice; (2) that the effect of candidate quality increases with reduced differences between candidates on ideology; and (3) that the effect of issues on voting depends on candidate differences in quality and ideology. The conditional nature of these effects has consequences for candidate position taking that challenge conventional wisdom because candidates with a quality advantage have an incentive to moderate while candidates who are at a quality disadvantage do not. Analyses that do not include competitors’ differences on both ideology and quality are incomplete because the effects of moderation depend on the position of the opponent and which candidate has the quality advantage.
Recent studies of voting behavior in Anglo-American elections have demonstrated the clear superiority of the valence model over its rivals for explaining how people cast their ballots. In this paper we test the portability of the valence model in a particularly challenging setting the 2009 German Parliamentary elections. Although there are reasons to think that a spatial model might outperform the valence model, we find that the valence model outperforms it with results similar to previous findings in other political settings.
Data from national election studies in Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.S. were analyzed to test hypotheses concerning the perception of ideological distance between parties and candidates. The first hypothesis, derived from Sherif's social judgment theory and Heider's balance theory, was of a U-shaped function between self-placement and the perception of ideological distance. This hypothesis, that extremists would perceive relatively greater distance than moderates, who in turn, would perceive more distance than centrists, was supported in data from each of the four countries. Moreover, this relationship remained significant in the regression analyses of U.S. data when a host of demographic and political variables were controlled. The second hypothesis, that voters would perceive more distance than nonvoters, was supported in bivariate analyses of U.S. data, but the relationship was not significant in the regression analyses. The third hypothesis was that people voting for a candidate outside the political mainstream would perceive less distance between the mainstream candidates than people who voted for the mainstream candidates. Data from the 1968 U.S. election did not support this hypothesis.
We extend the directional theory of issue voting from a strictly deterministic model to a model which incorporates voter uncertainty. In the model, each voter has a probability of preferring a given direction of policy with regard to an issue and each party has a probability of pursuing a given policy direction if elected. We examine the implications of the theory for representation and develop the link between directional and proximity theory as models of political change and realignment.
The effects of source valence, including its components source credibility, attraction, and homophily, on voter preference were examined in this study. A systematic sample with a random start of 350 registered Democratic voters in Tallahassee, Florida, was used to test the effects of eight dimensions of source valence on voter preference. The differential valence of the two candidates was the best predictor of voter preference. The eight-variable model accounted for 61% of the variance in voter preference, while attitude homophily alone accounted for 58% of that variance.
Two experiments examined the role of presentation modality in evaluations of Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale during the second Presidential debate in the 1984 campaign. In the first experiment, 219 subjects were presented selected segments from the debate in one of four following conditions: (1) audiovisual, (2) visual only, (3) audio only, or (4) text. Although Reagan was rated more favorably than Mondale in all of the conditions, Reagan's advantage was greatest in the visual modality. The second experiment (n = 64) examined the role of judgments of expressiveness and physical attractiveness as potential mediators of the visual modality advantage of Reagan. Results showed that rated expressiveness and physical attractiveness differences between the candidates were maximized in the visual modality condition, primarily due to Mondale being rated as less expressive and less physically attractive. Analysis of behavioral differences between the candidates revealed that Mondale blinked more frequently and had significantly fewer gaze changes and head movements than Reagan. Implications of the visual modality effect for real world evaluations of political candidates are discussed.
The “new conventional wisdom” of a waning impact of social divisions on political choices has been subject to debate in recent years. This paper addresses the debate by assessing the relevance of parties' political positions, using a novel approach to analysing it comparatively, based on a combination of data from the Eurobarometer with data of the Comparative Manifestos Project. The findings of this paper lend support to the claim that the decline in the relation between social divisions and voting behaviour, so far as it can be observed at all, is attributable to parties' changing political positions. Once these changes are taken into account, the diagnosis of a persistent impact of social divisions prevails.
Do events such as scandals, intra-party squabbling, and acts of perceived incompetence affect political parties' valence images, and thus, their electoral fortunes? If so, how great is their effect? Building upon a growing body of literature that explores the concept of valence, we develop a valid measure of valence based upon content analysis of Keesing's Record of World Events that scores parties along three valence dimensions – competence, integrity, and unity/division. The results of regression analyses designed to test this relationship for parties in nine Western European democracies are reported, and suggest that the answer to the first question posed above is yes. Specifically, evidence is found that events such as political scandals and party divisions cause parties to lose vote share, and that these effects are both statistically and substantively significant. These findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of electoral competition, for parties' election strategies, and for political representation.
Theory: Recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues, information shortcuts, and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act, individually or collectively, ns if they were fully informed. Hypotheses: Uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave ns if they were fully informed. Failing that, individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate, producing the same aggregate election outcome ns if voters were fully informed. Methods: Hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics, estimated by probit analysis of data from National Election Study surveys conducted after the six most recent United States presidential elections. Results: Both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed. At the individual level, the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote probabilities was about ten percentage points. In the electorate as a whole, these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation, but by no means eliminated: incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better, and Democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better, than they would have if voters had in fact been ''fully informed.''
Even if there is a vast body of literature on the attractiveness stereotype, little is known about the effects of the physical attractiveness of politicians. This holds true especially with regard to the relationship between physical attractiveness and electoral success. Taking the German Federal Election of 2002 as an example, the effect of the attractiveness of the candidates in the constituencies on their personal votes is analyzed. The attractiveness is judged by a group of raters on the basis of photographs used by the candidates for their self-representation. By means of multiple linear regression analysis it can be shown that the physical attractiveness of the candidates in the constituencies has a statistically significant and politically relevant impact on the share of votes they receive.
Even if there is a vast body of literature on the attractiveness stereotype, little is known about the effects of the physical attractiveness of politicians. This holds true especially with regard to the relationship between physical attractiveness and electoral success. Taking the German Federal Election of 2002 as an example, the effect of the attractiveness of the candidates in the constituencies on their personal votes is analyzed. The attractiveness is judged by a group of raters on the basis of photographs used by the candidates for their self-representation. By means of multiple linear regression analysis it can be shown that the physical attractiveness of the candidates in the constituencies has a statistically significant and politically relevant impact on the share of votes they receive.
Science involves the accumulation of knowledge, which means not only the formulation of new sentences about discoveries but also the reformulation of empirically falsified or theoretically discredited old sentences. Science has therefore a history that is mainly a chronicle and interpretation of a series of reformulations. It is often asserted that political science has no history. Although this assertion is perhaps motivated by a desire to identify politics with belles lettres, it may also have a reasonable foundation, in that political institutions may change faster than knowledge can be accumulated. To investigate whether propositions about evanescent institutions can be scientifically falsified and reformulated, I examine in this essay the history of the recent and not wholly accepted revisions of the propositions collectively called Duverger's law: that the plurality rule for selecting the winner of elections favors the two-party system. The body of the essay presents the discovery, revision, testing, and reformulation of sentences in this series in order to demonstrate that in at least one instance in political science, knowledge has been accumulated and a history exists.
The use of spatial ideas to interpret party competition is a universal phenomenon of modern politics. Such ideas are the common coin of political journalists and have extraordinary influence in the thought of political activists. Especially widespread is the conception of a liberal-conservative dimension on which parties maneuver for the support of a public that is itself distributed from left to right. This conception goes back at least to French revolutionary times and has recently gained new interest for an academic audience through its ingenious formalization by Downs and others. However, most spatial interpretations of party competition have a very poor fit with the evidence about how large-scale electorates and political leaders actually respond to politics. Indeed, the findings on this point are clear enough so that spatial ideas about party competition ought to be modified by empirical observation. I will review here evidence that the “space” in which American parties contend for electoral support is very unlike a single ideological dimension, and I will offer some suggestions toward revision of the prevailing spatial model.
This paper reevaluates Jacobson's well-known finding (1978, 1980, 1984, 1985) that campaign spending by House incumbents has little influence on the vote. Analysis of the 1978 House election shows that three forms of model misspecification cause Jacobson to underestimate the effect of incumbent expenditures: failure to control for the quality of the challenger, inattentiveness to interaction effects, and inadequate treatment of reciprocal causation. When these biases are corrected, the marginal effect of incumbent spending is found to be substantial and, under certain circumstances, on par with the effect of challenger spending. In addition, challenger quality is shown to be an important determinant of the vote, particularly when the challenger spends heavily on his or her campaign. These findings imply that revisions to Jacobson's policy recommendations are necessary if House races are to be made more competitive.
From citizen evaluations of candidates we construct a spatial representation of the 1968 and 1972 elections. This representation differs from that of Weisberg and Rusk (1970) in that it includes both voters and candidates, enabling us to examine the mass-elite relationship. The spaces we recover provide an excellent overview of the two elections. However, contrary to expectations based on spatial theory, we find no political figure located in the center of the distribution of voters. This result can be explained if issues operate in a dispositional manner. The thrust of the dispositional model is that it is the direction of a candidate's policy that is critical to developing his support base, not his absolute position. The model implies no candidate will receive his strongest support from those who are centrist on an issue. We test this model on a variety of issues with respect to several candidates and find it well supported.
This article studies a model of political parties as informative "brands" to voters. Voters across a large number of constituencies are assumed to be risk averse and incompletely informed about candidate ideal policies, and candidates are unable to commit to a declared policy platform. In this environment, parties can play a critical role by aggregating ideologically similar candidates and signaling their preferences to voters, This signaling is effective because party membership imposes costs, which screen out candidates whose preferences are not sufficiently close to the party's platform. We find that when party labels are very informative, the parties' platforms converge. When party labels are less informative, however, platforms diverge, because taking an extreme position allows a party to reduce the variance of its members' preferences. As parties become less able to impose costs on their members, or less able to screen out certain types of candidates, their platforms move further apart.
To examine the traditional view that challenger spending is move effective than incumbent spending, I reestimate the effects of spending using instrumental variables that affect a candidate's ability to raise campaign funds, such as candidate wealth levels. When the endogeneity of candidate spending levels is properly taken into account, the marginal effects of incumbent and challenger spending are roughly equal. In contrast to previous reseal ch showing that, because of higher marginal returns to challenger spending, the incumbent's spending advantage cannot explain high incumbent reelection rates, this article shows that in an average Senate election the incumbent's spending advantage yields a 6% increase in the incumbent's vote share. That incumbent spending wins elections has direct implications regarding the consequences Of campaign finance reform. My findings imply that equalizing spending levels may significantly increase incumbent defeat rates, and caps on candidate spending may improve the chances of challengers.
Theory suggests that three factors – the importance of ideology to primary voters, costly movement due to candidate reputations and lack of competition – all contribute to candidate divergence in US congressional elections. These predictions are analysed with new data from a 2000 mail survey that asked congressional candidates to place themselves on a left–right ideological scale. The data reveal that candidates often diverge, but that the degree of candidate polarization is variable and may be explained by factors in the theory. Candidates with firm public reputations, those who face weak general election competition, and those who experience stiff primary competition are all more likely to deviate from the median voter's position. Perhaps more importantly, the locations that candidates adopt have clear effects on their vote shares.
The study of political perception has been dominated by research on the perception of candidates' issue positions, focusing on the processes of projection and persuasion. This research has limited our understanding of political perception by interpreting projection and persuasion narrowly in terms of cognitive balance theory. Only recently has the possible impact of candidate ambiguity on voters' perception come to be appreciated. In this paper, we use a more comprehensive theory of perception to specify a series of lagged recursive equations and estimate the parameters using the CPS 1974–76 panel data. Our results provide no support for the persuasion hypothesis, and only limited evidence of projection. Rather, the inference of candidates' issue positions from party positions and the candidates' ideological stances are much more important factors in candidate perception.