Coping With Complexity: How Voters Adapt to Unstable Parties by Dani Marinova

Author:Dani Marinova [Marinova, Dani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781785521515
Google: 6Df8jgEACAAJ
Publisher: ECPR Press
Published: 2016-01-15T07:47:09+00:00

Heuristics for unstable parties: preliminary expectations

The ideology heuristic: Proximity and direction-intensity theories

In their seminal study, Lau and Redlawsk (2001, p. 953) explain the use of the political ideology heuristic as follows: ‘If the salient characteristics of a particular politician are consistent with or representative of the prototypic [conservative party], say, then voters may readily infer that she is for a strong defense, low taxes, against government intervention in the economy, against abortion, and so on…’ By relying on ideology alone, voters can infer party positions on a number of issues with relatively little knowledge about each party's exact stance on each policy. The ideology heuristic has one of the longest histories in political psychology and has gained widespread acceptance (Popkin 1991; Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock 1991; Lau and Redlawsk 2001, 2006; but see Bartels 1996).

Precisely how voters use ideology to elect parties has been less clear. In one model of ideology-based voting, voters choose based on their proximity to each party (Downs 1957). This model of voting posits that voters will select the party closest to them in policy space based on a rational calculation of policy distances to each party. Where both voters and parties can be represented by a point in a hypothetical policy space (usually, left-right), voters’ decision-making is simply a matter of finding the party which is at the shortest policy distance from their own position.

An alternative model of ideology-based voting considers not only each voter's distance to each party but also the side of the ideological spectrum on which the voter finds herself (Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989). The directional theory of issue voting predicts that voters will select parties whose positions are on the same side of the policy space and will prefer parties with more ‘intense’ positions on that side.2 In contrast to the proximity model, voters are thought to select parties not on the grounds of objective policy issues or straightforward calculations of policy distances between each party and their own position but rather on their emotional responses to party appeals. While in both the proximity and the direction-intensity models voters decide based on ideology, the way in which ideology is used by the voter differs significantly. The proximity model posits a straightforward, rational calculation of policy distances while the direction-intensity model instead postulates an emotional response to the direction and intensity of party messages.

To appreciate how different these two perspectives on vote choice are, it is useful to compare the predictions they generate in the following scenario: imagine a policy space, as depicted in Figure 5.1, ranging from –5 to 5, where three parties (party A at –1, party B and 4 and party C at 5) compete for the ballots of two voters (voter Z at 1 and voter W at 3). The proximity model predicts that voters Z and W would select parties A and B, respectively, such that the absolute distance between voters and parties is minimised. Notice that in this scenario, voter Z selects party A, even though the party's position is opposite in direction from voter Z's position.

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