How Referendums Challenge European Democracy by Richard Rose

Author:Richard Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030441173
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

6.5 Don’t Expect Too Much of Your Party Label

In addition to talking about their positions, referendum campaigners also mention their party label, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes strategically, to sway voters. When parties make choices or express preferences, voters can evaluate these actions based on what they think about the party. The party thus offers cues that voters can follow, for example when they form their own opinions about whether to like the European Union or when they decide how to vote in a referendum. A large body of research has shown that party cues are an effective vehicle of preference formation in various issue domains (Cohen 2003; Petersen et al. 2013; Rahn 1993). Party cues allow voters an easy shortcut to forming opinions and making decisions that absolves them of the need to engage in extensive thinking about the issue.3 They can simply rely on the party label and whatever they associate with it, allowing the party label to guide them towards their opinions and choices.

However, campaigners should not expect too much of invoking their party label in a referendum campaign. Notwithstanding differences in the clarity and strength of the signals parties in different systems provide to voters about European integration, mainstream parties all over Europe have traditionally avoided clear positioning on European integration due to pronounced within-party variation of opinions over the issue (Hix and Lord 1997; van der Eijk and Franklin 2004). This is why perceptions of competing party positions can be experimentally manipulated (Tilley and Wlezien 2008; Vössing and Weber 2016, 2017). Because voters are uncertain about mainstream party positions regarding European integration, they can hardly rely on party cues when voting in a referendum about a European issue (van der Brug and van der Eijk 1999; see also Chapter 5, Table 5.1, in this book).

Participants in my experiments were given randomly assigned information about the party affiliation of the MEP justifying his positive view of European integration. The assigned party label varies between the four parties represented in German parliament at the time. Figure 6.3 shows that none of the four parties is inherently better at producing support for the European Union. The F-statistic identifying the effect of the categorical variable ‘party affiliation of the MEP’ (F = 0.43; p = 0.73) is clearly low, and none of the between-group comparisons of any two party categories reveals statistically significant differences.

Fig. 6.3Political parties and support for the European Union

(Notes Graph shows mean value of support for the EU on a 0–100 feeling thermometer for different justifications used in the treatment article. The F statistic is 0.43 [p = 0.73]. None of the differences between the five justifications is statistically significant [p < 0.05] in a post hoc test [Bonferroni-adjusted for multiple comparisons])

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