issue cross-pressures and electoral behavior in western europe
Supervisor: Prof.dr. C.W.A.M. Aarts
The Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social sciences (BMS)
When citizens’ positions on some issues led them to support one party while their policy preferences on other issues pushed them toward another party, how would these kinds of voters behave in elections? Since their issue positions led them to inconsistent parties, compared to citizens whose positions on most issues generally pointed to the same party, would they rely less on individual issues and more on other cues such as political performance in order to make a decision? Would they have less motivation to go out to vote? Would they switch their voting choices more often between different elections? And would they even delay their voting decisions until the very last polling day? These were the central concerns of this dissertation. In simple terms, the overarching goal of this dissertation was to answer the following question: Do issue cross-pressures influence citizen’s different kinds of electoral behavior, and, if so, how?
Facing changes and instability in electoral behavior across Western Europe, traditional party identification and social cleavages performed increasingly poorly in understanding and explaining the way in which voters made their voting choices. On the one hand, the increasing number of people who were not partisan, or who had a loose link to a particular social group, indicated that, on the basis of this information, voting behavior could be predicted much less accurately. On the other hand, long-term factors such as party identification and social group attachments could tell us a great deal about why one group of citizens behaved in a given way while another group of citizens behaved differently in the same election. However, it could tell us little about why some voters’ behavior varied across different elections. This indicated that we must turn to other factors, especially short-term variables, in order to have a better understanding of electoral behavior in contemporary advanced democracies. One possibility was to focus on issue cross-pressures. However, comparatively few studies have developed a theory and explored the consequences of cross-pressures emerging from holding contradictory voting predispositions based on various issues.
To answer the research questions, this dissertation has been separated into a theoretical part and an empirical part. The theoretical part developed a theory of issue cross-pressures, which clarified: What are issue cross-pressures? What are the preconditions for citizens to experience issue cross-pressures? How do individuals’ issue cross-pressures arise? How do issue cross-pressures influence citizens’ different kinds of electoral behavior? How should issue cross-pressures be measured? It defined issue cross-pressures as cross-pressures resulted from holding policy preferences across various issues that pushed one in different political directions. For citizens to experience issue cross-pressures, they should care about at least two different issues and their opinions on those issues should not be comprehensively constricted by a unidimensional ideology. Citizens’ awareness of issue cross-pressures could come about because of conflicts between/among core values or in pursuing different self-benefits. When citizens experienced issue cross-pressures, in order to make a voting decision they would employ different methods to reconcile or alleviate their cross-pressures, including: re-evaluating their stances on some issues, looking for additional attributes related to the parties, and reducing the importance of some issues. This process in turn influenced citizens’ various kinds of electoral behavior, including issue voting, turnout, vote switching, and time of voting decision.
The empirical part examined the role of issue cross-pressures in electoral behavior. It firstly studied the question: Is the role of issues in citizens’ voting choice moderated by citizens’ issue cross-pressures? The theory of issue cross-pressures assumed that when citizens experienced issue cross-pressures, they would try to reconcile them in order to make a decision. They might re-evaluate their own stances on different issues to make certain that their issue positions point to a single party. They might reduce the importance of one or several of the issues in question to ensure that their positions on the most important issues lead them to a single party. They might consider several more, or all relevant attributes of the parties, such as the personality and political experience of party leaders, the party’s performance in government and party identification, to align themselves more with a particular party. If citizens who experienced issue cross-pressures employed the third way to reconcile their cross-pressures, the role of issues in decision making might be largely moderated, since many other factors were taken into consideration. Analyzing survey data from the 2010 British Election Study, this dissertation found that the role of issues in citizens’ voting choice was moderated by citizens’ issue cross-pressures, and that the more issue cross-pressures voters experience, the less pronounced issue voting would be.
Secondly, it examined the relationship between issue cross-pressures and turnout to answer questions: Do issue cross-pressures decrease citizens’ motivation to turn out to vote?, and: Is the role of issue cross-pressures in turnout moderated by the party system? When citizens experienced issue cross-pressures, they would seek to reduce these pressures in order to make a voting choice. As discussed before, citizens could employ three different methods to alleviate their cross-pressures when their positions on different issues led them to different parties. However, this did not mean that issue cross-pressured citizens could always reduce their cross-pressures and managed to make a decision. When issue cross-pressured citizens could not reconcile their cross-pressures successfully, they would keep on struggling to decide which party to vote for, which might influence their motivation to go out to vote. To test this position, this dissertation analyzed survey data from five Dutch parliamentary elections (1994-2012) and three British general elections (1992-2010). The findings showed that issue cross-pressures had an impact on voters’ motivations to turn out to vote. In terms of the conditioned role of the party system, the findings indicated that, although people might suffer more issue cross-pressures as the number of parties increases, the influence of issue cross-pressures on turnout would be more pronounced in almost two-party dominated contexts than in multi-party contexts.
Thirdly, the empirical part of this thesis studied the role of issue cross-pressures in vote switching to answer questions: Do issue cross-pressures influence citizens’ vote change across elections?, and: Is the role of issue cross-pressures in vote switching conditioned by different mobilization types? According to the theory of issue cross-pressures, if issue cross-pressured citizens managed to reconcile or alleviate their cross-pressures to a certain level, they would cast a vote. However, their voting choices would very much depend on how they reconciled their cross-pressures. Therefore, this dissertation suggested that issue cross-pressures might be a factor behind citizens’ vote switching across elections. In other words, it argued that the voting choice of issue cross-pressured citizens across elections would be more unstable compared to those whose issue positions pushed them toward a single party. Based on the survey data from the long-term panel of the 2002-2009 and 2005-2013 German Longitudinal Election Study, the dissertation did not find a strong relationship between issue cross-pressures and vote switching, but it did show that the influence of issue cross-pressures on vote switching was moderated by different mobilization types. This influence was strong and significant among people without party identification and with higher cognitive ability, namely apartisans.
Lastly, the thesis examined the influence of issue cross-pressures on citizens’ time of voting decision to answer questions: Are the time of voting decisions affected by issue cross-pressures?, and: Is the role of issue cross-pressures in the time of voting decision conditioned by political systems? When citizens did not experience issue cross-pressures, they could make a voting choice directly without any additional considerations, whereas, when citizens’ issue positions led them to several parties, they must employ one or more approaches to reconcile cross-pressures in order to reach a satisfactory voting choice. This process would obviously lead issue cross-pressured citizens to spend much more time on their decision, thereby delaying their time of voting decisions. Analyses of seven Dutch parliamentary elections (1994-2010), five British general elections (1992-2010) and four German parliamentary elections (1994-2013) showed that issue cross-pressures did influence people’s time of voting decisions, regardless of their consideration set size, demographic background and political attributes, and variations in the effect of issue cross-pressures on the time of voting decision in different political contexts could be partially explained by party systems
Summarily, the answers to the main research question in this dissertation: Do issue cross-pressures influence citizens’ different kinds of electoral voting, and, if so, how?, are as follows. When citizens experienced issue cross-pressures, in order to make a voting decision, they would employ different ways to reconcile or alleviate cross-pressures, which include re-evaluating their stances on some issues, looking for additional attributes related to parties and reducing the importance of some issues. This process in turn influenced citizens’ various kinds of electoral behavior, including issue voting, turnout, vote switching, and time of voting decision. Compared to citizens whose issues positions pointed to a single party, issue cross-pressured citizens would rely less on issues to make a decision, have less motivation to go out to vote, switch their voting choices more often between two elections (at least for those who did not have party ties and with a higher educational background), and delay their voting decisions even until the last polling day. Nevertheless, what could not be neglected was that these empirical findings were not always consistent with expectations. For example, the moderated effects of issue cross-pressures on issue voting were different in the proximity and directional models; the impact of issue cross-pressures on turnout and time of voting decision varied not only across countries, but also among elections within a country etc. This all needed further exploration.
This dissertation implied that, (a) although the impact of issues on citizens’ voting choices was not as great as expected, the important role of issues in electoral politics was still remarkable and must not be neglected; (b) modernization and cognitive mobilization might on the one hand make citizens more likely to make a decision independently of political elites and parties, which leads to an increase in issue voting; while on the other hand modernization and cognitive mobilization might also make citizens more likely to realize that their positions on different issues point to different parties, which could cause them to experience more issue cross-pressures. This might in turn decrease the overall level of issue voting, which goes against the optimistic view of the consequences of modernization and cognitive mobilization; (c) the decreasing stability in determinants and patterns of voting behavior was at least partially a result of a transformation in the nature of the demand side of politics. As such, the prospects for contemporary Western democracy were not as pessimistic as de-politicization theses have suggested. However, this did not mean that contemporary Western democracy faced no challenges. Given that a large group of issue cross-pressured citizens have not been fully captured by established parties across Western European countries, small parties would get a chance to develop and new parties would have an opportunity to emerge. Therefore, party systems in contemporary Western democracies might become unstable in the foreseeable future.
