From party to leader mobilization? The personalization of voter turnout (original) (raw)
Related papers
Leaders without Partisans: Dealignment, Media Change and the Personalization of Politics
ECPR Press/Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021
Leaders without Partisans examines the changing impact of party leader evaluations on voters' behavior in parliamentary elections. The decline of traditional social cleavages, the pervasive mediatization of the political scene, and the media's growing tendency to portray politics in "personalistic" terms all led to the hypothesis that leaders matter more for the way individuals vote and, often, the way elections turn out. This study offers the most comprehensive longitudinal assessment of this hypothesis so far. The authors develop a composite theoretical framework - based on currently disconnected strands of research from party, media, and electoral studies - and test it empirically on the most encompassing set of national election study datasets ever assembled. The labor-intensive harmonization effort produces an unprecedented dataset pooling information for a total of 129 parliamentary elections conducted between 1961 and 2018 in 14 West European countries. The book provides evidence of the longitudinal growth in leader effects on vote choice and on turnout. The process of partisan dealignment and changes in the structure of mass communication in Western societies are identified as the main drivers of personalization in voting behavior.
UC Irvine CSD Working Papers, 2018
Partisan dealignment is recurrently presented in the literature as a main driver of the “personalization of politics”. Yet, on the one hand, the claim that leader effects on voting behaviour are increasing across time is short on comparative evidence. On the other hand, there is limited empirical evidence that such increase is due to dealignment. This article addresses these claims, exploring the longitudinal relationship between dealignment and the determinants of vote choice through a novel dataset pooling 90 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies in the period 1961-2016. The results suggest that both critics and proponents of the personalization thesis got it partially right. Leader effects did not increase over time, but their relative importance did: leader images came to matter more as party attachments came to matter less. Partisan dealignment is the key contextual dynamic in downplaying the electoral impact of partisan attachments vis-à-vis leaders evaluations.
The Rise of Party/Leader Identification in Western Europe
"This article investigates the attitudinal drivers of partisanship in Western Europe, focusing in particular on the role exerted by voters’ evaluation of party leaders. The cross-sectional analysis is performed on pooled national election study data from three established parliamentary democracies (Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands). Results highlight the growing statistical association between leader evaluations and voters’ feelings of partisan attachment throughout the last three decades. Further analyses of selected panel data provide evidence for a causal interpretation in which voters’ evaluation of party leaders plays a crucial role in shaping their feelings of attachment to parties. comparative political behavior, electoral change, party identification, personalization of politics, political psychology"
West European Politics, 2020
Partisan dealignment is recurrently presented in the literature as one of the main drivers of the ‘personalisation of politics’. Yet, on the one hand, the claim that leader effects on voting behaviour are increasing across time is short on comparative evidence. On the other hand, there is limited empirical evidence that such an increase is due to dealignment. This article explores the longitudinal relationship between partisan dealignment, leader effects and party choice, through a novel dataset pooling 109 national election surveys collected in 14 Western European parliamentary democracies across the last six decades. The results show that leader effects increased over time as a function of the decline of party identification. Additional panel evidence from selected countries shows that partisan dealignment is responsible for increasing leader effects on party choice at the individual level. The longitudinal dimension of this study contributes to the most contested aspect of the personalisation of politics debate.
Changing Parties, Changing Partisans. The Personalization of Partisan Attachments in Western Europe
This article investigates the effects of the deep transformations in the relationship between West European class-mass parties and their electorates. Particular attention is paid to the changing nature of individuals' partisan attachments, which are hypothesized to be less rooted in social and ideological identities and more in individual attitudes towards increasingly visible partisan objects. The main objective of this article is to examine the influence of voters' attitudes towards one of these “objects”—the party leaders—in determining psychological attachments with the parties. The analysis concentrates on the two main cleavage-based parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The empirical findings highlight the declining ability of social identities (class and religious) to predict individual feelings of partisan attachment, as well as the growing influence of voters' attitudes towards party leaders. The concluding section points to the crucial role that political psychology can play in our understanding of democratic elections' outcomes.
Image that Matters: News Media Consumption and Party Leader Effects on Voting Behavior
The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2020
Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the "personalization of politics." The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there is evidence of this trend for presidential democracies, notably the United States, this linkage is yet to be fully explored for parliamentary democracies undergoing a process of personalization. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of pooled national election study data from thirteen Western European parliamentary democracies collected between 1982 and 2016. Our results show that leader effects are significantly stronger among individuals with a television-dominant media diet. The findings provide support to the yet underdeveloped theoretical relationship between media change and the personalization of politics, while also speaking to the broader question involving the importance of media for contemporary democratic elections.
Personalization of Politics and Electoral Change
2014
The conventional wisdom that parliamentary elections are now, more than at any time in the past, determined by voters' assessments of party leaders has been fiercely contested by comparative electoral research. To overcome the obvious mismatch between customary expectations about the role of party leaders and the conclusions drawn by scholarly research in the field, this book provides an innovative framework for the study of voting behavior in light of the ongoing personalization of politics. Through analysis of election study data from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, this book highlights the progressive inability of social-psychological models of voting to account for individuals' choices. Throughout the last four decades, voters' attitudes towards party leaders have apparently become a crucial determinant of their feelings of affinity with certain parties. Once the role of leaders as drivers of partisanship is taken into account, their electoral effect emerges as a force that can – more often than not – make the difference between victory and defeat.
Despite the growing literature on polarization, students of comparative politics have not yet been able to reach much assured understanding of how party polarization influences voter turnout in multiparty settings, which often put on offer both centrist, and divergent mainstream and niche party policies. I evaluate how politically sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens with different ideological preferences respond to high and increasing party polarization by employing individual-and party system-level data from 17 European multiparty democracies. I hypothesize that high levels of actual and perceived party polarization increase voter turnout, and policy seeking, sophisticated citizens are more likely to turn out when polarization in party policy offerings in the short run increases their utility from voting. The empirical analyses show that high party polarization increases both politically sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens' propensities to turn out. However, such positive effect for the most part comes from the between-and within-party systems differences in actual party polarization, rather than how individual citizens perceive that. The implications of these findings with respect to strategic position taking incentives of political parties and the effects of the knowledge gap between sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens on political participation and democratic representation are discussed in the concluding section.
This article provides an empirical assessment of the causal structure underlying the core dependent variable of electoral research (the vote) and two of its most notable predictors (partisanship and leader evaluations). A critical review of traditional models of voting highlights the need to account for the reciprocal relationship between the main predictors as well as for the potential feedback stemming from the dependent variable. In the light of these considerations, a new ‘iron triangle’ of electoral research would seem to take shape, with partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote tight to each other by a strong link of reciprocal causation. Making use of pre-/post-election surveys from Britain and Italy, the empirical analysis provides evidence for a strong effect of past behavior on political attitudes. However, past behavior seems to exert its effect mainly on partisan attitudes, whereas party leader evaluations appear only slightly affected. The results point to the considerably weakened role of partisanship as attitudinal anchor of vote choice. Leader evaluations, on the contrary, emerge as a crucial component in the voting decision.
Party and Leader Effects in Parliamentary Elections: Towards a Reassessment
Social-psychological models of voting behaviour systematically downsize the relevance of party leader evaluations by conceiving them as mere consequences of causally prior partisan attachments. However, the validity of this interpretation depends heavily on the effectively exogenous status of party identification. Empirical research shows that the assumed exogeneity of partisanship is, at best, doubtful. In such a context, single-equation models of voting are likely to provide seriously biased estimates. By employing the proper econometric procedures (instrumental variable estimation) and the most appropriate data sources to address causality issues (panel data) this study provides strong support in favour of the personalisation hypothesis.