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Abstract
Citizens can face a difficult electoral decision when no party even broadly represents their views. In Western Europe, this applies to those citizens with left-wing preferences on economic issues and traditional/authoritarian preferences on socio-cultural issues. There are many voters with such ‘left-authoritarian’ views, but few parties. Hence, the former often have to choose between parties that only match their views on one of these two ideological dimensions. This study shows that whether these citizens privilege economic or socio-cultural congruence in their electoral preferences depends on the issues they are concerned about. In general, it is found that left-authoritarians privilege economic concerns and therefore prefer parties that are left-liberal. These findings have implications for our general understanding of electoral choice and of changing patterns of political competition in Western Europe.
Acknowledgements
The research conducted for this paper has been financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): S10902-G11 and I150-G14 under the auspices of the projects ‘Austrian Election Study’ (AUTNES) and ‘Representation and Policy Congruence in Europe’ (REPCONG) respectively. Zoe Lefkofridi also acknowledges support by the HumVib Eurocores Program of the European Science Foundation (ESF). We would like to thank Sylvia Kritzinger, our colleagues at the Dept. of Methods in the Social Sciences as well as Kostas Gemenis, Nathalie Giger, Monika Mühlböck and Agnieszka Walczak and two anonymous referees for valuable comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 ECPR Joint Sessions. All errors remain our own.
Notes
1. A related question that has received a lot of scholarly attention is why many working-class citizens and lower-income groups have left-wing economic views and conservative/authoritarian cultural views (e.g. Lipset 1959, 1966; for a more recent account, see Derks 2004). Unlike such sociological work, we concentrate here on issue-based representation and electoral choice for voters with such ideological preferences.
2. Given that the relationship between the two core dimensions under study (i.e. economic left–right and liberal/authoritarian) is different in the East compared to the West (e.g. Marks et al. 2006), our study confines itself to West European countries, i.e. the ‘old’ EU member states.
3. While the term ‘cross-pressures’ originally referred to individual membership of cross-cutting social groups (Lazarsfeld et al. 1960), we can also apply this term to issue- and policy-based cross-cutting appeals (Brader et al. 2013).
4. Ideally, we would be able to use two single-item summary dimensions indicating voter positions on economic and socio-cultural issues. To our knowledge, however, there is no cross-national dataset that places voters on such scales.
5. We do not use data reduction techniques to uncover dimensionality. In this decision, we follow the recommendation of Rovny and Marks (2011), who argue that the outcomes of such procedures depend heavily on the items included in the survey. Instead, we assume that West European political systems are at least partly structured by a socio-cultural and an economic dimension, so our approach is explicitly deductive.
6. We do not include items on European integration because this issue is related to both the economic and the socio-cultural dimensions (e.g. Hooghe et al. 2002).
7. The Cronbach’s alpha for the socio-cultural scale is a satisfactory 0.65 across all countries. For the economic scale, the Cronbach’s alpha is just 0.24, which is very low. To confirm that we were indeed reliably measuring voter’s economic views, we therefore also performed a principal component analysis (PCA) of the eight economic and socio-cultural items and extracted two varimax-rotated components. These components correlate with the two indices at r = 0.82 for the economic scale and at r = 0.95 for the socio-cultural scale. Our descriptive results do not differ substantively if we use this PCA-extracted component rather than the composite indicator. Note, finally, that these indicators are only used to classify voters and are not used in the subsequent regression analyses.
8. To exclude individuals with mixed or ambiguous views, we create cut-off points of 2.5 and 3.5 on the 1 to 5 scale. However, we need to acknowledge that responses to ‘agree–disagree’ questions may be coloured by acquiescence bias (Krosnick and Presser 2011). Although this is not an issue for the economic items, where there are two questions in each direction all four socio-cultural items point into the same (right-wing) direction. Hence, for the socio-cultural items, we adjust the cut-off points to 3 and 3.5. Doing so means that more voters are classified as left-liberal and right-liberal than would be the case if we left the cut-off point at 2.5; this coding approach is conservative in that it increases the size of these two groups relative to the number of left-authoritarians.
9. There are several advantages to using expert survey data rather than comparable data (e.g. based on coded manifestos or media sources) to assess party positions, as already argued by van der Brug and van Spanje (2009). Moreover, expert data tend to slightly underreport ideological changes of parties (see McDonald et al. 2006; van der Brug and van Spanje 2009), so matching 2006 party data to 2009 voter data should be valid. We also examined the EES candidate survey (Weßels 2011), which shows that there are also very few left-authoritarian candidates (less than 10 per cent) in Western Europe; details available from the authors on request.
10. The Cronbach’s alpha for the economic index is 0.97, for the socio-cultural scale 0.95. The economic index correlates with Hooghe et al.’s (2010) summary economic scale at 0.97; the socio-cultural index correlates with Hooghe et al.’s (2010) gal/tan scale at 0.86. Our results do not depend on the index or scale we use.
11. Acquiescence bias is less of a concern here as the questions are explicitly worded as dimensions with two endpoints.
12. Thomassen’s (2012) analysis of dynamic representation portrays the Dutch party system as self-correcting itself over time, i.e. as adjusting to voters’ preferences on the increasingly salient liberal/authoritarian dimension. Drawing on this insight, it is possible that some parties might have moved towards left-authoritarian positions since 2006. This should hold especially for countries with low electoral thresholds (Thomassen 2012). New parties might have formed that propagate such views, e.g. the Party for Freedom (PVV) founded by Geert Wilders. However the examination of movements on the supply side of democracy is beyond the scope of this article.
13. Ideally, we would also run our models using the distances of parties as perceived by voters themselves. Unfortunately, we know of no cross-national dataset that would include these perceptions on our two ideological dimensions.
14. These measures, on which we elaborate below, are also almost completely uncorrelated with respondents’ issue opinions on the two dimensions.
15. The full question texts are: (1) ‘What do you think about the economy? Compared to 12 months ago, do you think that the general economic situation in [COUNTRY] is a lot better, a little better, stayed the same, a little worse or a lot worse?’; and (2) ‘And over the next 12 months, how do you think the general economic situation in this country will be? Will it get a lot better, a little better, stay the same, a little worse or get a lot worse?
16. The full question texts are: (1) ‘And over the last 12 months, has immigration in Britain increased a lot, increased a little, stayed the same, decreased a little or decreased a lot?’; and (2) ‘In your opinion, is this a change for the better or the worse?’
