Heterogeneity in the effects of resources, proximity, and identity on preference voting in PR systems

ABSTRACT

The institutional design of the Czech Republic's flexible-list PR system with optional preference voting allows us to examine not only who casts preference votes, but also how voters allocate preference votes to candidates on the party ballot. Drawing on the resources, proximity and identity models, we first examine how these voter attributes impact the decision to cast preference votes or not. We then extend our analysis to theorise and test the heterogeneous impacts of these factors on voting only for the list puller, for candidates other than the list puller, or for both types of candidates.

KEYWORDS:

• Political resources
• proximity
• preference voting
• electoral systems
• Czech Republic

Acknowledgements

The work of Lukáš Linek was supported by the Czech Science Foundation: [Grant Number 21-30345S].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Sometimes, socio-economic resources like education or employment (social class) are used to explain the use of preferential voting. However, their effect is usually not significant. The reason is that explanatory models also include political interest and knowledge which are correlated with socio-economic indicators.

2 The other factors usually subsumed under the identity model do not seem to be present in the Czech case. The ethnicity of candidates is almost uniform (white, Czech) as is the voting population. The age of candidates and voters vary providing some space for possible voting based on age. However, the age structure of voters and candidates of several parties is very skewed: young voters and candidates in the case of the Pirate party, older voters and candidates in the case of the Communists or Social Democrats. This makes using preferential votes for candidates of the same age redundant as almost all candidates of these parties share similar age. In addition, only the younger age group is politically underrepresented. The results of the analysis do not depend on including age in the models. The models are similar and the age variable is not significant.

3 This phenomenon is seen in other democracies such as Poland (Jankowski and Marcinkiewicz 2019) and Belgium (Wauters, Weekers, and Maddens 2010). Wauters, Weekers, and Maddens’ (2010) note that in their study of the 2003 election, men held 72% of the top ballot positions. In contrast to the Czech Republic, however, they find that women received fewer preference votes, and they attribute this to media coverage, campaign spending, and list position. A different study by Luhiste (2015) provides a comparative analysis across countries in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections and finds that the type of PR list system that a country uses impacts women’s list placement. Specifically, “party gatekeepers place women on moderately viable, rather than highly viable, list positions in preferential ordered-list systems and on highly viable list positions in closed-list systems” (Luhiste 2015, 110).