The short-time dynamics of issue ownership and its impact on the vote

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the short-term dynamics of issue ownership and its effect on electoral choice. We hypothesize that voters who change their mind with regard to the party they deem most competent to handle the top issue are more probable to change their vote choice, than those who do not change their evaluation of competence. Second, we claim that the impact of a change in perception of party issue competence increases with the electoral strength of the party benefiting from this change. The analysis is based on data from a Rolling-Cross-Section with a panel component carried out in the 2011 Swiss Election Study. The results show the expected effects of change in issue competence assessment and the conditional role of party size.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Anke Tresch, Simon Hug, Alexandra Feddersen, Deana Gariup, the participants of the seminar at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Simon Lanz is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva. His research focuses on the role of issue and party evaluations in the decision making process.

Pascal Sciarini is Professor of Swiss and Comparative politics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His main research topics are decision-making processes, direct democracy, Europeanization and political behavior. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Swiss politics, Zurich: NZZ Libro (2014). His most recent book, which he co-authored with Manuel Fischer and Denise Traber, is Political Decision-making in Switzerland: The consensus model under pressure, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2015).

Notes

1. The Swiss Foundation for Research in Social Sciences carried out the survey. The data are available on www.forscenter.ch/de/our-surveys/selects/.

2. For simplicity, we use the terms “change in party issue competence evaluation”, “change in competence evaluation” and “competence change” interchangeably.

3. Hypothesis 2 is premised on the assumption that voters are aware of how electoral strength is distributed across parties. This is a reasonable assumption in the Swiss context, where citizens are certainly aware of parties' electoral strength, at least in terms of rank ordering, and arguably also in terms of vote share and party size.

4. Citizens receive their voting documents two to three weeks prior the election and can vote by mail.

5. Swiss People's Party (28.9%), Radical Democratic Party (15.8%), Christian Democratic Party (14.5%), Social Democratic Party (19.5%), Green Party (9.8%), Liberal Green Party (1.4%), Bourgeois Democratic Party (0%) – this party was founded during the 2007–2011 legislature and was competing for the first time in 2011.

6. The questions asked concerned (1) the number of parties represented in the Federal Council, (2) the name of the President of the Confederation, and (3) the number of signatures required to launch a popular initiative. Respondents receive 1 point for each correct answer. We then rescaled the variable so it ranges between 0 (low sophistication) to 1 (high sophistication).

7. We exclude the interaction terms from the random-intercept estimation since they do not change the model fit nor the effect of competence change.

8. For example, if a voter changes the MIP from immigration to environment, a change in party competence evaluation from the Swiss People's Party (on immigration) to the Social Democratic Party (on the environment) would not correspond to instability in terms of party competence perceptions.

9. Note that unstable party competence evaluations are observed for all types of issues. Among those who changed the party issue competence (but not the MIP), 41% mentioned the economy as the MIP, 23% immigration, 21% environment and 11% the welfare state.

10. We estimated a variation of the model using a more detailed categorization of the outcome variable. In addition to conversion, we took into account two other forms of change, namely mobilization (voters who were undecided at t1 but eventually turned out) and demobilization (voters who had a party preference at t1 but abstained). The results are in line with those presented in Table 2. In addition to increasing the probability to convert, competence change increases the probability to mobilize or demobilize. However, due to the low number of cases the effects on mobilization and demobilization are not statically significant.