The effect of political sophistication and party identification on voter–party congruence. A comparative analysis of 30 countries

ABSTRACT

Partisanship and cognitive mobilization are generally seen as independent and counter-balancing influences on vote choice. While the former is typically regarded as a shortcut, reducing the need for close ideological congruence with one’s preferred party, the latter is associated with increasing levels of political sophistication and the importance of ideological proximity in voter decision-making. This paper tests the strength of these arguments in comparative perspective using data from Wave 3 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Our results show that in general higher levels of political sophistication are associated with higher levels of voter–party ideological congruence and that a strong party identification reduces this proximity. For voters with both high levels of sophistication and strong partisanship, however, congruence remains high. In a second step we examine whether these relationships are affected by the complexity of the party environment. Our findings show that party system size has no effect on levels of ideological congruence at the individual level, and this holds for different levels of voter sophistication. We conclude that for the most part voter sophistication and party identification are best seen as counter-weights in determining vote choice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Joris Boonen (Ph.D.) works as a researcher and guest lecturer at the Center for Political Research at the University of Leuven. He is also a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in research methods at the faculty of International Business and Communication of Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in Maastricht. His research mainly focuses on the development of party preferences among adolescents.

Eva Falk Pedersen holds a master's degree in political science from McGill University. Her thesis investigated age and generation effects in the domination of the Liberal Party of Quebec. She worked in Belgium as a researcher for the Belgian Election Study. Her research interests are political behaviour, elections and aboriginal affairs. She now works as a public affairs consultant in Montreal.

Marc Hooghe is a professor of political science at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has published mainly on political participation and political trust. He holds an ERC Advanced Grant to investigate the democratic linkage between citizens and the political system in Europe. He is also the co-founder and director of the Leuven-Montréal Winter School on Elections and Electoral Behaviour.

Notes

1 We have also tested the measure by using the median placement of the parties given by the respondents as Blais and Bodet (2006) suggest, but this did not lead to any substantial differences in the analyses.

2 We have also used an alternative coding, in which all categories of the scale were included separately on a 1–4-scale, but this did not alter the results. Since it is more rigorous to not consider weak identifiers, we have decided to use this coding in the final model.

3 In two additional tests on the country level, we included a variable for years of democracy (ranging from 7 to 199 years) and a dummy variable for whether the country has been a postcommunist democracy or not. These two variables did not alter the results in any way: the variables are not significant and the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) does not vary significantly.