Party System Polarization and Electoral Behavior

When deciding whether to turn out to vote and what party to support, citizens are constrained by the available options within their party system. A rich literature shows that characteristics of this choice set, which capture how “meaningful” the choice is, have pervasive effects on electoral behavior and public opinion. Party system polarization in particular, which captures how ideologically dispersed the parties are, has received much attention in earlier work. More ideologically polarized party systems are associated with higher turnout rates, while both proximity voting and mechanisms of accountability appear strengthened when parties are more ideologically distinct. However, party system polarization also strengthens party attachments and entails a risk of fostering mass polarization.

An agent-based model of multi-dimensional opinion dynamics and opinion alignment

It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. ``left'' vs. ``right'') and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized facts as emergent properties of an opinion dynamics in a multi-dimensional space of continuous opinions. The mechanisms for the change of agents' opinions in this multi-dimensional space are derived from cognitive dissonance theory and structural balance theory. We test assumptions from proximity voting and from directional voting regarding their ability to reproduce the expected emerging properties. We further study how the emotional involvement of agents, i.e. their individual resistance to change opinions, impacts the dynamics. We identify two regimes for the global and the individual alignment of opinions. If the affective involvement is high and shows a large variance across agents, this fosters the emergence of a dominant ideological dimension. Agents align their opinions along this dimension in opposite directions, i.e. create a state of polarization.

Issue Scales, Information Cues, and the Proximity and Directional Models of Voter Choice

One of the most important questions in the study of democratic politics centers on how citizens consider issues and candidate positions when choosing whom to support in an election. The proximity and directional theories make fundamentally different predictions about voter behavior and imply different optimal strategies for candidates, but a longstanding literature to empirically adjudicate between the theories has yielded mixed results. We use a survey experiment to show that the way that candidates’ issue positions are described can cue citizens to choose a candidate that is preferred under the expectations of either the proximity or the directional theory. We find that directional voting is more likely when the issue scale is understood to represent degrees of intensity with which either the liberal or the conservative side of the issue is expressed and that proximity voting is more likely when an issue scale is understood to be a range of policies.

Separating Candidate Valence and Proximity Voting: Determinants of Competitors’ Non-Policy Appeal

Previous scholarship has provided ample evidence that non-spatial considerations can trump voters’ policy preferences in candidate selections. The literature has been less successful, however, in providing a sense of the factors that raise candidates’ non-policy appeal. Faced with the challenging task of separating policy and non-policy aspects of individual vote choices, empirical research has frequently relied on shorthand measures like candidate incumbency. This paper separates the valence component from policy-based candidate selections by explicitly supplying voters with information on the policy agreement between themselves and their district candidates. Relying on the distinction between campaign valence and character valence by Stone and Simas, it is shown that candidate valence is driven by candidate visibility in a party-dominated political system.