News by Popular Demand: Ideological Congruence, Issue Salience, and Media Reputation in News Sharing

Social media news sharing has become a central subject of scholarly research in communication studies. To test current theories, it is of an utmost importance to estimate the meaningful parameters of news sharing behavior from observational data. In this article, we retrieve measures of ideological congruence, issue salience, and media reputation to explain news sharing in social media. We describe how the proposed statistical model connects to different strands of the news sharing literature. We then exemplify the usefulness of the model with an analysis of the relationship between ideological congruence and issue salience. Results show that if ideology and salience correlate with each other, the preferences of ideologues (i.e., users who give higher weight to ideological congruence) will be overrepresented in observational data. This will result in the heightened perceptions of polarization. We test the performance of the model using data from Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.

A Multilevel Model of Ideological Congruence in Latin America

ABSTRACT What explains ideological congruence between citizens and political parties? Although the literature on congruence has recently provided some answers to this question, most of these works have focused on the effect of systemic and partisan factors. They have paid less attention to the effect of people’s characteristics on ideological congruence, which is built by the interaction between citizens’ positions on public issues and those of the political parties that represent them. Our general research hypothesis is that party-voter congruence is stronger when parties reduce the uncertainty about their ideological positions and citizens can understand these signals better. Analysis of Latin American data supports this hypothesis, showing that people’s cognitive ability, specifically education and political knowledge, has a positive effect on party-voter ideological congruence. Moreover, this relationship is moderated by parties’ attributes, such as ideological ambiguity and radicalism.

Citizen Representation and Electoral Systems

One common way to think about citizen representation is in terms of the ideological distance between citizens and their representatives. Are political elites ideologically congruent with citizen preferences? Electoral systems are an especially important political institution to consider when studying citizen representation because they influence the size and ideological composition of party systems, how votes are translated into legislative seats, the types of governments that form after elections, and the types of policies that get implemented. In effect, electoral institutions affect each stage of the representation process as one moves from citizen preferences to policy outcomes. Research on ideological congruence indicates that electoral rules can cause distortions in citizen-elite congruence to emerge and disappear as one moves through the representation process. In this regard, studies show that proportional electoral systems enjoy a representational advantage over majoritarian systems when it comes to legislative congruence (the ideological distance between the median legislative party and the median citizen) but that this advantage disappears when it comes to government congruence (the ideological distance between the government and the median citizen). Although research on citizen-elite ideological congruence has made significant progress over the last two decades, several new lines of inquiry are still worth pursuing. One is to move beyond the traditional focus on the left–right ideological dimension to evaluate citizen representation in a truly multidimensional framework. Another is to develop a unified theoretical framework for thinking about ideological congruence and ideological responsiveness. For too long, scholars have conducted studies of citizen-elite congruence and responsiveness in relative isolation, even though they address fundamentally related issues. In terms of measurement issues, progress can be made by developing better instruments to help locate citizens and elites on a common metric and paying more attention to the policymaking dynamics associated with minority and coalition governments. Existing studies of ideological congruence focus on the United States and the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe. Scholars might fruitfully extend the study of citizen representation to presidential democracies, other regions of the world, and even authoritarian regimes. Among other things, this may require that scholars think about how to conceptualize and measure citizen representation in countries where parties are not programmatic or where elites are not necessarily elected.

Clarity of voter choices: neglected foundation for ideological congruence

Ideological congruence between voters and governments is desirable, the wisdom goes, because it implies enactment of policies close to those preferred by voters. Party polarization plays a paradoxical role here: more polarization reduces voter-government congruence if parties making up a government move away from the center-ground where most individual voters are located; yet increasing polarization permits those governments’ policies to become more distinct in the eyes of voters. This paper investigates how political system clarity helps to resolve this paradox. We examine the interplay of several sources of clarity and, in particular, of the joint role of party and voter polarization. We argue and find that, if polarization of survey respondents increases in step with party polarization, this provides clarity that can override party polarization’s negative effect on voter-government congruence. But other types of clarity also play important roles in accounting for the range of values that congruence takes on.

3. Voting Behaviour

This chapter examines theories and evidence of voting behaviour in Europe. Sociological models examine the role of political cleavages such as class in the development of long-term attachments between parties and voters. Rationalist models examine the sources of short-term changes in voting behaviour with spatial models focusing on the ideological congruence between parties and voters and performance voting models emphasizing evaluations of incumbent records in office. Recent decades have seen debates about a possible realignment of voter loyalties or a dealignment of voter attachments. The final section focuses on how the legacy of communism has structured the development of voting behaviour in East-Central Europe.

The Politics of Loyalty: Understanding Voters’ Attitudes after Primary Elections

What happens after primary elections? Strategies of loyalty or defection in general elections have been addressed by US literature mainly by means of aggregate data. However, we lack similar studies in non-US contexts. This article investigates the strategies followed after primary elections by taking the case of the Italian Partito Democratico as an illustration. We addressed the individual drivers of loyalty or defection strategies by considering three different dimensions: (1) the outcome of the primary election, having backed a winning or losing candidate; (2) the strength of partisanship, meant as ideological congruence with the party and partisan involvement; and (3) the leader effect. We relied on four surveys (exit polls) administered during party leadership selections held in 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2019. The results suggest that all three dimensions have an influence on post-primary strategies, but what counts the most is partisan involvement.