A New Politics dimension of non‐economic issue preferences emerged in Denmark during the 1980s. The new dimension is clearly separated from the traditional economic Old Politics dimension, though the two are correlated. The New Politics dimension has not given rise to viable new parties but is represented by three medium‐sized parties: the Sodalist People's and Radical Liberal parties constitute the New Left, and the Progressive Party constitutes the New Right. The three old class parties contribute little towards explaining the individual variance in the position of New Politics; as always, the Social Democratic Party represents the Old Left while the Liberal and Conservative parties represent the Old Right. In terms of social positions, New Left attitudes are correlated especially with level of school education and with employment in the reproductive sectors.
Economic issue effects (“sociotropic” effects) are found to eclipse “pocketbook” effects on the vote for shifting Danish governments in cross‐section surveys of the general elections of 1987. 1990 and 1994. Voter stands on the economic issue, Denmark's economic conditions, are in turn affected by left‐right orientation and by images of the competing governments as managers of the economy and in the aggregate differ markedly from real economic growth.
The concept of party identification has proved useful in the analysis of political behavior in two ways. At the practical level it adds information about the forces affecting the voter's decision beyond the knowledge we obtain from ascertaining his voting preference. It contributes to predictions of a wider range of political behavior in space and time than does reported voting behavior or intended vote at a specific election. We would expect strength oE party identification to be indicative of the stability of voting patterns from election to election. Moreover, we would expect that party identifiers would play a more active role in politics than non-identifiers.The second advantage of the concept is that it opens up theoretical possibilities for the analysis of political behavior in its assumption of long-term forces that predispose the individual to consistently favor a party and its candidates. The specific events and the particular candidates constitute short-term forces. The long-and short-term forces interact to produce the outcome of the specific election. Party identification as a major long-term factor is easy to identify and measure, but short-term forces such as issues, critical events in a campaign, differential resources and their effective employment present more of a problem. Finally the interaction of the two sets o€ forces presents even greater difficulties. Often, however, people themselves provide the clues for how conflicting forces interact, for they have to integrate, or compromise, or aggregate these influences in reaching a decision. For example, many Democratic identifiers in the USA in 1952 and 1956 voted for Eisenhower not because they perceived him as a Republican but because they saw him as a national leader standing above the political arena. In this fashion they assimilated the short-term force of the Eisenhower personality into the long-term partisan identification and proceeded to vote for Democrats on
This chapter explores the consequences of beliefs about the scope of political support with a view to explaining the possible loss of political support in advanced democracies. Its main hypothesis is that policy distance—the distance between a voter's policy position and the actual policy of the government—reduces support for the political system. The analysis first examines the nature of this relationship, and then develops it in three ways: first, by introducing controls for party choice; second, by investigating whether it holds only for specific policy fields; third, by testing the further hypothesis that, in practice, it is ‘negative distance’—the tendency to demand ‘more’ rather than ‘less’ government, which accounts for the low level of support in countries with a low aggregate level of support. The evidence suggests that the fulfilment of public expectations and the securing of public support is likely to be a much bigger problem for governments of the less economically advanced societies.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the changing cleavage lines in Danish politics as reflected in people's perceptions of and votes for the various political parties in the system. The focus is on “change” between the 1971 and 1973 elections and what cause this change. Multidimensional scaling techniques help to uncover the differing cleavage lines in Danish politics in the 1971 and 1973 elections and to give us some understanding of the voting patterns underlying them. Direct analysis of correlates of the vote further specifies the causal factors involved in 1971 and 1973 in forming these different cleavage structures. Implications of these findings for the future of the Danish political system are then discussed.
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