Continuous Consistent Voting: Individual- and Institutional-Level Predictors of Preference-Aligned Voting in 48 Democracies

Abstract

Scholars have debated whether democracy suits human nature for millennia. Since democracies and people are diverse, some people may be better suited to democracy, and some democratic systems more suited to humanity. This study investigates whether and in what ways this is true. We conceptually replicate and extend Lau et al. (2013) by measuring how closely citizen’s Head-of-State vote choices match their political preferences using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, investigating 147 elections from 48 countries between 1996-2018 (N = 260,282). We explore individual- and institutional-level predictors using a continuous measure of multi-dimensional preference-consistent voting, something hitherto missing from the literature. Efficacy, political sophistication, and age all increase consistency; systems with clear lines of responsibility increase but personal vote incentives decrease consistency. Proportional systems do not increase consistency overall, but in countries with both single-member- and multi-member-district electoral tiers, votes are more consistent in (more-proportional) multi-member tiers.