Does Political Representation through Parties Decrease Voters' Acceptance of Decisions?

Abstract

Are decisions by political parties more or less accepted than direct-democratic decisions? The literature on parties as brand names or labels suggests that the existence of political parties lowers information and transaction costs of voters by providing ideological packages. Building on this important argument, we posit that this informational rationale for parties is not universally applicable and is contingent on the context of the decision that is made. Intermediary political decision-making institutions may impose additional costs on voters in situations where the decision is perceived to be personally important to the individual voter. We conduct an experimental online vignette study to substantiate these claims. The results imply that a combination of representative democracy and direct democracy, conditional on the distribution of issue importance among the electorate, is optimal with regard to acceptance of a decision.Are decisions by political parties more or less accepted than direct-democratic decisions? We conduct an experimental online survey to disentangle voters' procedural acceptance of both decision-making mechanisms and finally compare it to the acceptance of expert committees as a third mode of political decision-making. With our results, we seek to qualify the literature on parties as brand names or labels (e.g., More specifically, we argue that the acceptance of decisions does not vary per se and irrespectively of context between different modes of decision-making. Instead, it is is contingent on the subjective importance that a voter attributes to the issue under consideration, controlling for personal agreement with the outcome of the decision that is made. Previous research indicates that personally important issues increase people's motivation to systematically process arguments. In contrast if they consider an issue of little importance, they tend to rely on partisan cues (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). We argue that if voters' core interests are at stake, they prefer more individual, immediate control over important decisions instead of a decoupling of decisions from the electorate through intermediary decision-makers. Political decisions on topics in which voters are slightly less interested, however, are equally well accepted no matter how the decision comes about, and unimportant political decisions may be best delegated to representatives. We argue that political parties rightly assume their role of lowering transaction costs of voters for everyday decisionmaking, but they do less well in terms of acceptance for important political decisions.Our argument is structured in the following way. The first section compares theoretical arguments in favor of and against the acceptance of decision-making by political parties and direct democracy, respectively. We set out four hypotheses regarding the procedural acceptance of the different decision-making modes. This is followed by a description of the methodology of survey experiments, the setup of our study, the data collection, and our...