Issue cross-pressures and electoral behavior in Western Europe

Abstract

When citizens' positions on some issues lead them to support one party while their policy preferences on other issues push them toward another party, how will these kinds of voters behave in elections? Since their issue positions lead them to inconsistent parties, compared to citizens whose positions on most issues generally point to the same party, will they rely less on individual issues and more on other cues such as political performance in order to make a decision? Will they have less motivation to go out to vote? Will they switch their voting choices more often between different elections? And will they even delay their voting decisions until the very last polling day? These are the central questions of this research. Elections have long been considered by political scientists as a key element of representative democracy, through which political power is justified by competition for the people's vote. Consequently, without insight into how citizens arrive at their decisions in elections, we cannot fully understand the functioning of democracies. The 'funnel of causality' model developed by the Michigan school is the cornerstone in studying how people vote. It describes a chain of variables that contributes to the vote of a particular political candidate or party , such as long-term factors including socioeconomic backgrounds, historical patterns, and groups' loyalties; and short-term factors such as issues, candidates, political and economic situations, government performance and campaign events. At the entrance of the funnel are the citizens' sociological characteristics that influence the subsequent element: party identification. Party identification, in turn, determines citizens' evaluation of candidates, issue proposals, government performance, etc. The output of this funnel represents citizens' eventual voting choices. As we can see, long-term factors, especially partisanship, are expected to affect the short-term variables and therefore moderate the effects of the short-term variables on voters' decision making. Thus the 'funnel of causality' model clearly puts the importance of longterm factors ahead of short-term factors which affect electoral behavior. Party identification, a psychological attachment to a particular party, in the United States and social cleavages, as politically dividing lines in a society, in most Western 1-Introduction political science. In this dissertation I will answer the following main research question: Do issue cross-pressures influence citizens' different kinds of electoral behavior, and, if so, how? 1.1 Issue cross-pressures: A by-product of the rise of issue orientation To answer the question about the influence of issue cross-pressures on electoral behavior, we should first explore the background of the emergence of issue cross-pressures. The occurrence of issue cross-pressures stems from the decline of partisan politics and the rise of importance of citizens' orientation on specific issues in arriving at their vote choices. Party identification and social cleavage ha...