Reevaluating the Influence of Leaders Under Proportional Representation: Quantitative Analysis of Text in an Electoral Experiment

Abstract

We propose that leaders play a more important role in voters’ party sympathy in proportional representation systems (PR) than previous research has suggested. Voters, from the 2018 Swedish General Election, were in an experiment asked to describe leaders and parties with three indicative keywords. Statistical models were conducted on these text data to predict their vote choice. The results show that despite that the voters vote for a party, the descriptions of leaders predicted vote choice to a similar extent as descriptions of parties. However, the order of the questions mattered, so that the first questions were more predictive than the second question. These analyses indicate that voters tend to conflate characteristics of leaders with their parties during election campaigns, and that leaders are a more important aspect of voting under PR than previous literature has suggested. Overall, this suggests that statistical analysis of words sheds new light of underlying sympathies related to voting.

Voters’ view of leaders during the Covid‐19 crisis: Quantitative analysis of keyword descriptions provides strength and direction of evaluations

“…Future studies should further elaborate the link between leadership evaluations and party perceptions more in depth. In this analysis, we used leader evaluations as the dependent variable, but it is very possible that citizens reevaluate their party sympathy depending on party leaders (Fredén and Sikström, 2021). The free text based quantitative semantic analysis suggests that support for parties and leaders are intertwined and potentially even more so during an intense crisis outbreak.…”

“…All countries and respondents in the survey were, to some extent, affected by the crisis. The survey included the unique items where the voter described their PM in two keywords, which has previously been tested only in national election contexts (Fredén and Sikström, 2021). The survey also contained more standard variables such as vote intention, and socio-economic variables.…”