The consequences of appearing divided: An analysis of party evaluations and vote choice

Greene, Zachary; Haber, Matthias

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2014.11.002

Cited by 94 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

100

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Instead, they focus on party performance and perhaps constituency service. 20 Greene and Haber 2015;Kam 2009, ch 6. 8 negatively evaluate acts of dissent from that MP, because such actions damage the party brand.…”

Section: Conditional Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legislator Dissent as a Valence Signal

Campbell

Cowley

Vivyan

et al. 2016

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We discuss how our findings apply to other contexts in more detail in the conclusion. 16 We begin the article by outlining the mechanisms through which dissent may affect voter evaluations of their representative. We then present the results from our three studies, beginning with the observational data before moving on to the experimental studies. We conclude by considering the broader implications of our findings. Theory and expectationsDrawing on existing literature, we consider three mechanisms through which dissent may affect constituent evaluations of their legislative representative. Dissent could: (1) Profile effectsThe profile effects hypothesis, suggested as one possible mechanism by Kam, contends that dissenting legislators receive electoral benefits due to their enhanced media profile. 17 This increases their name recognition, which in turn leads to greater constituent approval and more support at the polls, for example via the recognition heuristic. 18 If any increased electoral success of dissenting legislators is wholly the result of such effects, then constituents do not in fact react to independentmindedness directly at all. 19 Conditional evaluationsIn contrast, conditional evaluation accounts posit that dissent can have a direct impact on voter evaluations of a legislator, but that the nature of this effect depends on the nature and context of the dissent and on the particular preferences of the voter. The predictions regarding voters who identify with a party other than that of their MP ('opposing partisans') are more ambiguous: these voters may be indifferent to dissent from their MP, or may even have particularly positive evaluations of dissent, inasmuch as it damages the brand of a party that competes with their own. Finally, non-partisans may also react particularly positively to dissent, if many such voters have a general dislike for partisan politics. 22Such partisan assessments of dissent need to be distinguished from a subtly different type of conditionality which also relates to voter partisanship, and which we label partisan crowding out.This refers to Kam's argument that when voters with strong partisan attachments come to evaluate an individual politician, party-related considerations (including the party affiliation of that politician) tend to dominate so that there is little or no room left for any other information about the politician -such as their dissent behaviour -to have any impact. 23 In contrast, the individual attributes of a politician ...

show abstract

Section: Conditional Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legislator Dissent as a Valence Signal

Campbell

Cowley

Vivyan

et al. 2016

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Our model links promises made by the party leadership to the preferences of voters and of the party rank-and-file-we make no presumptions as to how electoral promises map into actual party behavior. A second option to derive measures of party policy ambiguity is to make use of expert surveys (e.g., Rovny 2012; Greene and Haber 2015). Here, experts are either asked directly after their perceived level of dissent within parties or heterogeneity is proxied by the variation in party policy positions perceived by the experts.…”

Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Ambiguity of Party Positions in Multi-Party Competition

Bräuninger¹,

Giger²

2016

PSRM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Party competition is largely about making policy promises to voters. We argue that the clarity of the expressed policy position may be equally important. If blurred messages toward different audiences and therefore ambiguous positions can attract votes from different groups, parties have incentives to present ambiguous rather than clear-cut policy platforms. We present a formal model of multi-party competition with stochastic voting where party leaders make strategic choices on both the position and the level of ambiguity of their platforms. Leaders respond to the demands of two principals, the general public and party core constituencies. We derive two hypothesis on the location and ambiguity of party platforms and provide initial tests of these hypotheses in a comparative setting in 14 Western European democracies gathering data on voter and party left-right positions from Eurobarometer surveys and electoral manifestos. Ambiguity of party profiles is estimated using a variant of Wordscores on a newly established data set of electoral manifestos. We find that platforms become more ambiguous as the preferences of the two principals diverge. Our findings imply that ambiguity can be a winning strategy for parties, especially in settings with strong partisan lines.

show abstract

“…Party unity is the extent to which a party's goal is unified (Greene and Haber, 2015), that is, the extent to which in a given situation 'group members can be observed to work together for the group's goal in one and the same way' (Ö zbudun, 1970: 305). This additionally involves the unity of action among party members as observed at party conventions or the parliament (e.g.…”

Section: Perceptions Of Intra-party Conflict As Dependent Variablementioning

confidence: 99%

‘The enemy within’: Campaign attention and motivated reasoning in voter perceptions of intra-party conflict

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In spite of broad interest in internal party dynamics, with previous literature relatedly demonstrating that voters are not oblivious to party infighting, very little attention has been paid to the antecedents of voter perceptions of intra-party conflict. This article addresses this research deficit with the support of empirical evidence gathered over the course of the 2017 Austrian national election campaign. The study examines variations in perceived intra-party conflict over time, both across parties and within the same party. We find that although voter perceptions largely mirror actual distinctions in intra-party fighting, conspicuous individual-level variations can also be identified owing to attention to the election campaign and motivated reasoning in information processing. These results have important consequences for our understanding of voter perceptions of intra-party conflict and the role of election campaigns, with potential implications for party strategies during election campaigns.

show abstract

The consequences of appearing divided: An analysis of party evaluations and vote choice

Cited by 94 publications

References 37 publications

Legislator Dissent as a Valence Signal

Legislator Dissent as a Valence Signal

Strategic Ambiguity of Party Positions in Multi-Party Competition

‘The enemy within’: Campaign attention and motivated reasoning in voter perceptions of intra-party conflict

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About