When does valence matter? Heightened valence effects for governing parties during election campaigns

Abstract

Empirical election studies conclude that party elites' images with respect to competence, integrity and party unity -attributes that we label character-based valence -affect their electoral support (Stone and Simas, 2010). We compile observations of media reports Downloaded from pertaining to governing party elites' character-based valence attributes, and we relate the content of these reports to mass support for the governing parties. We present pooled, time-series, analyses of party support and valence-related media reports in six European polities which suggest that these reports exert powerful electoral effects during election campaigns but little effect during off-election periods. This finding, which we label the Election Period Valence Effect, is consistent with previous work concluding that citizens are also more attentive to policy-based considerations and to national economic conditions around the time of elections. These findings have implications for political representation and for understanding election outcomes.

Economic Voting under Coalition Governments: Evidence from Germany

“…20 In doing so, we generated a dummy variable that takes a value of 1 if a party represents the interests of the social group to which the voter belongs on the basis of the Lipset and Rokkan (1967) cleavage approach. We take into account the following relationships between social groups and parties: (1) voters who regularly attend church, which should have a close attachment to the Christian Democrats and (2) trade union members, who are traditional supporters of 18 See also Stokes 1963;Stinchcombe 1975;Wattenberg 1991;Evans 1999;Abney et al 2013. 19 See, however, Schmitt-Beck, Weick and Christoph 2006.…”

Valence and satisfaction with democracy: A cross‐national analysis of nine Western European democracies

“…Given these limitations, we rely on an exogenous measure of parties' character‐related valence attributes constructed from content analysis of media‐based news reports (see Abney et al. ; Clark ). To measure parties' character‐valence, we rely on Keesing's Record of World Events , which been published monthly for over 80 years and provides coverage of global events by drawing on worldwide press, wire services and Internet sources.…”

Voter Polarization, Strength of Partisanship, and Support for Extremist Parties

“…3 Because voters generally face significant information constraints in terms of not being able and/or willing to gather all pertinent information to make political decisions, partisan attachment helps voters orient themselves in politics (Brader, Tucker, & Duell, 2010;Ferejohn & Kuklinski, 1990;Lupia, McCubbins, & Popkin, 2000;Popkin, 1991;Zaller, 1992). Valence judgments and other "affective" components have been shown to cause voters to prefer spatially distant parties to more proximate ones (Abney et al, 2013;Clark, 2009; see also Adams & Merrill, 2009;Groseclose, 2001). Given this, however, partisanship may easily lead voters to support positions that differ from those they would have supported if they acquired full and objective information on all parties or candidates (Brader et al, 2010).…”