Coping with Complexity: How Voters Adapt to Unstable Parties - Softcover

Marinova, Dani

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785522604 ISBN 13: 9781785522604

Verlag: ECPR Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

This book examines how voters cope with the complexity triggered by party instability.

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By Dani Marinova

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Coping With Complexity

How Voters Adapt to Unstable Parties

By Dani Marinova

ECPR Press

Copyright © 2016 Dani Marinova
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78552-260-4

Contents

List of Figures and Tables, 
List of Abbreviations, 
Acknowledgements, 
Chapter One – Coping with Complexity: Introduction to the Research Problem, 
Chapter Two – Voting in Complex Information Environments: A Theoretical Framework, 
Chapter Three – Electoral Instability in Parties: Concept, Measurement and Dynamics, 
Chapter Four – Seeking Information: Voter Knowledge of Party Positions, 
Chapter Five – Heuristics for Unstable Parties: How Voters Cope, 
Chapter Six – Judging Competence: The Economic Vote, 
Chapter Seven – Conclusion: A New Look at Old Theories, 
Appendix: Party Instability Data, 
Appendix to Chapter Four, 
Appendix to Chapter Six, 
Appendix: Party Names, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Coping with Complexity: Introduction to the Research Problem

Imagine you were a voter in Greece's election in January of 2015. The election was historic; it brought about the first radical-left government in Europe's post-war history. It was also highly dynamic. The party system was undergoing profound transformation over the previous electoral cycles in 2012 and into 2015. Consider that for decades Greece was essentially a two-party system, with PASOK and New Democracy sharing roughly 80 per cent of the popular vote. Their share was reduced to 40 per cent in 2012 and to just 30 per cent in 2015. Since then, a dozen or so parties have been created, most of them splinters from PASOK or New Democracy (e.g., Pact for a New Greece (PASOK splinter), Union for the Homeland and the People (ND splinter) and Plan B (SYRIZA splinter)). Political personalities, like TV presenter Stavros Theodorakis, also launched new parties that proved to be electorally successful despite their vague policy stances. Some of these parties went on to merge or form joint lists with other newcomers (e.g., the newly formed splinter Reformers for Democracy and Development and Theodorakis' The River). The 2012 and 2015 elections saw some of the most colourful, and most fragmented, distribution of parliamentary seats in modern Greek history.

This book is not concerned so much with the success of new and transformed parties as it is with the electoral complexity that party changes generate for voters. Consider that a Greek voter in 2015 could not rely on his or her stored knowledge or past experiences with political parties in the same way that a Greek voter could in the 2004 or 2007 parliamentary elections. In the latter, the main contenders were long-standing parties with whose policies and performance records voters were closely familiar. In 2015 in contrast, a voter would need to seek out information on the largely unknown new and transformed party organisations, including their ideology, policy positions and competences. How do voters cope with the electoral complexity triggered by instability in party organisations? And what are the implications for democratic representation in elections?

This book is about how voters make decisions. It looks particularly at how voters seek out information, apply decision-making heuristics and elect viable policy makers. I offer a novel answer to these old questions by taking into account the quality and the diffusion of information in elections. I argue that political parties are central to structuring and communicating electoral information. Parties organise messy, 'raw' information about ideology, policy goals and competences into a coherent set of electoral alternatives. Thanks to the informational cues that parties offer, voters are able to access information at a low cognitive cost and to choose readily viable policy makers. When parties undergo abrupt organisational changes between elections – e.g., when they fuse, split, or take part in or abandon party joint lists – they profoundly alter the organisation and supply of electoral information. The electoral alternatives on the ballot are no longer fixed or presented as such to the voter but need to be actively sought out and cognitively constructed instead. Regular citizens need to do more of the work in acquiring, attributing and processing electoral information. I argue that this has important consequences for electoral behaviour. Namely, voters cope with the complexity of such electoral races by acquiring relatively little information in elections and by using an alternative set of low-information heuristics to discern and decide between parties.

Insights on the facilitating role of parties in voter decision-making allow me to shift attention to the principal actors who provide voters with cues in elections — political parties — and to reexamine the theories predominantly used to understand electoral behaviour from this new perspective. Extant explanations of the differences in information seeking and electoral decision-making have predominantly focused on voters' characteristics (e.g., level of education) and institutional setups (e.g., electoral institutions). Important as they are, these factors nonetheless neglect that voters rely on political parties to simplify public choices effectively. Party instability has received considerable academic attention in the study of electoral and party systems; yet its effects on the electoral information environment and on voters' decision-making have thus far not been well understood. A closer look at the impact of party instability on the vote promises to advance our extant knowledge of voter behaviour and to qualify quintessential theories of vote choice, including proximity voting (Downs 1957), direction-intensity appeals (Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989), economic voting (Powell and Whitten 1993), the use of informational heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman 1974) and dual-processing theories (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). The empirical analyses rely on survey, party and national data from a large set of European elections, from both advanced industrialised and young democracies. The rich and nuanced findings illustrate that political parties hold a key to understanding electoral behaviour and representation in modern democracy.

Parties and party instability in representative democracy

Change in political parties is commonplace in modern democracies. Nearly five decades ago Carl Friedrich observed (1968):

Party development is more highly dynamic than any other sphere of political life; there is no final rest, no ultimate pattern ... Rather, there is constant change in one direction or another, with never a return to that starting point (p. 452).

Party instability – or the organisational changes parties undergo between electoral cycles – is a phenomenon which is just as relevant in the study of electoral politics today as it was in 1968 (Birch 2001; Mair 1997; Mair et al. 2004; Powell and Tucker 2014; Sikk 2005; 2012). What is more, changes in party organisations are frequent in old and new democracies alike. Instability has become common in the consolidated party systems of West Europe. It marks a process of electoral dealignment that initiated in the 1970s and 1980s (Maguire 1983; Mair et al. 2004). Party instability is also a defining feature of the new party systems in Central and Eastern Europe (Bielasiak 2002; Sikk 2005; Tavits 2008a). It has been critical to understanding politics in the region and has received ample academic attention.

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECPR Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785522604
• ISBN 13: 9781785522604
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 170
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland