Parties and Voters Flashcards
What is the sociological model for why voters have attachments to parties?
Dominant social divisions contain varying parcels of historical experiences, socializing influences and material interest, and these experiences become matched to the policies expressed by a particular political party (Clarke et al, 2004)
Party identification originally said to be acquired as a result of childhood and adolescent socialisation experiences within family and other primary group settings (Clarke et al, 2004)
Social characteristics, social contexts and social psychology drive political preference
How has class been a politically relevant social cleavage in Britain.
Class provides beliefs, cues, interests, and values to members, and class identities and interests are the foundations of partisan attachments and reflected in images projected by political parties. Labour’s commitment to redistributive policies and the welfare state, together with its trade-union associations, have distinguished it as the party of the working class. In contrast, the Conservative Party’s commitment to property rights and business enterprise has helped to forge the link between itself and the middle class. (Clarke et al, 2004)
In Butler and Stoke’s account, party identification converts social class locations into long-term party support (Clarke et al, 2004)
According to Letki (2013), what social cleavages are politically relevant in Poland?
- In Poland, the expectation has been that apart from social position and economic status, religiosity (due to the strength of the Catholic Church during and after communism), and the cultural inheritance of the historical regions will play a significant role in explaining political choices. (Letki, 2013)
- Studies in Poland show that rather than declining in relevance over time, political competition has gained a class basis over time and class became a relevant predictor of voters’ choice in Poland in the mid-2000s. However, when control variables such as gender, age and education are added to the model the effect of class on voting choices disappears almost entirely (Letki, 2013).
What is the standard model of rational decision making for why voters have attachments to parties?
Standard model of rational decision-making incorporates a utility-maximising strategy: ranks all the alternatives based on what is preferred and chooses from the alternatives that which ranks the highest (Clarke et al, 2004)
What is the valence model of individuality for why voters vote for certain parties?
Public opinion is skewed heavily towards ‘good’ outcomes, notably peace, probity, and prosperity
If voters think that the incumbent party has performed well (inflation or unemployment declines and ‘utility’ measured by prosperity improves) then, they reward it for ‘good times’ and when voters think the incumbent has performed poorly, they punish it for ‘bad times’
What is the issue-position model of individuality for why voters have attachments to parties?
An issue must meet three criteria to affect voting and the outcome of an election. A voter must have a position on an issue, competing parties must have clearly different policies on the issue, and the voter must be able to link his or her position to the policy of one of the parties
Parties establish track records of dealing with a specific set of issues when in office. Parties claim issue ownership and build policy reputations that become widely recognised by voters.
A party mobilises its supporters by emphasising its issues, but not those of other parties and benefits when its issues become salient on the political agenda.
What is the Downsian Spatial Model of individual rationality for why voters have attachments to parties?
Electoral politics takes place on a left-right continuum where voters choose where they are on the continuum and choose the party closest to them on the continuum
How does individual rationality as a reason for voter attachments to parties change slightly in coalition vs single-party governments?
In coalition systems, voters react to changes in economic conditions in a very prospective fashion, taking account of likely party policies in the light of whatever economic problems might be paramount. Their preference for right parties increases when inflation is a problem and their preference for left parties increases when unemployment is a problem, as though they see a party’s ideological stance as a sign of its priorities should it take government office. The retrospective punishment model seems to be a better fit in countries that are characterized by single-party governments (Van der Ejik and Franklin, 2012)
What are some arguments that class is no longer a significant factor in voter identification in the UK?
- Election studies have shown further erosion of the relationship between class and electoral choice in the UK, indicating that class dealignment had become a prominent feature of British electoral politics long before 1997 (Clarke et al, 2004)
- New post-industrial social cleavages are relacing class-based conflict
- Because of a general increase in levels of education and “cognitive mobilization,” identity-based responses to class-based divisions of interest are being replaced by the expression of preferences that reflect voters’ increasing ability to make electoral decisions that are calculative and issue oriented rather than being driven by collective identities
- Values are becoming more important as a basis of party preference and are cross-cutting the impact of social class
- Since the manual working class has declined as a proportion of the electorate, left-wing parties have had to direct their programs toward the concerns of the growing middle classes or face continued electoral defeat
- In 2019, the Conservatives actually did better amongst C2DE voters (48%) than they did amongst ABC1 voters (43%). Labour performed the same amongst both social grade groups (33%). This is in contrasted to what is historically expected.
What are arguments for class still being a relevant determinant of voter identification in the UK?
- Alternative ways of capturing evolving social realities of British political life; different measures of social class and other socioeconomic cleavages such as voter’s consumption and production relations to public and private sectors (Clarke et al, 2004)
- The first wave of the new approaches to class voting (e.g. Heath et al 1985, 1991, Evans et al 1991) modelled class voting in Britain to examine whether trendless fluctuation, a linear trend, or one-off changes best described the pattern of association in class voting over time; subsequent analyses tested for evidence of trends using log multiplicative models (Heath et al 1995). These studies found little evidence of declining class voting and have concluded that trendless fluctuation, or at most a one-off change, in the 1960s best captures the pattern of association in class voting over time. (Evans, 2000)
- One promising argument is that class divisions in political orientations may remain relatively constant, but that because of changing class sizes, parties change their strategies, which eventually changes class-vote relations. (Evans, 2000)
what are some arguments that voter attachments due to sociological model are in decline?
- Inserting party identification as a mediating variable in the social-class electoral choice causal chain is of little help in explaining short- and medium-term change (Clarke et al, 2004)
- We see more important effects of issues and of left-right proximity than social structure in determining party preferences (Van der Ejik and Franklin, 2012)
what are some arguments that voter attachments due to sociological model are not in decline?
- The only consistent and robust evidence of declining class-vote relations is in Scandinavia. generic theories of the decline of class voting and class politics in industrialized societies are empirically unsupported, as by extension are theories that claim that all social structural bases to politics are in decline. (Evans, 2000)
What is Van der Ejik and Franklin’s (2012) theory that there is base support for a party and free voters?
- A cohort that gives strong support to some party when its members are young usually continues to do so in the future and the reverse happens for a cohort that avoids voting for a particular party when its members are young. This results in a baseline vote in any election that is largely set by the electorate’s past history. The same is true for turnout. A high turnout era will tend to perpetuate itself among the cohorts that entered at that time, as will an era in which a turnout was low. Only a portion of the electorate is truly free to vote or not, or to choose any one of the political parties competing for their votes. (Van der Ejik and Franklin, 2012)
- Voters with strong preferences for a single party can be regarded as providing the bedrock support for that party. These are the ‘party faithful’ who will turn out reliably at election after election without the need for appeals from party leaders. Voters with weaker preferences are also more likely to have multiple preferences and are probably only mobilized by election campaigns in which parties vie for their support. Relatively weak first preferences for multiple parties are evidently common among younger voters and may also exist among older voters in societies where political instability has uprooted their established patterns of preferences or prevented patterns of preferences from becoming established
How does generational change affect partisanship?
In the days when party loyalties were largely established on the basis of social group memberships, newly adult voters essentially inherited their partisanship and entered the electorate with their loyalties almost fully formed. In such a world there was little room for change other than as made possible by enlargements of the electorate. A window has opened during young adulthood in which partisan forces for most young adults are much less than they used to be. Because of this development, large swings in support are possible in contemporary electorates without requiring a corresponding enlargement of the electorate. (Van der Ejik and Franklin, 2012)
A cohort that gives strong support to some party when its members are young usually continues to do so in the future and the reverse happens for a cohort that avoids voting for a particular party when its members are young. This results in a baseline vote in any election that is largely set by the electorate’s past history. The same is true for turnout. A high turnout era will tend to perpetuate itself among the cohorts that entered at that time, as will an era in which a turnout was low. Only a portion of the electorate is truly free to vote or not, or to choose any one of the political parties competing for their votes. (Van der Ejik and Franklin, 2012)
declining openness to change beyond young adulthood, an increase in party-issue constraint as age advances, and cohort-specific responsiveness to changes in the partisan environment (Stoker and Jennings, 2009)
What is clientelism?
Clientelism is a political or social system based on the relation of client to patron with the client giving political or financial support to a patron (as in the form of votes) in exchange for some special privilege or benefit
