This article aims to investigate under which circumstances policy representation can exist in terms of agreement in voters' perceptions of parties' left–right positions. The focal point in the study is on how voters' perceptions are affected not only by individual characteristics but also by various contextual factors related to the political parties and the political systems. With data from the CSES on individual voters and various system characteristics from election surveys in 32 countries, this article shows that what in earlier findings have appeared as national context effects rather are party effects when being decomposed. System related variables have only a small impact on voters' perceptions while the party- followed by the individually related variables exerted the greatest impact.

Segnalazione bibliografica. Autore: Ruth Dassonneville Acta Politica 47, 18-41 (January 2012) Abstract In this article, we investigate voter volatility and analyse the causes and motives of switching vote intentions. We test two main sets of variables linked to volatility in literature; political sophistication and political disaffection. Results show that voters with low levels of political efficacy tend to switch more often, both within a campaign and between elections. In the analysis, we differentiate between campaign volatility and inter-election volatility, and by doing so show that the dynamics of a campaign have a profound impact on volatility. The campaign period is when the lowly...

This study suggests that performance voting is characterised by extensive individual heterogeneity. Most economic voting studies to date treat voters as rather homogeneous in their reactions to economic performance of incumbents. Yet, a large and well-established line of research from the American context demonstrates the conditional impact of political sophistication and salience on voters' political attitudes and behaviour. Building on this work, this article explores individual-level variation in performance voting due to political sophistication and salience. Utilising cross-national data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) including 25 democracies, performance voting is examined across an array of policy areas including the economy, social welfare, immigration and national security, and it is shown that political sophistication and salience are key moderators of performance voting. The findings suggest that holding governments to account for past performance is mainly the prerogative of the highly sophisticated and thus may be more laborious than previously assumed. At the same time, the results indicate that the sophistication gap in performance voting narrows when voters attach a higher degree of salience to a policy area. As long as voters care enough about government activities in a particular policy area, incumbents can expect credit or blame for policy outcomes. This should provide at least some impetus for responsive policy making.

This article focuses on the electoral strategies of state-wide parties (SWPs) with regard to centre–periphery issues in regional elections. It applies Meguid’s Position–Salience–Ownership (PSO) theory to regional electoral competition in Spain and the United Kingdom. We anticipate that SWPs will seek to vary their strategies, especially in regional elections where they face fierce competition from regionalist parties. We also expect their strategies to be influenced by the SWPs' strategy in state-wide elections. The analysis reveals that the key assumptions of the PSO stack up quite well when applied to regional elections. It also reveals the influence of the multi-layered institutional context in which SWPs compete: at the regional level, said parties do not necessarily adopt the most logical strategy according to the PSO theory if this runs counter to the prevailing SWP strategy at the state-wide level.

Segnalazione bibliografica. Autori: Kosuke Imai e Dustin Tingley American Journal of Political Science 56(1), 218-236 (January 2012) Abstract Empirical testing of competing theories lies at the heart of social science research. We demonstrate that a well-known class of statistical models, called finite mixture models, provides an effective way of rival theory testing. In the proposed framework, each observation is assumed to be generated either from a statistical model implied by one of the competing theories or more generally from a weighted combination of multiple statistical models under consideration. Researchers can then estimate the probability that a specific observation is consistent with each rival theory....