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 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.

Gallagher, M. (2013). Book review: Personal representation: The neglected dimension of electoral systems. Party Politics, 19(6), 1001–1003. http://doi.org/10.1177/1354068813500704 Vai al sito web

The past few years have seen the advent and proliferation of Voting Advice (or Aid) Applications (VAAs), which offer voting advice on the basis of calculating the ideological congruence between citizens and political actors. Although VAA data have often been used to test many empirical questions regarding voting behaviour and political participation, we know little about the approaches used by VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. This article presents the most common aspects of the VAA approach and examines some methodological issues regarding the phrasing of statements, the format of response scales, the reliability of coding statements into response scales and the reliability and validity of scaling items into dimensions. The article argues that VAAs have a lot of potential but there is also much space for methodological improvements, and therefore concludes with some recommendations for designing VAAs.

We propose a framework for analysing party elite perceptions of voting behaviour based on four party competition and voting behaviour models: the Downsian proximity, saliency, competence and directional models. We analyse whether and to what extent party elite perceptions support these theories of party competition and voting behaviour. Empirical analysis is based solely on internal party documents from two Swedish parties, the Social Democrats and the Conservatives, from 1964 to 1988/1991. We demonstrate that elements of all four party competition models have characterized Swedish party elite thinking and reasoning about voting behaviour in recent decades. Discussion in the Social Democratic elite was most in line with Downs' model. Until the mid-1970s, Downs' model tended to be combined with the competence model and thereafter with the saliency model. The Conservative elite clearly favoured the salience and competence models until the early 1970s and the saliency and Downs' models since then.

While there are many studies on the impact of the economy on elections, there is little evidence on the full mechanism of economic voting implied by performance-based theories of elections. Addressing the scarcity of evidence on the mechanism, this study provides the first estimates of the linkage between macroeconomic performance, individual economic evaluations, and vote choice. Building on recent advances in the statistical analysis of causal mechanisms, we conduct a causal mediation analysis in a data set covering 151 surveys in 18 countries. We find that the effect of economic performance on the incumbent vote is largely accounted for by voters’ retrospective evaluations of the national economy. The effect is stronger in contexts where policymaking power is concentrated rather than dispersed. Altogether, the results imply that the performance-based channel of voting is more relevant in accounting for election outcomes than suggested by recent individual-level studies.