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.

It is commonplace to see political parties as fundamentally constrained by public opinion. By contrast, this paper argues that party competition amplifies mass ideological polarization over public policy. Specifically, the investigation concerns the relationship between mass-level ideology and ethnic exclusionism (the call for harsh immigration policies). As party competition intensifies, this relationship strengthens. The party competition thesis is tested by performing a comparative study of Denmark and Sweden. Unlike their Danish counterparts, Swedish political parties have, most of the time, refused to take opposed stands on immigration policy. In effect, the empirical data show that the individual-level association between self-reported ideology and ethnic exclusionism is considerably stronger in Denmark than in Sweden. To investigate the party competition effect in depth, both longitudinal analyses and a cross-sectional analysis are performed. Data cover the period 1990-2008.