Interest in comparative research on voting behavior has exploded during the last ten years and rational choice institutionalism has been breaking new ground. The advantage of rational choice theories in general is that they focus on motivations among individuals, while the sociologically rooted models of voting behavior often concentrate more on contextual explanations and group characteristics (Johnson, Shively, and Stein 2002).93 According to rational choice institutionalism, formal or informal institu-tions create an incentive based structure for bounded rationality (Downs 1957; Gordon and Segura 1997; Norris 2004). The outcome is thus de-pendent on a combination of individual preferences and the rules that gov-ern the game, where the latter are assumed to be exogenous to individual behavior (Johnson 2002). Individuals are hence expected to be interacting with the contexts.94
How can contextual factors related to political parties, party systems and electoral systems affect individual behavior? A vast field of research focuses on various motivational and facilitative determinants behind voting behavior (see Franklin 1996; Franklin, van der Eijk, and Oppenhuis 1996 for a further discussion).95 Research has shown that voters are motivated or
93 The word rational is here used in the same manner as Downs where a voter is acting ra-tionally when s/he is comparing different policy alternatives given the information that is available and voting for the party or candidate that most closely resembles the voter’s prefer-ences (Downs 1957).
94 To assume exogeneity is not unproblematic. As an example, it can be discussed whether it is the proportional formula itself that tends to create more fragmented party systems or do divided societies prefer proportional rather than more majoritarian systems (Johnson 2002;
Norris 2004).
95 In this respect Franklin makes a division between instrumental motivation, resources and mobilization instead of facilitative and motivational factors. Among the factors behind in-strumental motivation we have contextual explanations such as the degree of proportionality in the electoral system. Resources are referred to as mainly being individual characteristics
facilitated by a number of individual characteristics such as party identifi-cation, eduidentifi-cation, age and sex (Campbell, et al. 1960; Holmberg and Oscarsson 2004). We also know that voters are affected by various party characteristics such as party size (van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999), party age (van der Brug, Franklin, Popescu, and Toka 2008) and ideological affiliation (Snyder 2002).
Other studies have shown that different electoral systems affect both parties and the party systems (Duverger 1954; Lijphart 1994b; Rae 1967;
Sartori 1976) but they may also result in different motivations for voters (Gordon and Segura 1997; Granberg and Holmberg 1988; Holmberg 2006). For example, proportional systems are known for producing multi-party systems with cohesive ideologically committed parties and tend to motivate prospective voting according to the RPM. Majority systems on the other hand, are known to produce more stable two-party systems where votes tend to be retrospectively based according to the accountability model (Granberg and Holmberg 1988). Aside of Granberg and Holmberg's pioneering work, studies on how different contextual factors may affect individual voters are rare. Studies that have investigated the effect of toral systems on individual voters have mostly focused on effects on elec-toral turn out (Bingham Powell 1986; van der Eijk, Franklin, and al. 1996), satisfaction with the democratic system (Farrell and McAllister 2006; Nor-ris 2004) or party choice (van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999).
Less is known about the effect of different contextual factors on voters’
perceptions of party positions.
Different institutional or contextual factors can be expected to have mo-tivational or/and facilitative effects on the perceptions of individual voters.
Motivational factors will thus induce voters to obtain information from certain directions about the political parties while a facilitative factor will simplify this process. Both motivational and facilitative factors can then be expected to affect the voters’ perceptions of the party positions in form of decreasing perceptual deviations.
This section will concentrate on contextual factors that are expected to have either motivational or facilitative consequences for perceptual devia-tion among voters. Hypothetically, we believe that factors derived from different organizational levels such as systems, parties and individuals will have a direct impact on voters’ perceptual deviation and further, that the
such as education or age. Mobilization in turn is referred to as factors related to the electoral campaign such as saliency of different issues etc. (Franklin 1996). The data on which the present study is based unfortunately does not allow us to include any variables relating to mobilization, which is why only facilitative and motivational factors will be used. Facilitative factors thus refer to the same category of variables as does the term resources.
effect of the individually related factors might be interacting with the po-litical context.
Figure 1 illustrates the theoretical relationship between these three classes of independent variables and their expected impact on PD.
Figure 1. The theoretical relationship between individual, party and system-related factors and voters’ perceptual deviation.
System-related factors
Party-related factors
Individually-related factors
Perceptual deviation
The institutional context - electoral systems and party systems A common notion within the literature is that the adoption of either pro-portional- or more majoritarian formulas creates different sets of incentives that structures rational vote-seeking politicians to either emphasize pro-grammatic or particularistic benefits during the election campaigns (Farrell 1997; Norris 2004). The idea is that the degree of proportionality or the size of voting districts affects the degree of national competitiveness, which often has dramatic consequences for how parties organize. Large propor-tional districts tend to correlate with more centralized party organization, which in turn should induce more programmatically orientated parties (Bingham Powell 1986; Farrell 1996). In this context, one can talk about the deployment of bridging or bonding strategies whereby party leaders and candidates respectively appeal to either a majority of the voters by downplaying ideological differences or specific groups of voters by empha-sizing ideological differences and positions (Norris 2004).
Proportional systems with a strong focus on cohesive parties thus may correspond better with representation according to the RPM, where voters vote prospectively for parties according to their policy preferences. More majoritarian systems on the other hand, may contribute to greater strains of government accountability and retrospective voting as these systems tend to emphasize single candidates and strong governments (Holmberg 2006;
Sartori 1997). Chin and Taylor-Robinson (2004) have investigated the ef-fect of electoral rules on voting behavior and showed that voters indeed are sensitive to different incentive structures produced by differences in the electoral systems. The results from an experimental study showed that, de-pending on the electoral rules, respondents sought different kinds of infor-mation. In single member districts, respondents tended to acquire informa-tion about candidates rather than parties while the opposite was true for proportional systems (Chin and Taylor-Robinson 2004). This leads to the expectation that the degree of perceptual deviation among voters when placing parties on an ideological left-right scale, will be lower among voters in more proportional political systems since there we can expect a greater focus on political parties and ideologies (among both voters and politi-cians).
According to Jacques Thomassen (1999), the effectiveness of the respon-sible party model is also dependent on the dimensionality within a political system. Unidimensional belief systems are desired characteristics of repre-sentative democracies since political representation may be difficult to ob-tain if idiosyncratic sets of policy preferences motivate the decisions of vot-ers. A simple and unidimensional political system however, is not sufficient
by itself. According to Thomassen, it also needs to resemble a left-right di-mension. Ideology here constitutes a channel of communication between citizens and their elected representatives, where the left-right positions of parties work as efficient cognitive cues for voters in search of information (see also Dahlberg and Oscarsson 2006).
Political parties are among the key carriers of continuity, values and ide-ologies in a representative system (Dalton 1985; Hoffman 2005; Katz and Mair 1995). Political parties, rather than single candidates, are also the main actors in most modern representative systems (Dalton 1985; Gran-berg and HolmGran-berg 1988; Katz and Mair 1995). If voters are to be repre-sented satisfactorily, a ‘breadth of alternatives’ is also an important aspect.
It has for example been argued that an increase in the number of parties leads to a more diverse representation of values (John M. Carey quoted from Hoffman 2005), minority groups (Lijphart 1999) and women (Norris 2004). Predictably, a situation of increased political options should increase the motivation of voters to seek information about political parties. A high degree of party system fragmentation should also encourage the parties to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the competitors in an at-tempt to mobilize their electoral support (Downs 1957). The effective number of competing parties thus may be an important causal force behind the deviations in voters' perceptions and thereby also a prerequisite for ef-fective representation. A greater diversity of choices, can thus be expected to elicit a greater motivation from voters and at the same time, it will place pressure on the parties to profile themselves more clearly in terms of ideol-ogy. However, if the number of parties becomes so high that no single party is likely to attain a majority of the votes and if a large number of smaller parties make up the legislature, then the voters may feel anyhow that they are unrepresented (Hoffman 2005); more alternatives then will simply raise the information cost. Circumstantially, less can be more while more can be too much (see Downs 1957 for a further discussion). Hypo-thetically, the number of parties will have an effect on perceptual deviation among voters, but empirically it remains a question as to exactly how. One theoretical answer is that fewer parties facilitate whilst more of them serve to motivate.
Earlier studies have shown that intense competition by parties for the
‘same’ voters, will affect voters' desire to participate (Franklin, van der Eijk, and Oppenhuis 1996). It is expected that party leaders will face incen-tives to mobilize their voters in situations where voters are likely to distrib-ute support among a variety of parties. This in turn can be expected to both motivate voters and to facilitate their acquiring political information.
Looking at leadership, a high degree of competition will influence leading politicians to lean towards bonding (‘us from them’) strategies. In this re-spect ideological undertones and statements might be of great importance
in an attempt to motivate voters to go to the polls and support their party.
The use of bonding strategies thus may imply that voters become more af-fectively linked to the political parties, which will increase the assimilation and contrast effects, and thereby the PD as well. However, from a voter perspective a high degree of competition among parties may also work to facilitate a decrease in voters’ perceptual deviation. If a high degree of party competition means that the parties are trying to position themselves as clearly as possible from their competitors, then voters may find it easier to perceive accurately the positions of parties within these contexts.
The party related context
Another criteria asserted by the RPM is that the parties should maintain divergent policy positions in order to give meaningful electoral choices to the voters. For example, the directional theory of voting assumes that vot-ers mostly are unable to perceive slight differences in the positions held by the parties on different issues. It is expected that parties with well separated views or holding an extreme position in an issue dimension will hold an advantage over parties with conformist and/or centrist positions because they can convey their messages more persistently and with a high visibility (Gilljam 1997; Macdonald, Listhaug, and Rabinowitz 1991; Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989; Westholm 1997). As such, there is a better chance of the voters correctly apprehending the party’s policy position.
Prior research established that the electoral size of a party may be a deci-sive factor in settling a voter’s choice party (Cox 1997; Holmberg 2004;
van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999). It has also been suggested that larger parties present different affective features, often adopting a more “catch-all” or vague ideological posture (Dittrich 1983; Kirchheimer 1990). If bigger parties tend be less distinctive in their ideological positions, a party’s electoral size can be expected to have implications for the clarity of voters’ perceptions.
We also know that parties are more or less attached to different ideo-logical dimensions (Budge 1994; Budge, Robertson, and Hearl 1987). Since the present article focuses upon the left-right dimension it may be a good idea to include a variable for different party families in the analysis, so that parties or countries that are less attached to this dimension not are dis-criminated against. It is reasonable that left-right proximity voting would be promoted in systems where many of the parties have ideologies that are directly connected to the left-right dimension. Parties of those sort often have brand names such as ‘social democrat’, ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ that unambiguously signal their position on the continuum (Budge et al. 2001).
It has been demonstrated that these labels sometimes works as cues for
vot-ers when acquiring information about policies or left-right positions (Sny-der 2002; Zechmeister 2006) and ideological affiliation thus may guide the voters, thereby promoting a lower PD.
Considering the role of left-right ideology as a guide, one might object that the content of dimension has become more heterogeneous during the last decades in, at least, several West European countries (Knutsen 1995).96 With greater complexity, it cannot be taken for granted that newer parties, perhaps less attached to the traditional left-right dimension, are being cor-rectly characterized by voters in terms of the left-right scale. The survival of the left-right dimension over the centuries however, is due to its strength as an overarching ‘super issue’, capable of incorporating many dimensions of political conflict (Holmberg 2009; Knutsen 1995; Thomassen 1999; van der Eijk, Schmitt, and Binder 2005). As noted, knowledge about a party’s left-right position can be used as a pointer to the party’s stances on other issues as well. Of course, a party’s position on a specific issue could inform inversely about the position on the left-right dimension but the left-right schema works best as a complexity reducing mechanism for understanding and interpreting different political matters.
The left-right grammar has an important orientation function for indi-viduals and a communicative function for the political system overall (Fuchs and Klingemann 1990; Knutsen 1995). Since the substantial content of the left-right dimension is set in steadily development, newer parties may not be discriminated as such. However, it is still reasonable to expect that voters in general, may find it easier to place parties on a left-right scale where the brand names reveal their positions on the same scale.
Another factor that may assist voters’ decision making is the age of a party since logically it will be easier to know the position of a long estab-lished party due to the greater exposure time. Newer parties also are more likely to repeatedly adjust or change their policies and ideological profiles as they attempt to carve a political niche. Such frequent changes in policies, identity and location will likely be somewhat confusing for voters (Brug 2008). Party age can, hence, be thought of as a proxy for stability of ideo-logical positions.
96 Sweden is in this aspect an exception where the content of the left-right dimension in all essentials not have changed since the mid 70’s and onwards (Oscarsson 2008).