Coping with Complexity

How Voters Adapt to Unstable Parties

Dani Marinova

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785521973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When parties undergo abrupt organisational changes between elections – such as when they fuse, split, join or abandon party lists – they alter profoundly the organisation and supply of electoral information to voters. The alternatives on the ballot are no longer fixed but need to be actively sought out instead. This book examines how voters cope with the complexity triggered by party instability. Breaking with previous literature, it suggests that voters are versatile and ingenious decision-makers. They adapt to informational complexity with a set of cognitively less costly heuristics uniquely suited to the challenges they face. A closer look at the impact of party instability on the vote advances and qualifies quintessential theories of vote choice, including proximity voting, direction-intensity appeals, economic voting and the use of cognitive heuristics. The rich and nuanced findings illustrate that political parties hold a key to understanding voter behaviour and representation in modern democracy.

Chapter One

Coping with Complexity: Introduction to the Research Problem

Imagine you were a voter in Greece's election in January of 2015. The election was historic; it brought about the first radical-left government in Europe's post-war history. It was also highly dynamic. The party system was undergoing profound transformation over the previous electoral cycles in 2012 and into 2015. Consider that for decades Greece was essentially a two-party system, with PASOK and New Democracy sharing roughly 80 per cent of the popular vote. Their share was reduced to 40 per cent in 2012 and to just 30 per cent in 2015. Since then, a dozen or so parties have been created, most of them splinters from PASOK or New Democracy (e.g., Pact for a New Greece (PASOK splinter), Union for the Homeland and the People (ND splinter) and Plan B (SYRIZA splinter)). Political personalities, like TV presenter Stavros Theodorakis, also launched new parties that proved to be electorally successful despite their vague policy stances. Some of these parties went on to merge or form joint lists with other newcomers (e.g., the newly formed splinter Reformers for Democracy and Development and Theodorakis’ The River). The 2012 and 2015 elections saw some of the most colourful, and most fragmented, distribution of parliamentary seats in modern Greek history.

This book is not concerned so much with the success of new and transformed parties as it is with the electoral complexity that party changes generate for voters. Consider that a Greek voter in 2015 could not rely on his or her stored knowledge or past experiences with political parties in the same way that a Greek voter could in the 2004 or 2007 parliamentary elections. In the latter, the main contenders were long-standing parties with whose policies and performance records voters were closely familiar. In 2015 in contrast, a voter would need to seek out information on the largely unknown new and transformed party organisations, including their ideology, policy positions and competences. How do voters cope with the electoral complexity triggered by instability in party organisations? And what are the implications for democratic representation in elections?

This book is about how voters make decisions. It looks particularly at how voters seek out information, apply decision-making heuristics and elect viable policy makers. I offer a novel answer to these old questions by taking into account the quality and the diffusion of information in elections. I argue that political parties are central to structuring and communicating electoral information. Parties organise messy, ‘raw’ information about ideology, policy goals and competences into a coherent set of electoral alternatives. Thanks to the informational cues that parties offer, voters are able to access information at a low cognitive cost and to choose readily viable policy makers. When parties undergo abrupt organisational changes between elections – e.g., when they fuse, split, or take part in or abandon party joint lists – they profoundly alter the organisation and supply of electoral information. The electoral alternatives on the ballot are no longer fixed or presented as such to the voter but need to be actively sought out and cognitively constructed instead. Regular citizens need to do more of the work in acquiring, attributing and processing electoral information. I argue that this has important consequences for electoral behaviour. Namely, voters cope with the complexity of such electoral races by acquiring relatively little information in elections and by using an alternative set of low-information heuristics to discern and decide between parties.

Insights on the facilitating role of parties in voter decision-making allow me to shift attention to the principal actors who provide voters with cues in elections—political parties—and to reexamine the theories predominantly used to understand electoral behaviour from this new perspective. Extant explanations of the differences in information seeking and electoral decision-making have predominantly focused on voters’ characteristics (e.g., level of education) and institutional setups (e.g., electoral institutions). Important as they are, these factors nonetheless neglect that voters rely on political parties to simplify public choices effectively. Party instability has received considerable academic attention in the study of electoral and party systems; yet its effects on the electoral information environment and on voters’ decision-making have thus far not been well understood. A closer look at the impact of party instability on the vote promises to advance our extant knowledge of voter behaviour and to qualify quintessential theories of vote choice, including proximity voting (Downs 1957), direction-intensity appeals (Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989), economic voting (Powell and Whitten 1993), the use of informational heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman 1974) and dual-processing theories (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). The empirical analyses rely on survey, party and national data from a large set of European elections, from both advanced industrialised and young democracies. The rich and nuanced findings illustrate that political parties hold a key to understanding electoral behaviour and representation in modern democracy.

Parties and party instability in representative democracy

Change in political parties is commonplace in modern democracies. Nearly five decades ago Carl Friedrich observed (1968):

Party development is more highly dynamic than any other sphere of political life; there is no final rest, no ultimate pattern… Rather, there is constant change in one direction or another, with never a return to that starting point (p. 452).

Party instability – or the organisational changes parties undergo between electoral cycles – is a phenomenon which is just as relevant in the study of electoral politics today as it was in 1968 (Birch 2001; Mair 1997; Mair et al. 2004; Powell and Tucker 2014; Sikk 2005; 2012).1 What is more, changes in party organisations are frequent in old and new democracies alike. Instability has become common in the consolidated party systems of West Europe. It marks a process of electoral dealignment that initiated in the 1970s and 1980s (Maguire 1983; Mair et al. 2004). Party instability is also a defining feature of the new party systems in Central and Eastern Europe (Bielasiak 2002; Sikk 2005; Tavits 2008a). It has been critical to understanding politics in the region and has received ample academic attention.

As prevalent as party instability is across democracies, its implications for electoral decision-making are not well understood. At least two recent studies have gestured towards the importance of party organisations in explaining vote choice and electoral representation but none has pursued these questions head-on (Ezrow et al. 2014; Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2012). More generally, the facilitating role of political parties in voter information seeking and decision-making has been subject to little empirical scrutiny. Paul Sniderman and colleagues have made convincing arguments for parties’ crucial roles in structuring and communicating electoral information to voters (Brady and Sniderman 1985; Jackman and Sniderman 2002; Sniderman 2000). However, empirical research in electoral behaviour and political psychology has not followed up on Sniderman's theoretical propositions. Instead, it has relied on the unstated assumption that the electoral alternatives on the ballot are equally well defined and continuous over electoral cycles and that parties are equally effective in simplifying and transmitting information across elections. In considering the role of party instability in electoral decision-making, this book seeks to shed light on how decision-making processes unfold in less well-structured electoral spaces.

More fundamentally, this work is an effort to assess the extent to which citizens can make sense of the order of politics and elect parties that represent their interests (cf. Roberts 2009). Taking a step back to broader debates on electoral representation and democracy, we can identify a widespread consensus that free, competitive elections, more than any other feature of the modern nation-state, signal the presence of a democratic political system (Powell 2000, p.4).2 Elections are ‘the instruments of democracy’ so long as they successfully fulfill two functions: citizens elect political parties that will represent them in policymaking; and voters hold incumbents accountable for their performance in office (Lippman 1925; Mill 1958; Powell 2000; Tocqueville 1945). As many scholars have argued elsewhere, the extant literature takes us only so far in understanding why democratic elections link citizens to their representatives in some countries and election years yet do not successfully do so in others (Nadeau et al. 2000; Powell 2004).3 This book places political parties at the centre of electoral representation and accountability as they are critical to both processes. Parties provide the informational cues without which the masses would struggle to discern the ideology, policy goals and competences of competing actors. And without this information, voters are likely to struggle in making the reasoned decisions which form the foundations of a working representative democracy. In considering the role of parties and party instability in voters’ electoral calculus, this book promises to shed new light on the workings and pitfalls of modern democracy.

What is new

A rich literature on electoral behaviour and political psychology informs our understanding of how voters make choices. One of the major breakthroughs in the behavioural social sciences is the advent of cognitive heuristics, for which Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.4 Heuristics were thought to have resolved one of the greatest puzzles in political behaviour – namely, how citizens, generally held to be uninformed and apathetic about public affairs, come to make reasonably good electoral decisions (Lupia and McCubbins 1998; Popkin 1991; Sniderman, Glazer, and Griffin 1990). Though not without their critics (e.g., Bartels 1996), efficient judgmental shortcuts have been generally appreciated for aiding voters make decisions (for a recent review, see Carmines and D'Amico 2015). This book joins several other works in questioning the focus in studying the use of heuristics in electoral decision-making (Brady and Sniderman 1985; Jackman and Sniderman 2002; Sniderman 2000). Much of the scholarly research has narrowed in on citizens’ cognitive resources in facilitating their ability to use heuristics. In contrast to earlier research, this book takes a step back to examine the role of voters’ information environments in facilitating the use of decision-making shortcuts. In particular, it considers how parties structure political conflict into a simplified set of alternatives and communicate these alternatives to voters. Investigating the role of party instability in voters’ information environments helps assess parties’ facilitating roles in voter decision-making and re-examine the importance of citizens’ cognitive abilities in heuristics use. This book thus integrates parties and party systems into the study of heuristics and into theories of vote choice more broadly.

Furthermore, the book speaks to an empirical puzzle which has motivated one of the largest subfields in political behaviour – why electoral accountability is fulfilled only in some elections (Anderson and Hecht 2012; Paldam 1991; Powell and Whitten 1993; Whitten and Palmer 1999).5 Research in economic voting has offered answers ranging from citizens’ demonstrated tendency to form skewed perceptions of systemic outputs and government performance (Nadeau et al. 2000; Nadeau et al. 1999; Sanders and Gavin 2004) to their displayed difficulty gaging which political actors should be held responsible for systemic outputs under complex institutional setups (Powell and Whitten 1993; Whitten and Palmer 1999). Such accounts of the voting calculus focus overly on structural explanations (e.g., institutions) that remain relatively stable over the medium and long terms. As a result, extant theories struggle to account for unexplained inter-election variation in the presence and strength of electoral accountability. Furthermore, institutions are only a secondary force in shaping electoral politics because politicians and voters learn – and learn to manipulate – the rules of the game over time (Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, et al. 1999, p.12). The actions of political actors have thus far not taken front stage in understanding variation in economic voting across elections.

Party instability is a game-changer when it comes to theories of economic voting. In contrast to the extant literature, I argue that the economic vote is not suited to all elections. Conventional wisdom has it that the economic voter casts a ballot either for or against the incumbent based on one simple piece of information – the state of the economy. I argue that this is an overly simplistic understanding of the economic vote. Consider that effective economic voting requires not only information about the state of the economy but also voters’ judgments on whether or not such information is a good predictor of future governing capacity and performance. In regard to the latter, changes in parties are essential to assessing governing capacity and may override strict economic retrospections. As a result, strict retrospective voting on economic considerations may not necessarily be an optimal voting strategy for altered parties. I argue that the stability of the electoral alternatives conditions the viability of economic retrospections as a decision-making rule. Party instability thus qualifies the universal desirability of economic voting across elections.

By integrating political parties into electoral decision-making, this book takes into account the active role of party organisations in the processes of electoral representation and thus equips parties with the agency to influence voter choice. Parties’ behaviour is essential to a functioning representative democracy. Elster et al. (1998) write, ‘The structure and the interaction of political parties are the most significant variables which contribute to the consolidation or failure of the political systems of democratic politics’ (pp.110–111). Despite the widely recognised import of parties to the functioning of electoral democracy, little has been done to integrate the rich and intricate world of party organisations in theories of voter behaviour. My account of parties as potentially divisive organisations moves away from static models of voter behaviour. In the latter, parties are merely the recipients of voters’ evaluations and responsibility attributions under fixed institutional settings and are not equipped with the agency to influence voters’ decision-making in turn. This book thus conceives of elections in fairly realistic terms – as dynamic, give-and-take processes between voters and parties. Considering the effects of party change on how voters decide begins to close an important gap in the interaction between political parties and voters. To my knowledge, this is the first study to examine systematically the linkage between the agency of political parties to change their organisational structure and the ability of citizens to make good electoral decisions.

Finally, this book has much to say about the internal processes of political parties and party systems. Recent scholarship has pointed out problems in the conceptualisation and measurement of party change (Birch 2001; Mair 1997; Powell and Tucker 2013; Tavits 2008). These problems pose challenges for empirical research and theory development in the subfields of party and electoral systems and in the broader comparative literature. The complexity of party dynamics usually means that they are studied qualitatively and are limited to a handful of cases (e.g., Dix 1992; Kreuzer and Pettai 2003; Protsyk and Wilson 2003; Sikk 2012; Shabad and Slomczynski 2004). My research makes an empirical contribution in producing a large, comparative data set on party instability in a diverse set of political systems. Unlike existing approximations of the prevalence of party instability in elections, these data minimise measurement error and can facilitate quantitative inquiries of parties, party systems and their interaction with voting behaviour, well beyond this book.

Empirical approach

Pedersen (1979) famously defined party system instability as changes in the patterns of interaction and competition between both parties and the electorate (p.4). Despite his broad and oft-cited definition, the study of party system change has focused primarily on changes originating from shifts in voter preferences, to the neglect of change originating from parties.6 Currently used measures of party system change either focus on the voter side of the equation or do not do enough to separate changes originating from parties and those originating from voters.7 As a result extant measures obfuscate the nature of instability in party systems. The endogeneity between parties and voters in extant indices of party system change render them inadequate for the study of voter response to party change.

I develop a measure of party system instability that can be traced to changes in political parties rather than voter preferences. To do so, I collect data on a wide range of indicators of party change: the emergence of new parties, the disbanding of existing parties, party mergers, splinter parties, and party entry into and exit from joint lists. From these detailed, qualitative data, I compose an aggregate, standardised index of party change to facilitate the empirical examination of how voters respond to party instability. By focusing on changes and continuities in party organisations, the new measure compliments Pedersen's index of electoral volatility and helps limit the conflation of different sources of party system instability. The data stand apart from existing indicators of electoral volatility in that they estimate party system instability independently of election results and mass preferences and reduce endogeneity concerns in the study of party ma...