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The Electoral Significance of Divided Behavior

Fri, August 31, 8:00 to 9:30am, Marriott, Salon C

Abstract

Political parties rarely act as unified organizations. Prominent party members often express opposing viewpoints and priorities in public settings. Electoral rules even incentives personal or candidate centered appeals that highlight individual party members’ policy disagreements. Yet, scholars show that internal divisions likely hold consequences for the leaders chosen, parties’ election platforms and even parliamentary voting behavior. Despite these advances, little research directly links perceptions of parties’ disunity to parties’ electoral success. I propose that perceptions of division inform voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy-making abilities. Public instances of disagreement serve as signals of the party’s legislative capacity. This relationship becomes more complex due to voters’ attachment to parties. Voters with strong partisan identities or ideologically proximate individuals respond less to instances of division than non-partisan and more ideologically distant voters. Using evidence from Germany and the United Kingdom, I show that perceptions of party division have complex implications for perceptions of policy competencies and vote choice through panel surveys of voter perceptions and comparative survey experiments. These results imply that partisans perceive internal divisions very differently than independent voters.

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