Considerations and Vote Choice: A Cleavage-Based Perspective

• In Event: Political Party Dynamics in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

Recent developments in electoral behavior afford new opportunities for studying phenomena such as dealignment, realignment, and the role of social cleavages in elections. At the core of these developments is the idea of consideration sets, the idea that voters parse political parties in two stages. First, they eliminate parties based on heuristics to form a consideration set. Next, they engage in effortful processing of the remaining alternatives to make a final decision.

In this paper, we build on cleavage theory and argue that the structure of party systems plays a central role in shaping consideration sets. Specifically, cleavages determine which parties are a priori acceptable for voters and which one’s are not. This determines both the size and composition of consideration sets.

We explore several hypotheses in the paper. First, stable party systems with a single dominant cleavage should produce small and homogeneous consideration sets. Second, stable party systems with multiple cleavages may induce cross-pressures that cause the consideration sets to be more heterogeneous. Third, dealignment contributes to larger and more heterogeneous consideration sets that persist. Fourth, new cleavages contribute to a restructuring of consideration sets.

To test these hypotheses, we draw from CES data for West European election for as long as these data are available. We measure consideration sets using propensities to vote (PTVs). In the analysis, we use multivariate regression models over the PTVs. To derive the nature of cleavages, we use party manifesto data.

Authors

• Marco R. Steenbergen, University of Zurich

• Gary Marks, UNC - Chapel Hill