Do Voters Understand Manifesto Promises?: A Comparative Survey Experiment

• In Event: How Citizen Political Knowledge and Patience Matter

Abstract

In this paper, we examine whether people perceive accurately the policy positions of parties in the European multi-party setting. Previous studies on European politics have found little evidence, that there is a linkage between the manifestos of the parties and the public perception of the policy positions of the parties in Europe (Adams, Ezrow, and Somer-Topcu 2011 Adams, Ezrow, Somer-Topcu 2014) . In contrast, in this paper, we argue that people know the policy preferences of all (not just their preferred ) parti(es) on issues that are salient and have a potential to be contentious during coalition formation. As an empirical evidence, we present the results of a comparative survey experiment that we conducted in Germany, Switzerland and Hungary in 2021 and 2022. In these surveys, we examine how voters place parties on a scale based on their stances on two regressive taxes: the carbon-tax and the Value Added Tax (VAT). In addition, we collected party manifestos from the elections of 2021 in Germany and 2022 in Hungary and party positions on the Co2 tax referendum in 2021 Germany to compare party positions to the surveys. We find that the voters’ placement of the parties follows accurately the placement we can see based on the manifestos of the parties in case of the highly salient Carbon-tax issue in Germany and Switzerland but less in Hungary where the issue is less debated. We also find some indication that that people rank the parties accurately on the VAT issue as well, however the voters are less clear about the positions of the parties We argue, that in aggregate voters may seem less sophisticated in multi-party environment, however, they have accurate knowledge about party positions on contentious policies.

Authors

• Zsuzsanna Blanka Magyar, University of Lucerne

• Lena Maria Schaffer, University of Luzern