Conference and Planning Committee Meeting, November 2017

Conference: Elections, Parties, and Public Opinion in a Volatile World: A Comparative Perpsective

Location: University of Mannheim
Friday November 10, 2017

The conference brings together leading researchers in the field of comparative electoral behaviour, drawing together 11 papers that use various data, country case studies, and analytical strategies to give us insight into how voters, parties, and politicians are responding to volatile times. This conference coincides with the meeting of the CSES project board in Mannheim. 

Programme:

09:00 Conference registration opens

09:30 Conference opening with Steve Quinlan and remarks by Professor Christof Wolf, President of the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and Professor Harald Schoen, Deputy Director of the MZES

09:45 Panel I: Cross-national insights into electoral behaviour from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project
Chair: Rudiger Schmitt-Beck (University of Mannheim Et MZES)

Paper 1: A Populist Wave or Metamorphosis of a Chameleon? Populist attitudes and the vote in 2016
Authors: Stephen Quinlan (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim) and Deirdre Tinney (University College Dublin)
Abstract: As the world peers into the crystal ball era of Brexit and President Trump, it has become clear that we need to talk about populism. These days, parties and politicians articulating what are regarded as populist views are to be found in established democracies globally, sparking questions about whether we are witnessing a populist wave. A vexing question, however, is do so-called populist sentiments shape vote choice? Relying on data from Ireland and the United States, both of which fielded the CSES Module 5 that focuses on populist feelings and vote choice in 2016, we show that populism motivated voters in both countries, illustrating support for the premise that so-called populist views are an important stimulus for voters. Our analysis also demonstrates that the old reliables – economic perceptions, partisanship, and socio-demographics remained omnipresent, suggesting a sole focus on populism for the success of Donald Trump in the US or Sinn Fein in Ireland is overblown. Further, the populist sentiments motivating vote choice in the United States were quite different from those that influenced voters in Ireland, which might be thought to mirror distinctions between left and right conceptions of populism. It implies that context profoundly conditions populism and that maybe even the “”chameleon”” metaphor over claims coherence for the term.

10:05 Paper 2: Having A Say or Getting Your Way: The Impact of Expressive and Instrumental Political Choice
Author: Sara B. Hobolt (London School of Economics)
Abstract: Political choice is the foundation of any democratic system. But what kind of political choice matters to citizens? Are they satisfied with parties that allow them to express their preferences or are they primarily concerned with their ability to elect governments that change policies in line with their interests? We examine the impact of these dual components of political choice: congruence, which denotes the availability of a specific alternative that matches an individual’s preferences, and the instrumentality, which takes into account whether congruent choices have the potential to cause policy outcomes (e.g. through office-holding). We argue that expressive, or congruent, choice will only increase satisfaction with democracy when accompanied by instrumentality. To test this proposition, we analyze survey data from 74 elections held across 33 European countries between 1996 and 2016 using the Comparative System of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results show that citizens able to vote for an ideologically congruent party that also has a good chance of implementing policies in government are more satisfied with democracy, whereas congruence without instrumentality has the opposite effect. These findings are supported by evidence from a conjoint experiment which shows that instrumentality is a crucial component of meaningful political choice to citizens. Overall, these findings imply that while the rise of challenger parties across Europe increase the range of choices available to citizens, it does not necessarily facilitate greater satisfaction with democratic processes as long as the influence of these parties on policy outcomes is limited.

10:25 Paper 3: The consequences of casting one or two ballots. The effects of different proportional electoral systems on voting behavior
Author: Sascha Huber (University of Mannheim Et MZES)
Abstract: Casting a ballot in your best interest is at the base of democracy. Even if you have come up with a preference for a party or a candidate, this task is not easy. Depending on the electoral system, making one’s vote count will be more or less difficult. In some mixed member proportional systems, like Germany and New Zealand, voters have two ballots for one election. In this paper, it is argued that psychological mechanisms may lead voters with two ballots more frequently to insincere voting – independent of possible strategic considerations. This may lead to a vote that is not in their best interest. Several survey experiments in Germany, New Zealand, and Austria with a total of 5000 participants were executed to analyze the impact of different electoral rules on voting behavior. Having manipulated the number of ballots (one vs. two) in each experiment, it is analyzed whether the opportunity of having two votes leads to more insincere voting benefitting mainly small parties. Several individual-level explanations (political interest, political knowledge, cognitive dispositions) as well as structural explanations (different wording of the ballots in Germany and New Zealand, different political context) for differences in insincere voting are tested. CSES data is finally used to validate the experimental findings.

10:45 Paper 4: Voters’ Reactions to Party’ Position-Movement:. Switching parties means Acknowledgement
Author: Kathrin Busch (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Kain)
Abstract: Spatial theory would predict voters to react to parties’ position switches on
the left-right axis, with ‘partisan sorting’: either follow the party with adjusting their own left-right position, or vote for a different party in the succeeding election. However, this ‘partisan sorting’ does not take place as citizens do not react on a significant level to changes in parties’ policy positions as represented in election campaigns (Adams, Ezrow and Somer-Topcu, 2012; 2011). The research paper aims at solving this puzzle. I argue that pure spatial modelling cannot account for voters’ reactions to policy change because voting is not a purely rational activity. On one hand, voters are often not best informed about policy change, on the other hand, voters’ emotional attachments to parties have a strong effect on their loyalty to the party. Using comparative data on individual voting behavior from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), Modules 2-4, and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), I run a 2-level multinomial model which takes account of voters’ individual reactions to party movements on the left-right axis by comparing voters’ previous to their current vote decision. I show that parties’ position change does not necessarily lead voters to abandon the party they previously voted for, but that for vote switching it is most important that voters know party positions precisely. For parties’ position change to have a significant effect on vote switching, it is necessary that voters are willing and able to notice this change.

13:00 Keynote address: “”Did Americans Vote for a Person, a Party, or a Populist?
Speaker: Prof. John Aldrich (Duke University)
Summary: While Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Many were surprised, even shocked, by his victory, given all that happened in the campaign. I draw from work with Prof. Sunshine Hillygus and Dr. Jack Zhou to address the first of the two questions most on American’s minds. Why did Trump win? Here we argue that the 2016 vote was very similar to prior elections, based on the fundamentals of voting in this era of polarized political parties. There is very little evidence that evaluations of the candidates, per se, mattered much at all. There is little evidence, as well, that economic and political bases of populism mattered either. However, the social dimension of populism was the sole aspect beyond the fundamentals that affected choice, and this came in the guise of racial resentment and immigration-related attitudes, as shown by data from the ANES, which was the first national election survey to run the revised CSES module 5. In short, people voted mostly for a party, rather than a populist or the particular features of one or both candidates, except race and immigration.

14:20 Panel II: Short-term and long-term developments in electoral behaviour
Chair: Bernhard Miller (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim)
Paper 1: Prelude to the General Election? The 2014 European Parliament Election and its spill-over to the 2015 British General Election.
Authors: Hermann Schmitt (University of Manchester), Cees van der Eijk (University of Nottingham), a Chris Prosser (University of Manchester).
Abstract: The conventional wisdom is that first-order elections — more precisely the political situation in the first-order electoral arena — have/has an impact on second­ order electoral behaviour. The paper does not dispute this. However, it investigates whether second-order vote choices might nevertheless have some sort of repercussion on subsequent first-order electoral behaviour. Based on an analysis of British Election Study Internet Panel survey data spanning the 2014 EP election and the 2015 General Election in Britain, we find some traces of such a reversed effect.

14:40 Paper 2: The changing gender gap in voting in Western Europe: Did women shift to the left? Did men shift to the right?
Authors: Orit Kedar, Lotem Halevy, Odelia Oshri (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Abstract: While in most Western democracies women support left-leaning and progressive parties at higher rates than men, five decades ago the opposite was the case. Utilizing Eurobarometer and ESS data from a cross-section of countries over a forty-year period, we show that the radical right enjoys the support of men more than the support of women, and that countries where the radical right gained parliamentary power experienced a more dramatic shift in the gender gap on the left. Specifically, where the radical right is present either women or men (or both) on the left vote differently. To explain the partisan realignment along gender lines, we analyze it jointly with the rise of the radical right – two phenomena usually studied separately. We hypothesize that the gender gap in support for the radical right stems from economic vulnerability of men holding manual jobs, where vulnerability is highest among those whose jobs demand low communication and high manual skills and who are not unionized. Drawing on individual level analysis from a cross-section of countries we find support for these hypotheses. Finally, we show that overtime manual workers deserted the left, and particularly so in countries where the radical right gained seats in parliament and that men holding manual jobs joined the radical right in rates disproportionately high compared to the general population.

15:00 Paper 3: Voter decision-making from election to election: An analysis of voter trajectories in Germany during the 2013-2017 period
Authors: Maria PreiBinger, Agatha Rudnik, Harald Schoen, Alexander Wuttke (University of Mannheim)
Abstract: Conventional wisdom builds on a black-and-white perspective on the timing of voter decision-making. Voters either make up their mind during the campaign in the run-up to an election or they knew they “”all along”” whom they are going to vote for (e.g.: Fournier et al. 2004). The periods between two subsequent elections are deemed inconsequential for voters’ decision-making, however. This view builds on quite strong assumptions. These periods, so the reasoning goes, do not comprise relevant events (Dreyer 1971), most voters do not perceive political events during these periods, or voters who defected during off-years will return to their partisan folds during the campaign (Butler & Stokes 1974; Finkel 1993; Finkel & Schrott 1995). As the validity of these assumptions cannot be taken for granted, the black-and-white perspective might prove inappropriate. In order to address this question we will explore voter decision-making in Germany during the 2013-2017 election cycle. This period hardly qualifies as calm or even dull. Rather, the massive influx of refugees to Germany since 2015 and ever new climaxes to the European debt crisis arguably present relevant political events to which voters may react. To study voter decision-making we will rely on data from a multi-wave panel survey conducted in the framework of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), with some panel waves fielded during the 2013 and 2017 campaigns and some waves in the years between. This setup enables us to examine the evolution of voting decisions during the 2013-2017 election cycles.

15:20 Paper 4: Does Government Provision of Electricity as a Public Good Matter? An Assessment of Mozambique National Elections, 1994-2014
Author: Carlos Shenga (Higher Institute of Public Administration, Maputo)
Abstract: This study explores the assumption that the incumbents win elections with a greater difference because they have at their disposal the State to deliver goods and provide services to the public. More specifically, it tests the effect of government provision of electricity on election competition and voting turnout in Mozambique, controlling for other factors, using the official election data combined with nightlight data from 1994 to 2014. While this study’s primary concern is of the impact of the provision of electricity on elections, it also considers whether the incumbent provides electricity according to ethnic groups, their strongholds, and rural/urban residential location. It also tests the impact of ethnicity, stronghold districts and residential location on elections as an alternative (or controlling) explanation of voting behavior.

16:30 Panel III: Studying electoral behavior from a comparative perspective – challenges and implications
Chair: Eva Anduiza (Autonomous University of Barcelona)

Paper 1: Ideological congruence and electoral participation
Authors: Marc Debus, Rosa Navarette, a Constantin Schafer (University of Mannheim) Abstract: To what extent does ideological congruence between citizens and parties affect electoral turnout? We discuss how the lack of ideological match among political alternatives leads citizens to abstention. We study this in two scenarios: pre-, and post-European financial crisis. As known, the European crisis gattered the emergence of new parties that, in some cases, responded to a lited party supply for more extreme ideological positions. Thus, citizens to whom traditional parties were ideologically distant might find incentives in voting for parties that cover an ideological space that in the past was empty. For this reason, we test whether the emergence of new parties has contributed to the electoral mobilization of citizens.

16:50 Paper 2: Challenges Impeding Comparability of Measurement Across Countries: Findings from an International Project Documenting Response Effects
Author: Jon Krosnick (Stanford University)
Abstract: When conducting cross-national studies, survey researchers often hope to measure the same construct in multiple countries using questions that have been written in one language and translated into other languages and adapted to other cultures’ communication habits. In principle, this process can be undermined by “”response effects””, which are effects of question form, wording, and context that are non-substantive and unintentional and can distort measurement within a single country if not managed appropriately. Such response effects include response order effects (effects of the order in which answer options for a closed-ended question are offered), question order effects (effects of a prior question on responses to a later question), and acquiescence response bias (a tendency toward affirmative answers to agree/disagree, yes/no, and true/false questions, regardless of the content of the assertion being evaluated). If such response order effects vary across countries, then they can be responsible for the appearance of what appear to be real differences between countries that are in fact methodological artifacts. This presentation will describe findings from the “Multi-National Study of Questionnaire Design” (Silber, Stark, Blom, & Krosnick) that illustrate variation in the presence and magnitude of response effects across countries and thereby offer a warning about potential misinterpretation of differences in survey results across countries.

17:10 Paper 3: Electoral Systems, political supply, and individual choice sets
Author: Bernhard WeBels (WZB, Berlin)
Abstract: Democratic elections imply a choice between political offers by parties or politicians. The differentiation of political supply is largely influenced by electoral system type – a fact well-known by the works of Duverger and others. Elections and their systems work as filters, reducing reasonable choices as can be observed by the difference between electoral and parliamentary party system. Thus, viable choices of voters are limited by institutions. However, voters’ themselves may constrain choice­ sets. Regardless whether valence or spatial criteria are applied, not all options on offer have the same proximity to voters’ preferences. This paper elaborates to which degree constraints by institutions influence the set of proximate choices or not. Extreme outcomes may be that a majoritarian or a plurality system with two viable parties does not offer any choice because the proximate choices are reduced to one, and in the other extreme that in a fully proportional fixed party-list system the number of proximate choices easily excesses two proximate choices; alternatively, the number of proximate choices may be the same across electoral and party systems because voters tend to reduce choice to a set of two. After the exploration of choice-sets, analysis looks to the implication of constraints of choice-sets by institutions and by preference for vote choice.

18:00 Close of Conference

CSES Module 5 Planning Committee meeting

Location: University of Mannheim
Mannheim, Germany
Thursday, November 9 – Sunday, November 12, 2017

Conference Participants

Short biographies of conference presenters, organizers, and chairs

John Aldrich
John Aldrich (PhD, Rochester) is the Pfizer-Pratt Professor of Political Science, Duke University, the Chair of the Module 5 CSES Planning Committee, and is visiting GESIS on the invitation of the CSES. He is a past President of the Southern Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the American Political Science Association has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His works have appeared in leading political science journals including the American Journal of Political Science and the American Political Science Review, and he is the (co}-author of several leading texts in the field of political behavior and methodology including Why Parties, Before the Convention, and Linear Probability, Logit, and Probit Models. His forthcoming work (2017, with John Griffin) is Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South 1832-2012.

Eva Anduiza
Eva Anduiza (PhD, European University Institute, Florence} has been an associate professor at the Department of Political Science of the Autonomous University of Barcelona since 2003, where she is also principal investigator of the research group on Democracy, Elections and Citizenship. She has published in several journals, including the European Journal of Political Research; the International Journal of Regional and Urban Research; Information, Communication and Society and the Journal of Information Technologies and Politics. She has also contributed to several books on political participation and serves on the CSES Planning Committee.

Kathrin Busch
Kathrin Busch is a PhD candidate in comparative political science at the University of Cologne. She was a staff member of the CSES Secretariat at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences from 2009-2017 where she was responsible for the processing and documentation of CSES microdata, providing user support, and staff training. As such, she has an in-depth view of the CSES data but can also take the perspective of the analyst due to the use of CSES data for her own research. Her current research interests are voters’ political sophistication and consequences for voting behavior, for which she pooled and stacked data from the CSES and the Comparative Manifesto Project. Kathrin studied ‘Cultural Science’ at Viadrina European University, Frankfurt /Oder with a focus on political sociology and her research has been published in Electoral Studies. 

Sara Hobolt
Sara Hobolt (PhD, Cambridge) is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published extensively on elections and referendums, public opinion and European Union politics. Her most recent book is Blaming Europe? Responsibility without Accountability in the EU (Oxford University Press, 2014, with James Tilley) and she
was awarded the Best Book prize by EUSA for her previous book Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration (Oxford University Press, 2009). Sara is the Chair of the European Election Studies (EES), an EU-wide project studying voters, parties, candidates and the media in European Parliamentary elections. She is frequently asked to comment on elections and European politics in international media, and she was the BBC television expert in the 2009 and 2014 European elections. Currently, Sara is working on an ERC-funded project on the consequences of political choice and also serves on the CSES Planning Committee.

Sascha Huber
Sascha Huber (PhD, University of Mannheim) is a Lecturer at the University of Mannheim. Currently, he is also a project leader at the Mannheimer Zentrum fUr Europaische Sozialforschung (MZES) investigating the short-term prospects of voter mobilization with the help of large scale field experiments. His research interests include institutional variations of voting behavior, political psychology and experimental studies of political attitudes and behavior.

Orit Kedar
Orit Kedar (PhD, Harvard) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Jerusalem, is a member at the Federmann Centre for the Study of Rationality, and is President of the European Political Science Association. She also serves on the CSES Planning Committee. Her research interests lie in comparative politics, specifically gender and voting, multi-level explanations in comparative politicals, federalism, identity, and political methodology. Orit’s work has appeared in leading journals such as American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Political Analysis and Public Opinion Quarterly and her book Voting for Policy, Not Parties: How Parties Compensate for Power Sharing (2009, Cambridge University Press) won the APSA Riker Award for best book in political economy. 

Jon Krosnick
Jon Krosnick is Frederick 0. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Communication, Political Science, and Psychology at Stanford University, Director of Stanford’s Political Psychology Research Group, and Research Psychologist at the U.S. Census Bureau. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of the AAPOR lifetime achievement award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and the Nevitt Sanford Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. A PhD in social psychology, he is an expert on the psychology of attitudes, especially in the area of politics, and has been a co-principal investigator of the American National Election Studies, the nation’s preeminent academic research project exploring voter decision-making. He has studied the causes of candidate choice, what influences people’s decisions about whether to vote, how the news media influence public opinion, and more. He is also done extensive work on questionnaire design and survey research methodology, having taught courses for professionals on survey methods for 25 years around the world and served as a methodology consultant to government agencies, commercial firms, and academic scholars. 

Bernhard Miller
Bernhard Miller (PhD, University of Mannheim) works as a Science Manager at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, working in the Presidents office. He received his training as a political scientist at Mannheim University, MZES and Johns-Hopkins University, published on parties, democratic quality, coalitions, (informal) institutions both in the German and an internationally comparative context. He also retains his interest in the degree to which elections shape political decision processes, and his work has been published in Party Politics and German Politics.

Rosa Navarrette
Rosa M. Navarrete is a PhD candidate at the University of Mannheim and a research associate at the Department of Comparative Government at the University of Mannheim. She has experience as a researcher at the MZES at the University of Mannheim and the Autonomous University of Madrid. She holds an MA in Democracy and Government from the Complutense University of Madrid as well as a Degree in History from the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her research interests include left-right ideology, electoral behaviour, political parties and political sociology. Her dissertation deals with the role of left-right ideology in Europe, its meanings and impact in vote choice.

Stephen Quinlan
Stephen Quinlan (PhD, University College Dublin) is Senior Researcher at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim and Project Manager of the CSES. In that capacity leads the CSES Secretariat and is a member of the CSES
Planning Committee. His research focuses on comparative electoral behaviour and public opinion including turnout, elections, referendums, and social media’s impact on politics. His research has been published in Information Communication, and Society, Electoral Studies, and Irish Political Studies. He is also a consultant for Eurobarometer and a former member of the Steering Committee of The Irish National Election Study.

Hermann Schmitt
Hermann Schmitt (Dr. rer. pol., Duisburg) received his doctorate in 1986. He taught methods of social research at the University of Duisburg between 1983 and 1987. Between 1987 and 1997, he was the head of research, later the director, of the ZEUS institute (Zentrum fur Europaische Umfrageanalysen und Studien) at the University of Mannheim, and as such an advisor of the Eurobarometer service of the European Commission. He received a venia legendi in 1999 from the Free University of Berlin (Dr. rer. pol. habil.) with a study on issue voting and political representation (Politische Reprasentation in Europa, published in 2001 at Campus Verlag). In Mannheim, he has been a Research Fellow at the Mannheimer Zentrum fur Europaische Sozialforschung from 1990 on. In 2011, he accepted a call to a Chair in Electoral Politics at Manchester University (part time) and is dividing his time between Manchester and Mannheim since then.

Harald Schoen
Harald Schoen (PhD, University of Mainz) is Professor of Political Science and Political Psychology at the University of Mannheim. He is currently a Co-Principal Investigator on the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2017. His research has been published in leading journals including European Journal of Political Research, Social Science Computer Review, Party Politics, and Political Psychology. His research interests include political psychology, political behaviour, political online communication and empirical research methods in social sciences. 

Carlos Shenga
Carlos Shenga (PhD, University of Cape Town) holds a doctorate and master’s degrees in political studies. Carlos is a senior lecturer in governance and public policy and academic director at the Higher Institute of Public Administration (ISAP). He is also the founder of the Centre for Research on Governance and Development (CPGD), Maputo, Mozambique. He is also a member of the CSES Planning
Committee.

Rudiger Schmitt-Beck
Rudiger Schmitt-Beck (PhD, University of Mannheim; Habilitation, University of Mannheim) is Professor of Political Science and Political Sociology at the University of Mannheim. He is currently a Co-Principal Investigator on the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES). He also directs a project on the deliberative quality of citizens’ everyday communication. His most recent books are The Long and Short of It: Parties and Voters at the 2013 German Federal Election”” (special issue of German Politics, 2017, co-ed. with Robert Rohrschneider); and Citizenship and Democracy in an Era of Crisis”” {Routledge 2015; co-ed with Thomas Poguntke, Sigrid RoBteutscher and Sonja Zmerli). His work has been published in, among others, European Journal of Political Research, British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies and Party Politics.

Bernhard Weẞels
Bernhard Weẞels is deputy director of the research unit “”Democracy and Democratization”” at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and professor of political science at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is a co-principal investigator of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), and project director of the Manifesto project (MARPOR). He is the principal investigator of the German module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) since 1998, and was a member of the project’s Planning Committee from 1998 to 2014. His research interests are comparative political behavior, interest intermediation and political representation.