Issue characterization of electoral change (and how recent elections in Western Europe were won on economic issues)

From Firenze University Press Journal: Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES)

Davide Angelucci, Italian Center for Electoral Studies (CISE), Luiss University, Rome

Lorenzo De Sio, Italian Center for Electoral Studies (CISE), Luiss University, Rome

Social science, and political science perhaps even more, is characterized by its inevitable engagement with different audiences. Results of social science are first and foremost aimed to their scientific community; but another often relevant audience is also a broader cultural community (politicians, the media, active citizens) looking at social science for empirical knowledge and interpretations of social reality, with arguments that often become relevant in the public debate (Pizzorno 1993, 31). This is obviously the case for election studies, particularly at the occasion of general elections. In this regard, elections not only perform their basic democratic function of allowing the formation of governments that inherently respond and correspond to citizen preferences (Dahl 1971; Thomassen 2005; Mair 2013), but also represent key occasions where actors involved in the public debate are offered the possibility of gauging actual citizen preferences, in a more reliable and representative way than offered by poll-based public opinion analyses. As a result, the immediate aftermath of a general election is usually characterized, on the media, by intense debates — often fuelled by empirical analyses — about the interpretation of the election result. This is a process we might identify as the characterization of election results, i.e. a collective construction of a (relatively shared) general interpretation of the election outcome: starting from the relatively easy identification of winners and losers (perhaps less easy, when drilling down to geographical disaggregation of results), up to — most importantly — the identification of a more general “popular will” emerging from the vote. All this process revolves around the answer to a key, but often under-studied, question: what were the elections about (Shamir and Shamir 2008)?

In this regard, the term interpretation appears particularly appropriate. While relatively simple statistical analyses usually allow to identify winners and losers of an election, it is much harder to identify a general “popular will” from an election result. The reason is simple: while e.g. in referenda voters are called to express themselves on actual policy choices, elections see them casting votes to parties that take positions on dozens of different issues, so that it is not easy to identify which actual issue stance determined the fortune of a particu-lar party. And the actual information available for this interpretation is mostly indirect: party platforms, elec-tion campaigns, exit-polls estimating the behaviour of particular social groups; geographical results provid-ing more suggestions about the behaviour of the same groups; perhaps even ecological-inference-based estimates of vote turnover tables that try to reconstruct which winning parties attracted votes from which los-ing parties (albeit both these latter are always prone to even severe ecological fallacy). None of these pieces of information in fact includes direct information about issue determinants of election results. Even when extensive survey data are available (but often not immediately after the election), these frequently only include a relatively limited set of items measuring voter attitudes on few specific policy issues. As a consequence, all these pieces of information only allow a quite indirect, at best limited reconstruction of the actual political issues that might have driven the election result, so that in fact little can be reliably known about actual citizen preferences which, in principle, represent the very core of democrat-ic representation.Such limited-information reconstruction is vulnerable to a number of biases (even more, when attempted in comparative perspective). To begin with, issue drivers of electoral change are oftentimes indirectly inferred from party platforms and campaigns of winning parties, while in fact there is little guarantee that the actual drivers correspond to the most defining (or visible) campaign issues of each party. And in comparative perspective, commentators often employ even stronger simplifications, by lumping together (based on party families) parties that in fact might even be significantly different in terms of party platforms, not to mention the actual issue drivers of their success.This paper introduces a novel methodology for characterizing electoral results which, in our view, rep-resents a significant improvement in this regard.

In general terms, our proposal consists of three key choices: (a) use of issue-rich public opinion data; (b) focus on issue-related predictors, and in particular on issue-based party-voter affinity measures; © focus on vote change(rather than on vote choice) as the outcome to be modelled. By modelling, for general elections, individual vote change (i.e. the individual-level component of aggregate electoral change) through issue-related predictors, we in fact are able to identify the key issues that produced electoral change for each party (and thus for the whole party system), providing an effective issue characterization of electoral change that provides substantive (and potentially unbiased) information about the citizens preferences that drove such change.We apply this methodology to general elections in six Western European countries in 2017–18 (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, UK), relying on survey data from the ICCP — Issue Competition Comparative Project (De Sio et al. 2019; De Sio and Lachat 2020a); thus, we not only demonstrate our methodology’s ability to issue-characterize a single election, but exemplify its ability to support a broader issue characterization of an electoral season across multiple countries. And our results confirm the relevance of our methodology, with findings partly in contrast with most extant literature relying on a party-based characterization of the same elections. While such party-based characterization has so far emphasized the emergence (and key relevance) of a transnational, cultural “cleavage” in Western Europe in recent years, our issue characterization of the same elections suggests an enduring relevance of economic issues, along with diverse non-economic, “cultural” issues, which however are only marginally related to a broader transnational conflict (e.g. over EU integration); and — most importantly — which do not appear to cluster together (in a consistent over-arching dimension) in their predictive ability of individual-level vote change.The paper is organized as follows.

After this introductory section, we discuss the main purpose of this paper, introducing the relevance of issue characterization of an election. We then review existing literature to set out theoretical expectations for issue characterization of the elections under study, following then two sections describing our novel method, research design, data and empirical strategy. Presentation and discussion of findings are then offered, followed by conclusions.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-10836

Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/qoe/article/view/10836