Abstract
To cast a meaningful ballot, voters ought to have sufficient knowledge of competing parties. As parties often change between elections (for example, merge, split), they breed electoral complexity, with potential consequences for voter ability to take party cues and make informed decisions. Owing to the demands placed on their attention and cognition, voters are generally less capable of taking party cues as parties erratically transform. This finding has several nuances: the impact of party instability depends both on its type and overall degree, as well as on voters’ disparate abilities to handle electoral complexity. First, voters tend to know considerably less about new parties and splinters than they do about preexisting parties; yet they are more knowledgeable about newly formed mergers and joint lists. Second, voters who experience only occasional peaks in instability are more adversely affected than voters in new, fluid party systems. Lastly as instability increases, the positive effect of education on political knowledge diminishes, suggesting that even the well-educated have difficulty sorting through electoral alternatives as parties change. The overall loss in knowledge associated with high instability speaks to the important role political parties have in facilitating the acquisition of electoral information and for political representation more broadly.
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Notes
The focus here is not on knowledge of current events or civics facts but on knowledge of the ideological positions of parties competing for election.
We may further postulate a non-linear relationship. In an election in which only a few parties change, voters may be capable of identifying new and transformed parties and gleaning their positions. However, if multiple parties transform repeatedly, voters are less likely to keep track of electoral alternatives. However, the analyses below did not uncover robust nonlinear effects.
See the Web Appendix for a list of election studies. The data collected on instability in parties is described below. Summary statistics of all variables are available in the Web Appendix.
In one Estonia – 2011, CSES expert placements of parties were hugely off from both the average placement by voters and an independent expert survey Hellwig (2011). For example, the conservative Union Pro Patria and Res Publica was placed on the extreme left by CSES experts while both voters and the experts in Hellwig (2011) correctly placed the parties to the right. For this election, I have used the Hellwig (2011) placements rounded to the nearest digit. See the Web Appendix for more information.
The 5 per cent threshold is consistent with Janda (1980). Please see the Web Appendix for a description of how it is applied to mergers and joint lists.
The mean EIP scores per country are listed in Table A1 in the Web Appendix.
Figures on seat–vote disparity are based on own estimates with the CSES data. The remaining individual and contextual variables come from the CSES.
Cook’s Distance test revealed that Bulgaria and Italy were influential outliers while Poland had an extreme value on EIP but was not an influential outlier. See the Web Appendix for full analyses of outliers. I discuss the substantive reasons behind these outliers below as well as their potential contribution to theory building.
Note that it is not possible to measure the effect of disbanded parties at the party level because respondents were not asked to place these parties.
The election-level variance in the baseline models with individual-level predictors is 0.1409; it shrinks to 0.1237, or by roughly 12 per cent, when party- and election-level instability variables are added as covariates. See the Web Appendix for full model results.
It is also plausible that voters place such parties more accurately because they receive more media attention than do preexisting parties that remain unchanged. The data does not allow us to weigh in on these arguments.
Pre-electoral coalitions exist in many other countries, including Belgium and France. In the context of party instability, however, Italian pre-electoral coalitions are significant in the great number of changes they often experience between elections.
Turnout was 8–11 per cent higher in 2001 than in the preceding and following elections.
The financial scandals related to the leaders of one of the new parties, the PiS, and were aired as documentaries during prime viewing time before the election. The campaign was also fueled by populist rhetoric about a more severe penal code and full disclosure of politicians’ private assets, two matters that also received plenty of media coverage before the election. Another new party, the LPR, benefited from coverage in a Catholic nationalist media outlet, Radio Marija (see Szczerbiak, 2002).
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Marinova, D. Political knowledge in complex information environments. Acta Polit 51, 194–213 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2015.8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2015.8