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Downs, Stokes and the Dynamics of Electoral Choice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2011

David Sanders ,
Harold D. Clarke ,
Marianne C. Stewart  and
Paul Whiteley
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Abstract

A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice. However, spatial effects still have sizeable indirect effects on the vote via their influence on valence judgements. The results of exogeneity tests bolster claims about the flow of influence from spatial calculations to valence judgments to electoral choice.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 287 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957)Google Scholar.

2 Stokes, Donald E., ‘Spatial Models of Party Competition’, American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 368–377CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Stokes, Donald E., ‘Valence Politics’, in Dennis Kavanagh, ed., Electoral Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 141–164Google Scholar.

3 Clarke, Harold D., Sanders, David, Stewart, Marianne C. and Whiteley, Paul, Political Choice in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clarke, Harold D., Kornberg, Allan and Scotto, Thomas, Making Political Choices: Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Sanders, David, Stewart, Marianne C. and Whiteley, Paul, Performance Politics and the British Voter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. See also Wlezien, Christopher and Norris, Pippa, ‘Conclusion: Whether the Campaign Mattered and How’, in Pippa Norris and Christopher Wlezien, eds, Britain Votes 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 214–231Google Scholar.

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6 See, for example, Grofman, Bernard, ‘The Neglected Role of the Status Quo in Models of Issue Voting’, Journal of Politics, 47 (1985), 231–237CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elaine Macdonald, Stuart and Rabinowitz, George, ‘Solving the Paradox of Nonconvergence: Valence, Position and Direction in Democratic Politics’, Electoral Studies, 17 (1998), 281–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rabinowitz, George and Elaine Macdonald, Stuart, ‘A Directional Theory of Issue Voting’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 93–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merrill, Samuel and Grofman, Bernard, A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Spatial Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ansolabehere, Stephen and Snyder, James M., ‘Valence Politics and Equilibrium in Spatial Election Models’, Public Choice, 103 (2000), 327–336CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heath, Anthony, Jowell, Roger and Curtice, John, The Rise of New Labour: Party Policies and Voter Choices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adams, James, Merrill, Samuel and Grofman, Bernard, A Unified Theory of Party Competition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Similar to neo-classic microeconomic theory, spatial models assume that voters do not change their preferences because of the actions of parties – individual ‘ideal points’ are exogenous.

8 Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy.

9 Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, The American Voter.

10 See, for example, Enelow, James and Hinich, Melvin, The Spatial Theory of Voting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Adams, Merrill and Grofman, A Unified Theory of Party Competition.

11 Stokes, ‘Spatial Models of Party Competition’.

12 Stokes, ‘Spatial Models of Party Competition’; Stokes, ‘Valence Politics’.

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17 On the latter, see, for example, Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, The American Voter.

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19 See, for example, Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, Political Choice in Britain, chap. 5; Clarke, Kornberg and Scotto, Making Political Choices; Clarke, Harold D. and McCutcheon, Allan, ‘The Dynamics of Party Identification Reconsidered’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 73 (2009), 704–728CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neundorf, Anja, Stegmaeller, Daniel and Scotto, Thomas J., ‘The Individual Dynamics of Bounded Partisanship’ (unpublished manuscript, Department of Government, University of Essex)Google Scholar.

20 Sanders, David, Clarke, Harold D., Stewart, Marianne C. and Whiteley, Paul, ‘Does Mode Matter for Modeling Political Choice? Evidence from the 2005 British Election Study’, Political Analysis, 15 (2007), 257–285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, Political Choice in Britain, chap. 4.

22 Since the 2005 pre-campaign panel asked the standard BES party identification question of a random half-sample only, we use the next five waves of panel data (2005 campaign–2009) to assess individual-level partisan dynamics.

23 For discussion and analysis, see, for example, Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, Political Choice in Britain, chap. 3.

24 Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, Performance Politics and the British Voter, chap. 4.

25 Overwhelming majorities of respondents did select an issue as most important – at least 99 per cent did so in each of the six waves of the panel. Note also that the vast majority of issues selected are valence, not positional, ones.

26 To render all rival models comparable, for the four-wave models we combine observations made in Waves 1, 2 and 3, using the most recent wave information available. For the three-wave models, using the crime–rights scale, we make the same combination for Waves 1, 2 and 3 and drop information from Wave 5. The data are organized as a STATA ‘long’ dataset, with the data clustered by respondent.

27 Finkel, Stephen, Causal Analysis with Panel Data (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Consider: Yt = a + γ 1Yt −1 + b 1Xt + εt = Yt−γ 1Yt −1 = a + b 1Xt + εt. Assuming Yt is a stationary process, γ 1 will be <1.0, and Yt−γ 1Yt −1 will be a partial difference. See, for example, Enders, Walter, Applied Econometric Time Series, 2nd edn (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004)Google Scholar.

29 Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, Performance Politics and the British Voter.

30 On the analysis of discrete choice models with lagged endogenous variables and large N, small T panel data, see Wooldridge, Jeffrey, Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Some dynamic discrete choice panel models are complex and raise difficult estimation issues; see, for example, Cappellari, Lorenzo and Jenkins, Stephen P., ‘Modelling Low Income Transitions’, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 19 (2004), 593–610CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, the models specified here are quite straightforward. We assume the appropriateness of a time t−1 lagged endogenous variable for capturing individual-level inter-election dynamics in party support. Also, similar to conventional static logit models of electoral choice, we do not assume unobserved heterogeneity among respondents. The latter decision is consistent with the results of recent research using mixed logit models of electoral choice in Britain; see Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, Performance Politics and the British Voter, chap. 5.

31 Respondents stating that they identify ‘very strongly’ with a party are scored 3, those stating that they identify ‘fairly strongly’ are scored 2, and those stating that they identify ‘not very strongly’ are scored 1.

32 Each respondent was asked to rate both her/his own position and those of each of the three major parties on both a 0–10 tax–services scale and a 0–10 crime–rights scale. The proximity of each respondent to party X was measured as (10 – abs(respondent position minus party X position)).

33 The policy areas were the economy, the NHS, crime and terrorism.

34 The valence measures were constructed separately for each party and for each panel wave using exploratory factor analysis. The Liberal Democrat valence measures were constructed solely from the ‘liking of party leader’ and ‘best party on most important issue’ variables, because respondents were not asked only about the Liberal Democrat's policy capacities in the specific areas listed in fn. 3. Detailed information on variable construction is available from the authors on request.

35 See, for example, Budge, Ian and Farlie, Dennis, Voting and Party Competition (London and New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977)Google Scholar; Roderick Kiewiet, D., Macroeconomics & Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Bara, Judith and Weale, Albert, eds, Democratic Politics and Party Competition: Essays in Honour of Ian Budge (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

36 The valence index for each party is constructed as a 0–10 scale. Each component variable was initially transformed to give it a range of 0–10. The indices were constructed by adding the component scales together and dividing by 3 in the case of Labour and the Conservatives and by 2 in the case of the Liberal Democrats. These additive indices correlate very strongly with more elaborate scales derived from factor analyses of the component variables on a wave-by-wave basis.

37 See, for example, Sanders, David and Gavin, Neil, ‘Television News, Economic Perceptions and Political Preferences in Britain, 1997–2001’, Journal of Politics, 64 (2004), 1245–1266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 The question is: ‘Now, some questions about the political parties. Please use the 0–10 scale to indicate how much trust you have for each of the parties, where 0 means no trust and 10 means a great deal of trust. How much do you trust the Labour Party? … the Conservative Party? … the Liberal Democrat Party?’

39 See Evans, Geoffrey, ‘Europe: A New Electoral Cleavage?’ in Geoffrey Evans and Pippa Norris, eds., Critical Elections: British Parties and Voters in Long-Term Perspective (London: Sage Publications, 1999), pp. 207–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 See Charemza, Wojeich and Deadman, Derek F., New Directions in Econometric Practice (Aldershot, Surrey: Edward Elgar, 1997)Google Scholar. On a related note, see Sanders, David, Clarke, Harold D., Stewart, Marianne C. and Whiteley, Paul, ‘The Endogeneity of Preferences in Spatial Models: Evidence from the 2005 British Election Study’, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 18 (2008), 413–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 See, for example, Wooldridge, , Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data, pp. 118–122Google Scholar.

42 The models with only tax/services effectively cover three panel waves, since one case per panellist is lost because of the inclusion of a lagged dependent variable. The models with both tax–services and crime–rights effectively cover two panel waves.

43 See Burnham, Kenneth P. and Anderson, David R., Model Selection and Multimodel Inference: A Practical Information-theoretic Approach, 2nd edn (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2002)Google Scholar. ‘AIC’ is the Akaike Information Criterion; ‘BIC’ is the Bayesian Information Criterion.

44 Results are available from the authors on request.

45 See Scott Long, J., Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997)Google Scholar.

46 Probabilities are computed using the CLARIFY program. See Tomz, Michael, Wittenberg, Jason and King, Gary, CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results (Cambridge, Mass.: Department of Government, Harvard University, 1999)Google Scholar.

47 The lower R 2 value for the Liberal Democrats could reflect the more restricted measure of valence used for that party. Recall that the questions about policy competence in four key areas, which form part of Labour and Conservative valence measures, were not asked for the Liberal Democrats.

48 See, for example, Charemza and Deadman, New Directions in Econometric Practice; Wooldridge, Econometric Analysis.

49 Income is measured on an 11-point scale corresponding to eleven income bands. Government fairness is a 5-point scale reflecting the degree of agreement/disagreement with the statement: ‘The Government generally treats people like me fairly.’ Relative deprivation is measured as a 5-point scale reflecting the degree of agreement/disagreement with the statement: ‘There is often a big gap between what people like me expect out of life and what we actually get.’

50 Attention is measured on a 0–10 point scale: ‘On a scale of 0 to 10 how much attention do you generally pay to politics?’ Political efficacy is a 0–10 scale: ‘On a scale from 0 to 10 where 10 means a great deal of influence and 0 means no influence, how much influence do you have on politics and public affairs?’ Civic duty is 5-point Likert scale reflecting the degree of agreement/disagreement with the statement: ‘I would be seriously neglecting my duty as a citizen if I didn't vote.’