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The federal elections of 1998 were the first time in Germany that notions of personalization and presidentialization were discussed during an election; before that German voters chose, at least formally, between competing parties rather than between competing chancellor candidates, and only a minor role was accorded to the personalities and circumstances of candidates. The first part of this chapter analyses the role that voters’ orientations towards the chancellor–candidates has played in the broad context of electoral choice, paying particular attention to the influence of candidate orientations on the voting choices of people lacking any long–term party identification; this part of the analysis is based on data pertaining to all the electoral contests fought in Germany from 1961 to 1998. The second part of the chapter analyses the various components of the chancellor–candidates’ images: does the way in which voters evaluate the candidates simply reflect existing patterns of party identification, or do the voters construct their own candidate orientations by fitting separate pieces into a pattern, each of which refers to specific attributes of the candidates as perceived and evaluated by them; and are the proponents of the personalization thesis right in assuming that the candidates’ images are largely determined by the voters’ perceptions of the candidates’ personalities rather than by their performance? These questions are answered with specific reference to data collected by the 1998 German Election Study. Despite the apparent personal favouring of Schröder over Kohl in 1998, it is concluded that there is no real evidence that chancellor–candidates’ personalities and other personal characteristics play any stronger role in German voting patterns than they have in the past.

This chapter explores one of the most important questions that can be asked about the role of party leaders in elections: do evaluations of party leaders affect vote choice and the outcomes of elections? The impact of perceptions of leaders' traits is assessed in relation to the calculations and decision processes of voters across elections and the analysis incorporates voters' political sophistication. The chapter then narrows the analysis to look more closely at the impact of leaders in American elections from 1972 to 2004 in order to assess the difference leaders made in election outcomes. The chapter presents the argument that leaders matter in elections: voters' evaluations are very important to individual vote choice. Furthermore, evaluations of leaders' character have a larger impact on vote choice than evaluations of their competence. The net impact of leaders on election outcomes is also noticeable, ranging from no effect in the 1976 election to 10 per cent of the popular vote in 1972. The data suggest that in certain circumstances, leaders can be the factor that decides an election.

This chapter tackles the role of information on electoral behaviour by examining whether the informational biases to which voters are exposed during electoral campaigns end up influencing their voting choices. The second part of the chapter inspects the intermediation process and determines whether and why some types of intermediaries are more influential than others. The features that maximize informational bias include interpersonal communication, high levels of politicization, one-sided messages and credibility. Lastly, the chapter looks into the specific case of mass-media outlets using alternative measures of media bias, and he analyzes whether the degree to which media landscapes are dominated by partisan outlets makes a difference regarding the extent to which exposure to the media influences voting choices.

This chapter explores the political implications of differences in social space. The distinction between a “local” or “global” orientation systematically affects political behavior both within and across parties. Borrowing a concept from 1950s sociology—but operationalizing it differently—this chapter demonstrates that “cosmopolitanism” affects vote choice and is not well measured by typical demographic or attitudinal controls routinely included in vote models. Further, the chapter shows that cosmopolitanism is not accounted for by mainstay geographic indicators such as the regional marker for South or non-South. Cosmopolitanism is a mix of attributes, local environment, and opportunity, and the means of taking advantage of those opportunities. But it is measured here through a series of behaviors (or self-reports of behaviors) that indicate the presence or absence of a cosmopolitan orientation.

This chapter tests a party-centered and candidate-centered model of vote choice with some recent data, revealing that certain aspects of the candidate-centered model require revision. It focuses on voters who identify with the same party as the candidate challenging their incumbent member of Congress—here referred to as “challenger partisans.” Challenger partisans showed the strongest tendency to vote across party lines in 1978, but they are also the ones who have returned to the partisan fold in greatest numbers in recent years. However, many important early conclusions about congressional incumbents withstand changing political currents. Although parties are more central to the average voter's calculus, images of the incumbents as representatives of the parties, rather than images of the parties themselves, are behind this change. Challenger partisans have grown more dissatisfied with their incumbents as individuals, and have turned to the challenger as a meaningful way to express this dissatisfaction.

This chapter focuses on the accuracy of citizens' estimates of facts about the general state of the economy and on the consequences of that information. It analyzes both the determinants and political consequences of respondents' perceptions of the average price of gas and the unemployment rate in their home states. The chapter finds that individuals overestimate the unemployment rate and that substantial partisan differences also exist. In contrast, estimates of gas prices are on average reasonably accurate, with no partisan differences. These analyses also suggest that perceptions of unemployment, but not of gas prices, are implicated in changes in partisan identification.

This chapter explores the effects of perceived criminal injustice on voting behavior as well as on other important outcomes. Using data from the 2006 ANES Pilot Study, the chapter begins by examining the measurement properties of a set of survey items tapping perceptions of criminal injustice and then incorporates those items into a model of voting behaviors, controlling for demographic characteristics, political efficacy, political ideology, and political partisanship. It reveals that perceived criminal injustice has systematic and theoretically meaningful demographic and attitudinal correlates. In addition, these analyses demonstrate that perceived injustice has both direct and indirect effects on turnout and vote choice, above and beyond the expected standard predictors.

Chapter 5 investigates the impact of gender stereotypes on vote choice decisions in congressional and governor elections. The analysis compares the impact of stereotypes and candidate evaluations alongside political influences such as party, incumbency, and campaign spending. Voting for Democratic and Republican women candidates is considered separately and is compared with races with only male candidates. Voters do not rely on gender stereotypes when deciding for whom they will vote. Vote choice decisions in single-sex and mixed-sex races are similar.

This chapter analyzes several new religiosity items. While standard survey measures of religiosity typically are associated with right-leaning political orientations, this chapter argues that these measures are incapable of capturing the communitarian dimension of religiosity that may hold more meaning for liberal citizens. The 2006 ANES Pilot Study included questions to assess both the individualistic and communitarian elements of religiosity. Consistent with this chapter's expectations, these two dimensions of religiosity are distinct, exhibiting opposite relationships to partisan identification. The chapter's analyses further demonstrate that the two dimensions of religiosity have distinct, and substantial, influences on social policy attitudes and vote choice.

This chapter explores the specifics of a new voting system: ranked-choice voting, with multi-member districts for the US House. As the name suggests, ranked-choice voting lets voters rank their choices. The votes are then tallied as follows: If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place votes, that candidate wins. However, if no candidate has a majority in the first round, second-choice preferences come into play. The candidate with the fewest number of first-choice votes is eliminated, and voters who had ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to the candidate they ranked second. This continues until a single candidate gathers a majority, with subsequent preferences transferring as candidates get eliminated from the bottom up. Ranked-choice voting, especially multi-winner ranked-choice voting, is the best way to balance voter choice, stronger parties, and encourage moderation. Moreover, a bigger U.S. House would improve American democracy and support more multiparty democracy.

This chapter reviews the examination of the factors behind candidate emergence and the analyses of vote choice in fourteen contested leadership elections in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1965. It then discusses additional possible explanations of vote choice, how applicable the present findings may be to other legislative settings, and how the politics of leadership races has changed in the past and may change in the years ahead. The chapter concludes that we may see more ethnically diverse leadership candidates than in the past, with voters, interest groups, and new media playing more significant roles in shaping lawmakers' vote choice. However, so long as the central elements shaping the House's leadership elections—the size of the chamber, the service orientation of party leaders, committees and states as the bases for professional connections—do not change, professional connections and salient goals will remain fundamental to how the rank-and-file decide who will lead them.

This chapter assesses the electoral influence of vice presidential candidates using a nationally representative dataset - the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey. The results indicate that feeling thermometer ratings of vice presidential candidates have a statistically significant and positive effect on a respondent’s likelihood of voting for that candidate’s presidential ticket. However, the results also indicate that presidential feeling thermometer ratings are of far greater importance when predicting vote choice. Additional analyses predict the feeling thermometer ratings of vice presidential candidates using candidate characteristics. This analysis provides limited evidence of ticket-balancing effects, specifically with regard to the running mate’s gender and political experience.

This chapter continues the discussion on the open competition race, the most common type of leadership race in the House of Representatives, focusing on the GOP. It begins with a detailed discussion of perhaps the most consequential GOP leadership election in the past three decades: the 1989 race for whip, in which Newt Gingrich (R-GA) narrowly bested Ed Madigan (R-IL) and positioned himself to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years. It then considers three additional cases of open competition for GOP posts: the minority leader and whip races in 1980 and the majority whip contest in 1994. As in the previous chapter, the findings are consistent with the mixed-motive model of vote choice.

This chapter extends the party linkage model by examining how citizens' Left-Right orientations influence their voting choices — the third step in the electoral linkage process described in Chapter 4. It begins by describing the empirical relationship between Left-Right orientations and vote in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) nations. It then turns to party aggregates to consider how well the political orientations of party voters as a bloc are matched by the position of the party they support. The results describe the extent to which parties represent the voters who elected them to parliament, at least in Left-Right terms. Finally, the implications of the findings from Chapters 4–6 for the party government model are discussed.

This chapter examines whether various features of what Lijphart called consensus democracy, such as proportional representation, multiparty systems, and coalition governments promote party–voter linkages based on policy and ideology, either in an absolute sense or relative to accountability for performance in office. The chapter reviews the possible causal mechanisms that may generate the expected relationship between type of democracy and whether performance evaluations or ideological proximity dominate voting behaviour. Empirically, the chapter uses two-step multilevel models to examine the link between ideological proximity-based voting and key dimensions of political institutional variation across types of democracy, using behavioural indicators that address the endogeneity of political attitudes to partisanship as well as issues in comparability across two-party and multiparty systems. As expected, the chapter finds an ambiguous but very weak relationship between type of democracy and incidence of ideological proximity-based voting and highlight the relatively independent development of ideological polarization from type of democracy.

Both ethnic minorities and the white British moved away from Labour at the 2010 British general election, revealing their shared concerns about government performance; yet ethnic minorities were much less likely to switch from Labour to another party, and often opted instead for abstention. Black groups showed the highest loyalty to Labour just as they showed the strongest Labour partisanship. The same ethnic group contextual effects that explained minority Labour partisanship in Chapter 6 also help to explain their loyalty in 2010. However, minorities were much less likely to be mobilized by party election campaigns, and the occasional electoral success of the Respect Party indicates the vulnerability of Labour to active campaigns to win minority voters.

Chapter 8 explores the consequences of responsibility evaluations. A key component of democratic accountability is clarity of responsibility, enabling voters accurately to hold politicians to account for their actions. The chapter shows that this process works at the national level: governments are punished for poor performance if they are held responsible, especially when a cohesive government is in place. No evidence is found that performance and responsibility matter in a similar way for the European Parliament, however. It appears that, just as it is challenging for voters to hold large coalition governments in national parliaments to account, it is close to impossible for voters to identify which parties to reward and punish at European elections. Since citizens are unable to make vote choices for or against a ’government’ in the European Union, when voters hold the EU responsible for poor performance they lose trust in the EU institutions instead.