engleski

Linkages Between Parties and Voters in Comparative Perspective: How Political System Characteristics Shape Linkages Between Parties and Voters

Contemporary democracies vary substantially with respect to the nature of linkages between voters and political parties, and consequently in terms of prevalent patterns of voting behavior. In some countries these linkages are predominantly shaped by partisanship and/or long term ideological commitments, whilst in others the dominant role belongs to leadership attachments and clientelistic exchanges, and yet in others partisan performance evaluations matter the most. This paper investigates what shapes different types of linkages between voters and parties, and consequently what explains cross-national differences in importance of partisanship, ideology, leadership and performance evaluations in voting behavior. We posit that political institutions defining consensual or majoritarian type of democracy ; clientelistic penetration of the state and society by political parties ; size and distribution of social spending ; quality of governance and level of corruption are the crucial factors that determine the nature of party-voter linkages and prevalent type of voting behavior. We use a theoretically derived hierarchical non-linear model to test how these macro political characteristics mediate the impact of partisanship, leader and economic performance evaluations, and ideology on vote choices. We take a broad comparative perspective including nearly 80 post-election surveys carried out within the framework of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project. The model finds stronger leader and weaker party effects in presidential than legislative elections ; stronger ideological and weaker performance-oriented voting in countries closer to the consensual than the majoritarian pole of Lijphart's typology of democracies ; higher importance of partisanship and ideology and weaker importance of performance evaluation in countries that have higher levels of social spending ; and the existence of a residual, possibly cultural dimension of variation corresponding to party-and ideology-centered voting and correlates with the quality of governance and partisan penetration of state and society.

party-voter linkages; elections; institutions

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