The effect of party characteristics on the quality of party support.

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Title of talkOccasion & date

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The effect of party characteristics on the quality of party support.

Federico VegettiCEU PhD seminar

17/02/2011



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Title of my dissertation: Causes and Consequences of Ideological Polarization

Two (very broad) research questions: • What is polarization and why does it vary across

countries?• What is the effect of polarization on individual voting

behavior?



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Topic of this presentation:

1. Define polarization (and summarize the conceptual framework).

1. Discussing what I am working on right now – a paper regarding the second research question.



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1. Let's define polarization

Oxford English Dictionary: The accentuation of a difference between two things or groups; division into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of beliefs or opinions; an instance of this.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/146757?redirectedFrom=polarization#



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In political science:

“polarization measures how parties are dispersed on the ideological continuum, indicating the range of ideological choices that parties represent” (Dalton 2008)

A concept similar to the product-differentiation on the market: when citizens can recognize clear differences among the supply, their choice will be helped.

In fact, positive effect on turnout (Thomassen 2005, Wessels & Schmitt 2008).



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Sartori: polarized pluralism as a set of characteristics of a party system, e.g. strong ideological emphasis, outbidding tendencies and centrifugal drives.

In general, political opposition as “disagreement over principles and fundamentals.” (1976)

Problematic definition (especially at the empirical level) but it offers an alternative point of view: ideological opposition made of ideological distance and ideological intensity – the first being a property of the system, while the second of the single parties' polity.



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Sum up:

• Polarization as a feature of a party system.• Distance between parties on a given dimension (e.g. left-

right, issues)

However, conceptual differences between the two perspectives:

• Polarization as differentiation vs. polarization as conflict.• Emphasis on intensity.



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Another distinction can be useful

Most common perspective in the American literature: strong polarization among party elites that eventually spreads into the mass public.

Phenomena like party sorting (Hetherington 2009) and conversion (Levendusky 2009).

In general, polarization descending from party elites.



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European literature is less homogeneous in this respect:

• Old-fashioned perspective: polarization as a consequence of the political representation of the social divisions. (Lipset & Rokkan 1967, Sani & Sartori 1978, 1983)

• More recent perspective: taking account for macro-level factors (Pelizzo & Babones 2007, Schmitt & Freire 2010) and growing interest for party characteristics. (see Adams et al. 2006, Ezrow 2008 and many more)



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Most common operationalization so far

Polarization as weighted distance from the center:

while the presence of extreme parties is rather common, a

system is considered (more) polarized when such parties

are electorally strong.

A B C D E F

0 2 4 6 8 10

A B C D E F

0 2 4 6 8 10



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2. What I am working on right now

First, elaborate on the concept of intensity (ideological and general):

Sartori: “the temperature or the affect of a given ideological setting.” (1976)

A more useful conceptualization (at the individual level): individuals' reaction to issues is made by direction and intensity – the first being a feeling of agreement or disagreement and the second a measure of how strong this feeling is. (Rabinowitz & Macdonald 1989)



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In general, at the individual level we can consider intensity as the strength of an attitude towards an object – in our case a party.

This is supposed to be pushed by individual idiosyncratic characteristics and other, exogenous, characteristics.

My question here: do party characteristics influence the intensity of the support among their supporters?



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How to measure intensity of party support at the individual level?

PTV (Propensity To Vote) measures: a scale (from 0 to 10 or from 1 to 10) where an individual is supposed to indicate how likely is that she will ever vote for a given party.

In European Election Studies they're measured for all the most important parties.

Quite similar to the so-called Feeling Thermometer – but not the same.



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A possible measure of intensity is given by the difference between the highest PTV and the others – when the support is more intense there should be a big difference.

In other words, we expect party preference to be more exclusive when the support for a party is more intense.



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Visual example

* However we don't really need to model this on the left-right space, this is only for clarification.



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How to model this?

Data → EES 2009

Take the party for which R declares her vote intention as a reference, and compute the PTV differences with all the other parties.

Use this measure as a dependent variable in a stacked data matrix.



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Explanatory variablesThe model can get quite complicated, because we have

variables at four levels:

1. Characteristics of the choice set: e.g. distance, party size, incumbency.

2. Characteristics of the individual: e.g. sociodemographics, l-r extremity.

3. Characteristics of the supported party: e.g. l-r extremity, size, ***

4. Characteristics of the context: e.g. polarization, fragmentation.



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Problems with the party-level

I don't have a measure of the ideological intensity.

So far, some tentatives:

→ left-right extremity (it actually works).

→ measures of overlapping and ordinal similarity (Sani & Sartori 1983 – I am working on that).

→ type of party (e.g. post-communist, greens, nationalist; any kind of categorization that can characterize parties as niche parties).

→ other qualitative measures.



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Question: is there really that big difference between supporters of different parties?

Not astonishing. Intensity is a mainly individual feature.

However, given a party effect, the goal is to model it.



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-2 0 2 4 6

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0Die Linke voters - P4

Egocentric distances

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SPD voters - P2


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P1 Example from Germany - EES 2009:Mean PTV differences between the voted party and the other parties. Voters grouped by supported party.Next slide: the same for Hungary – EES 2009.



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MSZP voters - P7


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MDF voters - P6


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Jobbik voters - P2


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Fidesz voters - P1


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The effect of party characteristics on the quality of party support.

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