Party competition and voter decision-making

Abstract

This paper combines two important findings from research on how voters and parties interact: Firstly, it acknowledges that voters possess different decision making mechanisms: Instead of weighing the parties' policy promises, they might also vote based on past performance or the personal qualities of party leaders. Secondly, it incorporates empirical findings challenging a prominent device by which party-voter linkages are modeled, i.e. the left-right scheme. Modern party systems have been shown to vary in the number of dimensions parties compete on. We model how voters aggregate issues into party rankings, assuming that voters switch decision making mechanisms contingent on their heuristic value, and develop hypotheses on how issue diversity in party competition influences voter heuristic use.