Consideration Set Models for Party Choice in Multi-Party Elections

Abstract

Many well established explanatory models of party choice are waning as increasing proportions of citizens in established democracies display highly individualized and volatile voting behavior. Decades of electoral research have shown weakening ties between parties and voters, e.g., eroding social cleavages, increasing electoral volatility, and increasing proportions of late deciders (demand side). At the same time, in contemporary West European multi-party systems (supply side) there has been a toning down of ideological differences, a movement towards a “median voter” position, and an increase in the number of parties that compete for voter support. These well documented trends have generated more leeway for short-term explanatory factors that represents a big challenge to electoral research today. Recently, consideration set models of party choice (CSM) have come to present an intriguing remedy to the many challenges of individualized voting behavior. A central argument is that voters search for and utilize different kinds of political cues and information depending on the size of their party sets (i.e. form) or the combinations of parties that make up their party sets (i.e. content) Consideration set models enable us to isolate the impact of various factors at various stages in the decision process. Bringing together insights from research on voting behavior, social psychology, consumer behavior and marketing in one framework is long overdue. However, the application of the consideration set approach for elections in multi-party systems presents several challenges not yet met, theoretical as well as methodological. This panel therefore welcomes papers focusing on various aspects of the consideration set approach for party choice in multi-party systems, e.g., measurement of consideration sets, explanation of consideration set size and content, development of consideration sets during a campaign, impact of consideration set size and content on information search or voting behavior, or methodological approaches to deal with consideration sets.

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