The Bases for Voting Decisions: Policy Issues, Social Identities, and Partisan Loyalties

Abstract

What influences vote choice? This question is hardly new with much ink having been spilt on trying to identify the correlates underlying why voter’s choice one candidate or party over another. Traditional explanations have highlighted the crucial role of partisanship and social identities such as class, religion, and ideology (e.g.: Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). Yet, partisanship has been dwindling in many countries, ideological divisions have become fuzzier, and with social mobility and deconfessionalization, class and religious divisions have diminished (e.g.: Franklin 1992). With these developments, more recent studies of voter behaviour have emphasized valence issues impact on the vote, especially the crucial effect of voter’s economic perceptions and feelings about political leaders (e.g.: Clarke et al. 2004, 2009). Yet, more recent studies have suggested that the downplaying of social identities and partisanship is misplaced, with some maintaining that the traditional cleavages of class and religion still have strong explanatory value (e.g.: Evans 2000), and others noting the development of social identities driven by new cleavages such as education and globalization (e.g.: Kriesi et al, 2012; Stubager 2010). Such claim and counterclaim about the impacts of policy, social identities, and partisanship calls, especially vis-à-vis one another, requires focus to be concentrated on the role these things have on vote choice. This is especially crucial considering the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), a seminal occurrence globally, the consequences of which are still emerging, might have shifted the political equilibrium and resulted in policy, social identities, and/or partisanship taking on greater or less salience. This panel, composed of papers taking a quantitative and qualitative approach and containing a mixture of cross-national comparative studies as well as country case studies, unpacks these important questions. The aim is to shed further light on the role of policy, social identities, and partisanship on the vote in the 21st century.