Electoral Competition and Issue Voting: The Effects of Institutions and Party Characteristics on the Voting Decision Process

This paper analyzes how the competitiveness of the electoral context influences issue voting. We know from previous research that voters’ issue preferences exert a larger impact on their voting decision in more competitive contexts, that is, in more polarized and fragmented party systems, as well as in more proportional electoral systems. This paper investigates these effects in more detail, by considering to which degree context effects are party specific. This research is based on a new model of the voting decision process which allows the impact of voter-party issue distances on electoral utilities to vary across parties. With this model, the relationships between issue preferences and party utilities are estimated separately for each party. This makes it possible that some features of the electoral context reinforce the impact of issues for some parties, but not for others. These hypotheses are tested with data from Spanish and Swiss elections.