Three Dimensions of Vote Choice

Politics can be described as a set of infinite issue continuums often reduced to a limited number of relevant dimensions (mat-postmat/GAL-TAN and Left-right). The growing salience of European issues are providing new challenges to this two-dimensional understanding of political competition. This research paper proposes to contribute to the debate of vote choice dimensionality by specifying how dimensions and to what extent different – attitudinal – dimensions contribute to vote choice. We first seek to analyse whether we should design European factors should effectively be seen as a separate dimension and to what extent European variables are collinear with socio-economic and socio-cultural variables. Secondly, we will we also test two additional hypotheses (moderation effect and mediation effect) that allow for the specification of alternative, not-so-direct effects of European issues and attitudes on vote choice. The paper will use EVS trendfile (completed by recent EVS data).