Voter Uncertainty and Party Ambiguity in EP Elections

Voter uncertainty is much higher concerning European Union politics than national politics. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that voter uncertainty is equally caused by voter sophistication and by strategic ambiguity of political parties. Abstract: The spatial model of voting requires voters to be (fully) informed and (fully) rational decision-makers. Relations between the locations of voters and parties in a political space matter for party evaluation and for vote choice. This paper uses the unique comparative data provided by the European Election Studies to explore what happens when the idealized assumptions of full and correct information are violated. The argument is developed in two consecutive steps: (1) We begin with a definition of vote uncertainty about spatial party locations and discriminate between voter-induced, perceptual uncertainty which is predominantly a consequences of political sophistication and party-induced, strategic uncertainty which traces back to party ambiguity and equivocation. (2) The second step links voter uncertainty with vote choice. We hypothesize that higher levels of uncertainty reduce the voters’ capacity to use spatial considerations for vote choice and systematically depress voter utilities for a specific party.