The stability of electoral consideration sets: Theory and practice

Some decades ago election results in most democracies were characterised by high levels of stability, but in recent times elections show high levels of volatility, especially in multi-party systems. In this paper we examine if electoral preferences of citizens are more stable than the shifts in vote choice seem to suggest. More specifically, we hypothesize that citizens form electoral consideration sets (= a set of parties or candidates that a citizen considers to vote for in a certain upcoming election) and that these are fairly stable, while the observed volatility stems from different choices in consecutive elections from within these consideration sets. So, for example, a citizen may rate three left-wing parties much more positively than all other parties (long-term predisposition) and hence at the start of a campaign always consider to vote for one of these three, but then choose between them on the basis of election-specific factors that pulls this voter to one party in one election but to another party in the next election. The paper first outlines the theoretical foundations of the focus on consideration sets and the hypothesis that these are relatively stable when compared to vote choice. The second part of the paper explores this matter with panel survey data from different sources, which enable us to map the changes in consideration sets on the one hand and voting intentions or voting behaviour on the other hand, and compare both. The paper concludes with a more general reflection on the role of consideration sets in electoral research.