Changing Party Systems, Intra-Party Policy Cohesion and Proximity Voting: Do only Highly Educated Citizens choose the Right Party?

Theories of proximity voting belong to the core concepts when explaining the outcome of decision-making processes of citizens in elections. A number of studies provide evidence that voters choose parties that come closest to their position on key policy dimensions. This is – from a normative perspective – a desirable finding, because voters then decide for the ‘right agents’ who then serve in their voters’ interests in parliaments and governments. However, mentally ‘calculating’ the policy distance towards the parties competing for votes and deciding on the basis of the set of individual distance scores is considered to be a complicated process. We argue in this paper that voters with a higher degree of education are more likely to choose the party closest to their own ideal point compared to voters with a lower degree of education. This pattern should, yet, depend on contextual features: the education degree of voters should be less important for the impact of proximity-based issue voting if (1) the policy dimension under study covers general issues instead of more specific issues, if (2) the party representatives send clear programmatic signals before the election and if (3) the parties are established ones and not founded recently. We test these expectations on the basis of voter survey data and a novel dataset that covers information on the policy statements of party representatives before German Bundestag elections. The findings show that the degree of education matters for proximity-based issue voting only in the case of new parties and programmatically cohesive parties.