How Voters Respond to Election Issues: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

How do voters respond to party position taking over issues? Major theoretical accounts tend to assume that voters – by issue voting or not – respond uniformly to this behaviour of parties. This view, however, may underestimate the importance of variation in the development of issues amongst the electorate. In this paper, I explore this possibility by drawing on the attitude strength literature to develop the following argument: how an electorate responds to party position taking over an issue will depend upon its prior psychological engagement with it. I test this argument using original data collected from a survey experiment fielded in Germany and Spain (N=3,000) in relation to two contemporary issues, immigration and European integration. The emergence of party position taking on each issue is simulated. Results demonstrate a strong tendency for respondents to adjust their intended vote choice in line with their immigration issue attitude after exposure to treatment conditions manipulating party positions on the issue; little evidence for such a tendency exists in relation to European integration. In line with expectations, this difference is linked to the psychological involvement of electorates by demonstrating that (1) respondents more psychologically involved on an issue are more likely to adjust vote choice in line with prior issue attitude after exposure to party position taking and (2) a larger subset of individuals are psychologically involved on the issue of immigration than European integration. Results speak to the ongoing debate concerning the role of issues in the determination of voter behaviour and to the contemporary significance of party conflict over European integration vis-à-vis immigration in national electoral politics in Europe.