Voting in Two-Dimensional West European Politics: Do voters choose parties whose positions are closest to theirs?

According to recent socio-structural approach of contemporary West European politics, voters and parties are positioned within a two-dimensional political space. A key assumption underlying this approach is that voting behaviour is considered as a function of voters choosing parties whose positions are closest to their own. Debates within American political science literature have however highlighted the weakness of proximity voting and called into question the degree to which such an approach is able to explain voting behaviour in the USA. If proximity voting does indeed link structural divisions and preference divides to voting behaviour as implied in recent socio-structural approaches to West European politics, then ongoing debates within the American literature suggests the need to find direct confirmatory evidence of proximity voting. Using combined cross-sectional data drawn from the European Elections Study 2014 and Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2014, I find that voter preference-party position proximity impacts the probability of voting for Major Right, Major Left, Radical Right and Radical Left parties. Crucially however, the effect of a unit change in proximity on voting probability varies across dimensions, party families, and levels of partisan attachment. For vote-maximising parties, this implies that some parties may experience greater growth in votes than others for an equal shift in policy position on the same dimension, all things equal.