It’s the Social Identities and Partisan Loyalties, Stupid? The Bases for Vote Choice in Europe

In their recent book entitled “Democracy for Realists”, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that the functioning of representative democracies does not align well with the democratic ideal. That is, while representative democracy is assumed to ensure that citizens’ preferences inform what governments do, Achen and Bartels claim that such link is weak at best. This conclusion is supported by several empirical findings. First, most democratic citizens are uninterested and poorly informed and lack either resources or motivation to choose their parties or candidates based on policy issues. Second, even the most sophisticated and engaged voters make their political decisions based on shortcuts, such as social identities and group and partisan loyalties. Achen and Bartel’s work is based on rigorous empirical analyses, but the focus is limited to several historical events in the context of the US only. To validate their results and grim conclusions about the character of representative democracies, a more systematic analysis of the link between citizens’ preferences and their vote choices is needed. In this study, we present such an analysis. To this end, we make use of the data from the 4th Module of the CSES project. We analyze the extent to which Achen and Bartel’s observation is applicable to contexts with different historical, institutional and cultural characteristics. We first compare the views on public expenditure between supporters of different parties. Subsequently, we investigate the role of these preferences vis-à-vis social identities in accounting for party choice.