Recent elections in Western Europe have shown remarkably high volatility. Challenger parties have proven successful by rejecting the left/right dimension, and proposing innovative issue packages combining goals traditionally associated with the both the left and the right. The classical ideological dimension appears to be losing importance in shaping political conflict and vote choice. Thus, issue voting represents an increasingly useful tool to study voting behavior.
In this paper, we investigate the extent and characteristics of issue voting in contemporary Western Europe. To do so, we rely on an innovative original dataset we have collected in six Western European countries (the Netherlands, France, the UK, Austria, Germany, and Italy) immediately before their latest general elections. Six identical surveys were administered to representative samples of the national voting populations, including measures of issue preference for positional issues, and, for both positional and valence issues, measures of party credibility and issue priority.
The dataset has been collected to study campaign strategies pursued by parties (De Sio and Lachat forthcoming). Here we turn to voting behavior. Our dataset let us estimate regression models for the transitions in and out from each party with preferences in terms of party credibility and issue priority as predictors. We can thus assess the specific issues relevant in explaining the electoral successes and failures of different parties.
