A Micro Perspective on Electoral Competition (and How it Matters for the Choice Process)

From the voter’s perspective two aspects of political competition are crucial. Firstly, there must be more than one party coming into consideration. If all but one party are perceived to be ineligible there is no competition for this person’s vote. It is only voting for this party or not voting at all. Hence, a plurality of possible choices can be understood as a necessary condition for competition. This is a weakness of traditional model in electoral research: They focus only on explaining the final step in the decision-making process – voting for a specific party or candidate. In multi-party systems, however, considerations leading to this final step might not be as simple as ‘in favour of party A, equally against all other parties.’ Therefore, ‘propensities to vote’ (PTV) have been successfully applied to the study of electoral behaviour, but rarely to the (comparative) study of competition. Secondly, competition itself finds its expression in the selection process – from possible options to the final choice. This is how competition is perceived individually: a number of parties come into question but which one should I vote for? This reduction process can be measured using PTVs and their overlap structure. Therefore, a comparative study of electoral competition may profit considerably from focussing on those. This paper asks, firstly, how competitive the European party systems are and whether competition covaries with certain party system characteristics, e.g. the (effective) number of parties. Secondly, it asks whether the mentioned reduction processes in several countries is affected by the competitiveness of the party systems. EES data will be used to analyse cross-national variations in the competition structure. Thereby, systematic variation regarding patterns of competition can be detected and explained. This can help to describe voter’s decision-making process in a more realistic, context specific way.