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Partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote: Disentangling the new iron triangle in electoral research

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article provides an empirical assessment of the causal structure underlying the core dependent variable of electoral research (the vote) and two of its most notable predictors (partisanship and leader evaluations). A critical review of traditional models of voting highlights the need to account for the reciprocal relationship between the main predictors as well as for the potential feedback stemming from the dependent variable. In the light of these considerations, a new ‘iron triangle’ of electoral research would seem to take shape, with partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote tight to each other by a strong link of reciprocal causation. Making use of pre-/post-election surveys from Britain and Italy, the empirical analysis provides evidence for a strong effect of past behavior on political attitudes. However, past behavior seems to exert its effect mainly on partisan attitudes, whereas party leader evaluations appear only slightly affected. The results point to the considerably weakened role of partisanship as attitudinal anchor of vote choice. Leader evaluations, on the contrary, emerge as a crucial component in the voting decision.

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Notes

  1. One of the possible reasons for the generalized expansion of SEM applications in contexts that do not satisfy the autonomy requirement is put forward by Wooldridge (2010), who argues that ‘there appears to be a general misperception that “structural” and “simultaneous” are synonymous […] [while] a simultaneous model is not necessarily structural’ (p. 241).

  2. It must be noted that without the employment of a proper statistical estimator (for example, Anderson and Hsiao, 1981; Arellano and Bond, 1991) the magnitude of the coefficient of previous voting choice is likely to be biases. In this analysis, however, we are not interested in measuring the direct effect of previous vote choice, which is only included as a means for controlling the indirect effect exerted by this variable through our key attitudinal measures (that is, party identification and leader evaluations).

  3. We recognize that these measures are not fully exogenous. However, under the assumption that the proportions of the endogenous parts controlled for in PidPre and LeaderPre remain constant (that is, they are proportional to the endogenous part that remains hidden), we are allowed to make inference regarding the ‘exogenous nature’ of our key regressors.

  4. Harold Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne Stewart and Paul Whitely. British Election Study 2005. National Centre for Social Research [P2474 Data file]. Paolo Bellucci and Paolo Segatti. Italian National Election Study 2006. Istituto Cattaneo, Bologna [www.itanes.org].

  5. One problem arising from the use of pre/post election surveys is represented by the necessity to rely on recall data for the past voting choice variable. Admittedly, vote recall questions have been found to be problematic under a number of respects (for a review, see Himmelweit et al, 1978). Yet, as Schoen (2011) argues, abandoning recall questions would represent a massive limitation to the study of comparative electoral behavior, given the fact that suitable panel data are ‘neither abundant nor without their own problems’. Note that in the election studies at hand, past voting choice is measured in the pre-electoral wave of the survey.

  6. It is worth noting the highly uneven impact of ideology (0.85) and economic assessments (0.13) as drivers of voting choice in the Italian case. In the British case, the relative effect of ideology and economic assessments appears more balanced (standardized regression coefficients equal to 0.27 and 0.12, respectively).

  7. Further than considering clustered standard errors, we enforced a focus on the choices (for example, parties) available to each respondent separately as well as the omission of those respondents who made no choice at all through Conditional Logit estimation. If any, the results of this effort magnify the effect of leader evaluations (Italy=0.90, Britain=0.80) vis-à-vis party identification (Italy=0.23, Britain=0.60). In the case of Italy, we could also compare the findings of our analysis of synthetic utilities (that is, vote choice) with those stemming from the analysis of measured utilities (that is, propensity to vote scores; for a review, see De Angelis and Garzia, 2013). Once again, the effect of leader evaluations largely dominates that of party identification (standardized OLS coefficients equal to 0.43 and 0.15, respectively). Tables are not shown for parsimony.

  8. Frequency of church attendance was only available in the Italian dataset.

  9. As shown by Himmelweit et al (1978), vote recall questions may lead to systematic bias favoring large parties (for example voters that cast their ballot for smaller parties might be more prone to attribute their past vote to large parties). Through the one-by-one exclusion of parties from the model, we are able to assess the actual impact of this potential source of bias (if any) on our statistical estimates.

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Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this article have been presented at the 1st European Conference on Comparative Electoral Research (Sofia, December 2011), the 8th ECPR General Conference (Glasgow, September 2014), and at the 28th Convegno Annuale SISP (Perugia, 2014). We thank all the participants for the useful comments received.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European University Institute, Via dei Roccettini 9, San Domenico di Fiesole, I-50014, Italy

    Diego Garzia & Andrea De Angelis

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  1. Diego Garzia
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  2. Andrea De Angelis
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Correspondence to Diego Garzia.

Appendix

Appendix

Party identification question

Britain: Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, or what? If yes, would you call yourself very strong [partyname] fairly strong or not very strong?

Italy: Is there any political party that you feel closer to than others? If yes, would you consider yourself very close to this party, fairly close to this party or only a sympathizer of this party?

Leaders evaluation question

Britain: Now let’s think about party leaders for a moment. Using a scale that runs from 0 to 10, where 0 means strongly dislike and 10 means strongly like, how do you feel about [partyleader]?

Italy: I am going to read now a list of some political leaders. For each of them, please tell me if you have ever heard about him/her. If so, please tell me how would you judge him/her giving a mark between 1 and 10: 1 meaning completely negative judgment, 10 completely positive judgment and 6 sufficiently positive.

List of leaders and parties (in parenthesis) included in the analysis

Britain: Tony Blair (Labour), Michael Howard (Conservatives), Charles Kennedy (Liberal Democrats).

Italy: Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia), Fausto Bertinotti (Rifondazione Comunista), Umberto Bossi (Lega Nord), Pier Ferdinando Casini (Unione dei Democratici Cristiani di Centro) Piero Fassino (Democratici di Sinistra), Gianfranco Fini (Alleanza Nazionale), Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio (Verdi), Francesco Rutelli (La Margherita).

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Garzia, D., De Angelis, A. Partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote: Disentangling the new iron triangle in electoral research. Comp Eur Polit 14, 604–625 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2014.36

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