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A Behavioral Theory of Electoral Structure

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Abstract

Why are party systems in modern democracies so essentially robust? We theorize patterns of electoral competition as the outcome of a struggle between entropy and structure. Forces of entropy entail idiosyncratic voting behavior guided by subjective evaluations, while forces of structure entail coordinated behavior emerging from objective aspects of party preference. Our model locates determinants of party preference on a continuum spanning subjective and objective concerns. Entropy is endemic but elections for nationwide executive office periodically prime objective concerns, reinstating structure in party systems. We demonstrate the cyclical pulse of national elections in a comparative analysis of pseudo-randomized survey data from the European Election Studies since 1989. We also show how feedback from differently-sized party systems consolidates different working equilibria.

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Notes

  1. This is not evident in analyses that treat parties separately, but our research design considers generic party support, also avoiding the tautology that people support large parties by definition.

  2. But note that objectivity does not imply immobility. Demographic characteristics surely change and party systems, like all of society, have to adapt. However, this is a long-term process that gives parties ample time to react or even be proactive. Objectivity, in contrast, is a more immediate force that reproduces structure at the relatively fast rhythm of the electoral cycle.

  3. A possible, complementary, extension of this argument is that citizens have a preference for stable majority government as such and vote accordingly (e.g., LeDuc 1977).

  4. Note that first-order-ness is a measure in its own right, not an instrument for unmeasured motivations. So the question of meeting an exclusion restriction does not arise.

  5. Indeed, enlightened preferences theory provides another way of viewing our expectation that first-order structuring extends into the electoral cycle on both sides of an FOE.

  6. The idea that voters more centrist than the politicians they elect try to ensure centrist policies by voting at midterm to balance the outcome of the previous presidential election. For comparative perspectives, see Carrubba and Timpone (2005), Marsh (2007) and Kedar (2009).

  7. Each perspective has an early precursor. Pedersen (1979) showed how more parties increase the entropic potential of electoral volatility, and Hirschman (1970, 26ff.) argued that competition solidifies market structures if consumers switch back and forth between limited suppliers.

  8. The data and replication code are available at doi:10.7910/DVN/QZVK4B.

  9. Several electoral contexts had missing values for one or another required variable. Such values were imputed in the stacked dataset if all other required variables were measured.

  10. Perceptions of party positions generally suffer from rationalization bias as respondents seek closeness to preferred parties and contrast to less preferred parties. Importantly, such bias would be stronger around national elections and thus works against our hypotheses, which expect subjective variables to have stronger effect around midterm.

  11. No election is coded exactly 0 because, if an FOE is held on the same day as the EP election, that context is coded 1 on Cycle (a full cycle has elapsed since the previous FOE). This applies to nine contexts (five of which involve Luxembourg, see Online Appendix), which allow us to demonstrate that the cycle curves are not mere inter-election phenomena; they extend into first-order territory.

  12. Interactions with higher-order polynomials of Cycle did not yield additional insights.

  13. Note that random respondent intercepts enforce a focus on within-individual comparison, much as conditional logit does in the estimation of discrete choice models.

  14. Our model contains no party level, so party size is implicitly an effect at the lowest level. An additional level would have overloaded an already complex model. However, in a simpler model estimated for only one year, party size had a stronger and more highly significant effect when an explicit party level was defined, so our simplification of the hierarchical structure is conservative.

  15. The cyclical effect of party size is clearly asymmetric. This is at least partly because size does not measure the current state of affairs but the state of affairs at the time of the preceding FOE. This means that size “ages.” Unlike other variables that are continuously updated, its functionality as an indicator decreases through time. Once we jointly consider the instrumental effect and its decrease over time, we arrive at the picture displayed in Fig. 2: a strong effect at the start, a weak effect at midterm and an in-between effect at the end. We may additionally be seeing evidence of a long-term decline in the coherence of European party systems (see below).

  16. Note, however, that our estimate of the general level of the effect of social structure is conservative (see Online Appendix).

  17. We also tested for cyclical trends in the general level of independent variables. No such patterns were found. This means that the findings in Table 1 are not due to a composition effect in the number of people expressing partisanship or ascribing competence.

  18. The correlation of TPD (a context-level measure) and party size (a party-level measure) is a mere 0.167, so that collinearity is not a concern.

  19. We resists the temptation to interpret the reversed cycle theoretically because this finding is largely based on extrapolation—after all, there is only one case of TPD = 1 in our data (Malta 2009). The extrapolation is certainly based on a strong interaction in the data at large, but estimating the exact function for TPD = 1 is beyond our means.

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Acknowledgements

Early versions of this paper were presented at APSA 2010 and MPSA 2011 as well as in talks at Australian National University, the European University Institute, Nuffield College Oxford, Temple University, Trinity College Dublin, University of British Columbia and University of Houston. We thank the participants for their helpful comments and in particular Matt Barreto, Fabrizio Bernardi, Cees van der Eijk, Anand Shastri, Laura Stoker, Bernhard Wessels, Christopher Wlezien, and the anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Baruch College, City University of New York, 1 Bernard Baruch Way, Box B5-280, New York, NY, 10010, USA

    Till Weber

  2. Department of Political Science, Trinity College Connecticut, 300 Summit Street, Hartford, CT, 06106, USA

    Mark N. Franklin

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Weber, T., Franklin, M.N. A Behavioral Theory of Electoral Structure. Polit Behav 40, 831–856 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9425-5

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