PropertyValue
?:abstract
  • In the last two decades, the number of vote switchers has increased around the globe. This trend is particularly observable in multi-party systems. One under-researched dimension of this phenomenon is the impact of ambivalent political attitudes. Ambivalent voters who simultaneously hold positive attitudes toward more than one political party or leader may be particularly inclined to switch parties between elections. Whilst the effects of party and leader ambivalence on vote switching have been investigated in the American political system, their application to multi-party systems is rare. In a first step, the paper focuses on the impact of political ambivalence on vote switching for a variety of multi-party systems across the world. It demonstrates that party and leader ambivalence increases the likelihood of voters switching parties between two elections, highlighting once again the importance of ambivalence for understanding the underlying determinants electoral volatility in 21st century politics. In a second step, the paper deals with how voters become politically ambivalent. To understand the underlying causes, it focuses on two paths of explaining how voters' considerations sets can become larger and thereby increase the likelihood of developing ambivalent attitudes. The first path addresses ideological distances between parties. It is argued that an increasing number of parties leads to ideological convergence among some parties. As a result, the overlap in policy content becomes greater and certain parties appear more similar. Comparing the positions of these parties would therefore not reveal too many differences from which a decision could be derived. The voter’s likelihood of becoming ambivalent increases. The second path deals with tradeoffs between (1) a favorite party and a potential coalition partner and (2) a favorite party and its leader. Related to the former, a voter may become conflicted if she clearly prefers a party but disagrees with a potential coalition partner. Related to the latter, she may also find herself in trouble if her favorite party does not match with the party of her preferred candidate or leader. While both pathways are mainly relevant for multi-party systems, they also apply to some extent to two-party systems. The focus of the paper lies, however, on multi-party systems. For the empirical analyses, data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is used for the first part and data from national election studies, like the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), is used for the second part. (xsd:string)
?:author
?:comment
  • (CSES) (xsd:string)
?:dataSource
  • CSES-Bibliography (xsd:string)
?:dateModified
  • 2022 (xsd:gyear)
?:datePublished
  • 2022 (xsd:gyear)
?:duplicate
is ?:hasPart of
?:inLanguage
  • english (xsd:string)
is ?:mainEntity of
?:name
  • The Ambivalent Voter: Ambivalent Political Attitudes and Vote Switching (xsd:string)
?:publicationType
  • inproceedings (xsd:string)
?:reference
?:sourceCollection
  • American Political Science Association (APSA) (xsd:string)
?:sourceInfo
  • Bibsonomy (xsd:string)
  • In American Political Science Association (APSA), 2022 (xsd:string)
?:studyGroup
  • Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) (xsd:string)
?:tags
  • 2022 (xsd:string)
  • CSES (xsd:string)
  • CSES_input2022 (xsd:string)
  • CSES_pro (xsd:string)
  • FDZ_IUP (xsd:string)
  • english (xsd:string)
  • inproceedings (xsd:string)
  • transfer22 (xsd:string)
rdf:type