Research

The decline of party loyalties and the spread of television have led to the concerning expectation of increased leader relevance in voters' decisions. Using a large collection of national election studies over the last six decades (18 countries, 122 elections, over 170,000 respondents), I find that there is no increase in leader importance over time, but a drop in party relevance in the 1990s followed by a gradual party comeback. I find little support for media affecting this trend. Instead, I find support for the trend aligning with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communist ideology, which left parties without a vital cleavage on which to structure electoral competition, the decline of traditional class cleavages, and the subsequent changes in party strategy. My findings suggest that behavioral personalization is much less pronounced, a cautionary interpretation of the role of media, and a larger role for issue politics in voting decisions.

Voters face difficult choices in primary elections. Partisan cues are typically uninformative, the number of potentially viable candidates may be large, and detailed information about candidates' policy views or competence may be scarce. Endorsements, particularly those coming from high profile party elites, can provide voters with useful heuristics that help them make their choices. Yet little is known about how voters understand different types of endorsements in primary elections. We fill this gap with a study conducted during the 2020 Democratic primaries where we causally isolate the distinct impact of policy and electability endorsements. We find that endorsements based on policy issues raise support for candidates by 13 percentage points and endorsements emphasizing electability raise support for candidates by 15 percentage points. The results demonstrate that primary election endorsements that invoke policy or electability can influence vote choice and ultimately outcomes.

Voters often have to resolve dilemmas between choosing their favorite candidate and those likeliest to win elections. But researchers know surprisingly little about how voters make these decisions and whether policy agreement or electability matters more to voters. They know even less about how voters conceptualize electability. We use two novel survey experiments to evaluate how voters trade off policy views and electability in their decisions. The first experiment measures policy agreement between respondents and candidates and candidates' electability rankings on the same scale, allowing us to directly compare them and evaluate tradeoffs. We show that, while making electability information salient to respondents makes them 3.8\% less likely to support candidates who share their policy views, respondents remain primarily policy-motivated even in elections centered on electability. In a second experiment, we show that voters do not differentiate viability in a primary from electability in a general election. Moreover, respondents describe electability as a loose signal of a candidate's appeal or popularity - often thinking that if candidates are clearly qualified other voters will want to vote for them. Overall, our results make clear that policy views dwarf electability, and that voters think about electability in very general terms.

In coalition governments, parties need to agree on a common policy position. Whose preferences prevail? The proportionality hypothesis, the idea that coalition partners’ influence on policy is proportional to their share of seats, has been used widely in the literature on democratic representation, ideological congruence, and coalition politics. In my analysis of competing theories aimed at determining what influences policy compromise in multiparty governments, I reject the proportionality hypothesis. My results suggest instead that coalition partners exert equal influence on policy compromises, independent of their number of seats. More extensive analysis also provides evidence for increased party influence on policies when the party is the formateur or closer to the parliamentary median, ceteris paribus. As a by-product of my analysis, I provide a simple and better proxy for measuring a government’s position when this position is not directly observable.

The gender gap in factual political information – where men appear to know more than women – is widely documented. We extend research that argues for shifting the theoretical focus from factual recall to voters’ competence in completing a political task. We do not expect a gender gap in the latter case: even if women are less factually informed, they have comparable incentives to gain the sophistication necessary to make competent choices. We evaluate this expectation with unique data from the 2009 German election. We find men possessed significantly more factual information about German politics. But, there is no difference in men’s and women’s knowledge about the policy stances of various potential multi-party coalitions – knowledge crucial for the task at hand: voting. Our findings highlight the importance of connecting measures to theoretically relevant questions.

What causes the gender bias in policy-opinion congruence? I argue that, in addition to well-known factors such as women’s lower levels of descriptive representation and political engagement, the gender bias also stems from the policymaker hindering policy change, while women have stronger preferences than men for policy change. I use the case of the European Union, and I find that women’s opinions receive less policy congruence than men’s. The bias comes from a specific set of policies in which the policymaker fails to satisfy the policy opinion of the majority, women have different policy preferences than men, such as for social and environmental protection, and desire more policy change than men, but policy change occurs even less frequently.

We examine the impact of 1990 and 2000 laws of citizenship in Germany, which liberalized the path to the acquisition of citizenship, on the national identity of immigrants. Leveraging the exogenous variation in waiting time for naturalization generated by those two reforms, we find that immigrants who benefited from less restrictive conditions to become citizens developed a stronger national identification with Germany, both after and during their waiting time for naturalization. The effect was particularly strong for women and for those immigrants that were older at the time of their arrival. A higher attachment to Germany seems to have been mainly driven by psychological and socioeconomic mechanisms: a more liberal regime reduced subjective concerns about discrimination, heightened immigrants’ social and political participation, and fostered their use of the German language.

Political discussions shape vote choices and information environments. Yet, women typically discuss politics less than men do. We argue this stems from a motivational asymmetry. Specifically, men treat political conversations as a social activity, while women are functional dis- cussants, engaging in conversations that serve a purpose. Consequently, as elections approach and information-gathering is increasingly needed (i.e., there is a purpose), women will close the discussion gap with men. Panel data from eight elections in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States confirm this: the gender gap in political discussion narrows and effectively disappears in the final weeks before each election. Consistent with our argument, women decide for whom to vote later than men. They also discuss politics more with intimates such as family members than with those they may interact with in social settings such as colleagues. Finally, the gender gap in political interest, a stable disposition, does not similarly close as elections approach, providing placebo evidence for our account. Political engagement is not just a disposition, it also depends on context.