Natacha Postel-Vinay is impressed by the radical and bold conclusions presented in this study of the ways in which institutions can affect our voting behaviour

Postel-Vinay, Natacha

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LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.uk http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2011/08/28/book-review-citizens-context-and-choice/Book Review: Citizens, Context and Choice: How ContextShapes Citizens’ Electoral ChoicesNatacha Postel-Vinay is impressed by the radical and bold conclusions presented in this study of  the waysin which institutions can affect our voting behaviour.Citizens, Context and Choice: How Context Shapes Citizens’ Electoral Choices. Russell J. Daltonand Christopher J. Anderson. Oxford University Press. 2011.Find this book: Google Books Amazon LSE LibraryTo non-specialists, the title Citizens, Context and Choice: How ContextShapes Citizens’ Electoral Choices might suggest that the book deals withhow temporary events, issues and scandals affect the way people vote. Notat all – this volume, edited by established electoral studies scholars RussellDalton and Christopher Anderson, focuses almost exclusively on the ways inwhich the institutional context (e.g. proportional representation [PR] vs.majoritarian systems, the number of parties and their ideologicalpolarization) impacts voting. As a substantial amount of studies have beenundertaken on the topic, even political scientists might be reluctant to readyet another one. But fear not! The book comes up with a radically different,and rather bold, conclusion: these institutional traits, which differ widelyamong democracies, in fact have very little effect on voting decisions. Thisbodes ill for those looking for ways to increase the representative power ofgovernments.The editors of the book assembled an international team of political systemspecialists to work on a new cross-sectional dataset containing uniformly-collected information at the individual, national and international level.Multilevel analysis thus allows these researchers to separate the effects ofindividual characteristics (such as education, political views and income) from macro-level political variables.Although each author tackles a different aspect of voting, they all establish the same statistical fact:individual-level characteristics have larger direct effects on voting decisions than institutional ones. This is asmuch true, for example, with respect to voter turnout, as it is with respect to campaign activity and thestrength of Left-Right voting (the propensity for an individual to vote according to her stated position on theLeft-Right scale).But the subtlety of their argument lies in the fact that they also emphasise the existence of indirect orcontingent causation effects between less formal political institutions and voting. For instance: although,counter-intuitively, a high number of parties does not increase voter turnout, voters will have a higherprobability of casting a ballot as the clarity of choices (party polarization) strengthens. Further, thisprobability only increases for voters who already believe that voting is important. Likewise, party polarizationhas a negative effect on campaign activity, but this negative effect shrinks as an individual’s partisanstrength grows stronger. Finally, polarization also strongly conditions whether people can translate their Left-Right orientations into party choice.This volume provides a coherent and ground-breaking account of the subtle ways in which formal and lessformal institutions may affect voting behaviour. The use of multilevel analytic methods coupled with new finermeasures of political organisation (such as the “effective” number of parties, and of course partypolarization) is to be commended. Perhaps one of the only defects of some of these studies is a slighttendency towards tautology; a sentence like “Partisans are more likely to have stronger partisan preferencesthan non-partisans” may not be needed.It is also true that some non-specialists may express regret regarding what they expected from the title: thelack of treatment of the role of temporary issues and economic events for voting strategies. Given thecurrent electric political atmosphere, this is somewhat frustrating. However, some chapters do go in thisdirection: one establishes that Left-Right voting is not that important and that other, more temporary events,affect voting at least just as much; while another specifically studies “performance voting”, albeit by focusingon its causes rather than on its extent and nature (economic or other).This may be because the dataset is cross-sectional and does not analyse these variables through time. Inmany occasions the reader might wonder whether these results would be the same if the authors hadanalysed the evolution of voter behaviour between at least two elections. According to the authors the CSESdataset is perhaps the first multilevel, systematically-organised dataset covering such a large range ofcountries. The next step will certainly be to follow these countries and individuals in future elections,wherever possible. But overall, given the available data, this volume certainly provides an insightful andrigorous study of the dynamics of voting.Natacha Postel-Vinay is a PhD student in economic history at LSE.

Book review: citizens, context and choice: how context shapes citizens’ electoral choices

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