Empirical election studies conclude that party elites' images with respect to competence, integrity and party unity -attributes that we label character-based valence -affect their electoral support (Stone and Simas, 2010). We compile observations of media reports Downloaded from pertaining to governing party elites' character-based valence attributes, and we relate the content of these reports to mass support for the governing parties. We present pooled, time-series, analyses of party support and valence-related media reports in six European polities which suggest that these reports exert powerful electoral effects during election campaigns but little effect during off-election periods. This finding, which we label the Election Period Valence Effect, is consistent with previous work concluding that citizens are also more attentive to policy-based considerations and to national economic conditions around the time of elections. These findings have implications for political representation and for understanding election outcomes.

When do parties use emotive rhetoric to appeal to voters? In this article, we argue that politicians are more likely to employ positive affect (valence) in their rhetoric to appeal to voters when parties are not ideologically distinct and when there is uncertainty about public preferences. To test these propositions, our paper uses well-established psycholinguistic affect dictionaries to generate scores from three time-series of political text: British party manifestos (1900-2015) and annual party leaders' speeches (1977-2014) as well as US Presidents' State of the Union addresses (1880-2016). Our findings corroborate our expectations and have important implications for the study of party competition by illuminating the role of valence in way politicians communicate their policies.

Prominent studies of electoral accountability and economic voting suggest that government constraints and international financial structures decrease the economic vote. The proposed mechanism is often labelled as the Room to Maneuver and it posits that because elected officials have limited space to propose and implement economic policy, politicians can shirk responsibility, and thus voters are less likely to place voting weights on the economy. However, results from elections that took place in Europe during the Great Recession and scholarly research on economic voting in these elections cast serious doubts on the causal mechanism. This paper directly tests this mechanism with a survey experiment using data from Greece (the country most affected by the debt crisis). The results suggest that, although the economic vote is strong and substantive, its size does not vary across the Room to Maneuver treatments. This finding informs the literature on economic voting and carries out important implications for party strategies with respect to exogenous policy impositions and their electoral effects.

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Studies interested in the cross‐national levels of corruption have concluded that specific institutional characteristics drive the aggregate variation. In countries with high institutional clarity and plurality electoral systems, corruption tends to be lower since increased voter monitoring and clarity of responsibility incentivise politicians to deliver virtuous policies. However, the underlying accountability mechanism has never been tested at the individual level. It is still unclear whether (1) voters do place voting weights on corruption, and (2) whether these weights vary in response to aggregate institutional characteristics. In this article, survey data from 23 democracies is used to put the accountability micro‐mechanism to this test. While there is some evidence that voters do vote on the basis of corruption, the moderating effect of institutional characteristics is not as strong as previously thought.