Partisan choices in a direct-democratic campaign

Abstract

Ever since Lazarsfeld and his colleagues’ (1944) seminal study, it has become common wisdom that election campaigns, if anything, serve the activation of voters’ fundamental predispositions. However, disagreement emerges on the role of partisan orientations. Although some authors consider them as fundamental predispositions, which are activated during the campaign and subsequently act as filters for incoming information, others argue that party attachments are simple running tallies of political assessments, which are constantly updated in response to campaign events, or decision shortcuts for voters innocent of substantial information. In this study, we scrutinize the role of partisan orientations in a direct-democratic campaign using data from a panel survey fielded during the run-up to the 2006 Swiss asylum law referendum. We find that, as voters accumulate knowledge in the course of the campaign, vote intentions dramatically converge on pre-campaign partisan orientations. Moreover, voters, whose earlier issue-specific and partisan orientations collide, tend to resolve their ambivalence in favour of their partisan leanings. These results corroborate the view of partisanship as a fundamental predisposition.

Stability and Change in Party Preference

“…Because we have no measure of strength of party preference in our data, we cannot directly test its influence on stability. But in any case, such an empirical test would remain somewhat tautological, because strength and stability are causally very proximate to each other (Selb et al 2009). 4 To better understand mechanism behind stability, we therefore should focus at factors which are causes of both strength and stability of voting intentions and therefore less proximate causes.…”

Campaign Effects in Direct-Democratic Votes in Switzerland

“…It also contradicts the widespread conception that campaigns mainly help voters make decisions in line with their pre-existing predispositions (e.g., Finkel & Schrott, 1995;Lazarsfeld et al, 1944). Finally, it is also at odds with recent studies of Swiss direct democratic votes, which show that partisan orientations act as fundamental predispositions, helping voters to make political judgments and guiding political behaviour (e.g., Kriesi, 2005;Sciarini, Bornstein & Lanz, 2007;Selb et al, 2009). …”

The Use of the Endorsement Heuristic in Swiss Popular Votes

“…The political parties also provide their supporters with recommendations on how to vote on most of the issues. These recommendations are not as readily available and visible as the government's recommendation but, as empirical evidence suggests, are fairly well known to voters (Kriesi 2005; Selb et al 2009; Trechsel and Sciarini 1998).…”