CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Horváth, László |
|---|---|
| Title | Information effects and party competition set-ups: A cross-constituency study of Spanish electoral behavior |
| Summary | Current research on voting behavior has been shifting focus to the problem of how several aspects of the political, social, or economic context influence the way individuals reason and make up their minds about politics. Contextual variation is frequently understood as that of the information environment, in which one's opportunity to receive high quality political information explains a range of behavioral patterns. This, however, has mostly meant the role of the media (its systemic properties), and less has been said about a related, but conceptually different environmental factor, party competition. In my thesis, I argue that party competition situations represent variations in the information environment. The key mechanism that polarization and fractionalization can influence the programmatic party-citizen linkage in that (1) they create environments in which parties communicate their programmatic content with varying efficiency, and (2) they can therefore denote contexts in which a party-voter ideological congruence varies There is no single powerful theory that can identify, however, the kind of competition set-up that is most successful in informing voters. To see how competition matters, I designed a cross-constituency study of fractionalization and polarization's effect on selected indicators of informed behavior in Spain. The three sets of multilevel and one log-linear analyses are rather of exploratory kind, but some findings suggest that voters in multi-party and less polarized provinces are more aware of the party programs. However, the analysis of congruence does not give enough evidence to contend that they also find the best fitting parties. |
| Supervisor | Popescu, Marina |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/horvath_laszlo.pdf |
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