When Moderate Voters Prefer Extreme Parties:

This work develops and tests a theory of voter choice in parliamentary elections. I demonstrate that voters are concerned with policy outcomes and hence incorporate the way institutions convert votes to policy into their choices. Since policy is often the result of institutionalized multi-party bargaining and thus votes are watered-down by power-sharing, voters often compensate for this watering-down by supporting parties whose positions differ from (and are often more extreme than) their own views. I use this insight to reinterpret an ongoing debate between Proximity and Directional Theories of voting, showing that voters prefer parties whose positions differ from their own views insofar as these parties pull policy in a desired direction. Utilizing data from four parliamentary democracies that vary in their institutional design, I test my theory and show how institutional context affects voter behavior. ____________________________________________________________________ The author is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, ISR, 426 Thompson St., P.O.Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (E-mail: [email protected]). 0 Additional related materials (question wording, placement of parties, and values of party impacts) can be found at www.umich.edu/~oritk. At the core of democratic theory is the notion of competitive elections taking place at regular intervals. Citizens use elections as mechanisms by which they hold politicians accountable and express discontent, as tools for pointing in the direction they want policy to take, as means for placing issues on the public agenda, as an occasion for public deliberation, as well as opportunities for choosing delegates or trustees. As Powell (2000) describes them, elections are instruments of democracy How do voter preferences on issues translate into vote choice? To understand outcomes of any given election, one needs to sort out both the currency of the election – what voters care about – and how what they care about affects their choice. There is a general agreement among students of elections that issues matter (e.g., Barnes 1997). How they matter is unclear. According to current approaches, voters assess party positions (platforms) on the relevant issues with respect to their own views, employ some decision rule (e.g., similarity between party positions and voter views), and evaluate parties based on this rule. However, despite the voluminous literature on voter behavior, as far as issues go, much of the cross-national and cross-individual variation in voter behavior is left unexplained; political scientists disagree about which theoretical approach best explains how preferences on issues affect vote choice (e.g., Iversen 1994a; Lewis and King 2000). Would we imagine voters employing the same decision rule in, say, the 2001 British elections, where, as expected, the Labour Party alone secured a solid majority in the House of Commons as in the 2003 Israeli elections where thirteen parties gained seats in the Knesset, four of which hold cabinet positions at the time of writing? More generally, do voters in majoritarian systems employ the same strategy as their counterparts in consensual democracies? Under current scholarly frameworks, the answer is a clear yes. Focusing on voter evaluation of platforms, current frameworks of issue voting imply that post-electoral bargaining is of little