Intra-party candidate success and ideological positions in an open-list proportional representation system

Abstract

The importance of individual candidates and intra-party competition for electoral outcomes has been on the rise. This is due to increasing personalization of politics in Western democracies. This doctoral dissertation contributes to the relatively new literature on intra-party competition. Intra-party competition is a type of competition that is located within parties. At the time of elections, intra-party competition means that candidates from the same party compete for personal votes against their co-partisans. The dissertation examines the role of candidates’ ideological positions in their electoral fortunes from the perspective of intra-party competition. Literature on candidate success in open-list proportional electoral systems has emphasized voters’ informational context on voter decision-making. In complex information environments, voters typically resort to cognitive shortcuts, i.e., heuristics, when they choose the candidate to vote for. Voters seeking to minimize their cognitive load often choose candidates who are recognizable, have previous political experience, or have local roots in the voter’s area. Other factors, such as campaigning resources, are also important for winning a seat in parliament. Rational choice theorists have advocated for the role of candidate ideology in explaining voters’ vote choices. However, candidates’ ideological and issue positions have been typically seen as being too cumbersome for voters to use in complex information environments. Moreover, there have been alternative views about whether the optimal candidate strategy should be to carve out unique policy profiles and distinguish oneself from other co-partisans or take up positions that do not deviate from the party line. Using register, survey, and voting advice application data from Finnish parliamentary candidates, the dissertation provides further evidence that candidates’ ideological positions have a small, but non-negligible effect on candidate success. Besides confirming existing findings, it is found that the effects of candidates’ ideological distances are conditional to party ideology and the informational context that the voters face while selecting a candidate. These results imply that in a typical case the optimal candidate strategy is to stay ideologically close to the party line, which is at odds with the idea that candidates would benefit from distinguishable policy profiles. Within the literature of intra-party competition, these are novel and exciting findings. The results also show that under certain contexts, voters respond to candidates’ ideological positions more strongly. This is contrary to the expectation that open-list electoral systems with high district magnitudes, such as the Finnish system, pose such a complex information environment for voters that they would not choose candidates based on issue positions. This dissertation also shows that candidates’ ideological positions obtained from voting advice applications can be trusted as a source of political information for researchers and voters alike.

Veikko Isotalo

Senior researcher in Political Science

My research interests include VAAs, data science and electoral research.