Cees van der Eijk

What Voters Teach Us about Europe-Wide Elections. What Europe-Wide Elections Teach us about Voters

Abstract With four sets of European parliamentary elections now behind us, it is appropriate to review the prevailing interpretation of such elections as second-order national elections, a view first put forward by Reif and Schmitt in 1980. While the second-order model has yielded important insights into the way European elections can be understood as manifesting national political processes, more recent research has fruitfully turned the model on its head, and focused on what European elections can tell us about national elections and the nature of the voting act. Indeed, the use of individual-level survey data to study elections to the European Parliament has for the first time truly shown us the importance of institutional and political context in conditioning turnout and party choice. Findings of recent research suggest that the second-order features of European elections should be thought of as contextual variables that can affect other elections as well.

Design issues in electoral research: taking care of (core) business

Abstract National and other election studies suffer from a number of problems that can be addressed if electoral researchers focus first and foremost on the ‘core business’ of election studies — measurement of the dependent variable in all its aspects — and allow other concerns (generally associated with measuring independent variables) to be ‘hived off’ to special-purpose surveys specific to particular sub-fields of electoral studies. These additional surveys can later be linked to the core election study for analysis purposes. This paper spells out the manner in which such linkages can be implemented, and enumerates a variety of advantages to be gained from splitting up in this way the business of studying voter attitudes and behavior. It elaborates how measurement of the dependent variable, traditionally a straightforward question about party choice, can be improved, and indicates the advantages thereof for improving our understanding of the voters calculus, and for comparative electoral research.

Electoral participation in the Netherlands: Individual and contextual influences

Research into electoral participation has produced two traditions, one focusing mainly on individual level explanations while the second concentrates primarily on aggregate level explanations. By bringing these two research approaches together, we are not only able to explain individual electoral participation more thoroughly, but we also gain additional insight into the influence of aggregate level characteristics on individual behavior. We combine eight National Election Studies held in the Netherlands between 1971 and 1994 enabling us to study variation on the individual and the contextual (aggregate) level, including interactions between these two levels. Findings show that the addition of contextual characteristics form a significant improvement to an individual level model predicting electoral participation. Findings also confirm our expectation that the influence of individual characteristics such as education or political interest is dependent upon contextual characteristics describing for instance the salience of the election.

Risky business: factor analysis of survey data – assessing the probability of incorrect dimensionalisation

This paper undertakes a systematic assessment of the extent to which factor analysis the correct number of latent dimensions (factors) when applied to ordered-categorical survey items (so-called Likert items). We simulate 2400 data sets of uni-dimensional Likert items that vary systematically over a range of conditions such as the underlying population distribution, the number of items, the level of random error, and characteristics of items and item-sets. Each of these datasets is factor analysed in a variety of ways that are frequently used in the extant literature, or that are recommended in current methodological texts. These include exploratory factor retention heuristics such as Kaiser’s criterion, Parallel Analysis and a non-graphical scree test, and (for exploratory and confirmatory analyses) evaluations of model fit. These analyses are conducted on the basis of Pearson and polychoric correlations. We find that, irrespective of the particular mode of analysis, factor analysis applied to ordered-categorical survey data very often leads to over-dimensionalisation. The magnitude of this risk depends on the specific way in which factor analysis is conducted, the number of items, the properties of the set of items, and the underlying population distribution. The paper concludes with a discussion of the consequences of over-dimensionalisation, and a brief mention of alternative modes of analysis that are much less prone to such problems.

Electoral Alignments in the Netherlands

Religion and class have been the major factors structuring party choice in the Netherlands until the mid-1960s. Since then a process of dealignment has set in. According to some the old bonds were never replaced. Others claim the emergence of new cleavages which would have supplemented or possibly even replaced the former ones. Most frequently mentioned are left-right ideology and (post)-materialist value orientations. In this article the current structure of electoral alignments in the Netherlands is analysed. Left-right turns out to be the most important determinant of party choice. Religion and class are still correlated with choice, but they exert no strong direct causal influence. Post-materialist orientations are of negligible importance in a causal model of party choice.

News Content and Effects in an Historic Campaign

Abstract In the 1994 national election, parties and politicians in the Netherlands were, for the first time, confronted with a dual broadcasting system. Alongside the public service broadcasting channels, which by law and tradition had functioned as a politically balanced platform for political communication, a new commercial network had joined the broadcasting landscape. The commercial newscast, covering its first campaign, was expected to adopt a pragmatic approach, while the public service news was expected to continue a sacer dotal approach. We thus expected to find substantial differences between the two channels in the content of election news. Observation study and content analysis showed that there w ere fewer differences between the two channels than expected in the presentation of the election campaign. The public newscast showed an increasing trend toward reporting campaigns as hoopla and horse race and away from political substance. The commercial news did exhibit some features of a pragmatic ...

Exploring Uncharted Territory: The Irish Presidential Election, 1997

Elections to the Irish presidency belong to the category of those in which hardly any political power is involved. In elections such as this one, according to second-order election theory, voter behaviour reflects mainly preferences in the first-order political arena, where actual policy is made. This theory fails, however, to explain voter preferences in the 1997 Irish presidential elections. An alternative perspective of a popularity contest, suggesting that voters’ preferences are largely unconnected to their political opinions, and generally idiosyncratic in nature, also fails to fit the evidence. Nevertheless, the information, framing and priming that voters were subjected to during the 1997 campaign are shown here to result in the development of a significant unidimensional cognitive and preferential ordering of the candidates. The comparative study of electoral behaviour has demonstrated that our understanding of particular elections ‐ even the most important and familiar ones ‐ is enriched by the search for a general theory of electoral choice that encompasses the many different forms and contexts in which elections take

Die politische Bedeutung niedriger Beteiligungsraten bei Europawahlen. Eine empirische Studie über die Motive der Nichtwahl

Die Beteiligung an Wahlen zum Europaischen Parlament ist gering, und sie ist von der ersten bis zur funften und bisher letzten Wahl rucklaufig. Obwohl sich zahlreiche Forschungsarbeiten den Ursachen der niedrigen Beteiligungsraten zugewendet haben, sind die Ergebnisse noch immer etwas widerspruchlich. Aus der Aggregatanalyse wissen wir, dass der Kontext eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Naturlich ist es fur die nationale Beteiligungsrate von eminenter Bedeutung, ob in einem Mitgliedsland Wahlpflicht herrscht oder nicht. Eine grose Rolle spielt auch, ob die Europawahl mit der nationalen Hauptwahl oder mit einer anderen, wichtigeren Nebenwahl zusammenfallt. Und der zeitliche Abstand zur Hauptwahl ist ebenso relevant wie die Frage, ob sonntags oder werktags gewahlt wird (van der Eijk/Franklin 1996: Kapitel 19).

The Dutch parliamentary election of May 1986

After a rather uneventful election campaign, the results of the May 1986 Dutch parliamentary election were a surprise to virtually all involved. Since the introduction of regular opinion polling in the 1960s, no election has taken place when the polls were ‘wrong’. However, in 1986 last minute shifts that were stronger than had ever occurred in the Netherlands produced results that differed significantly from the predictions based upon the polls published immediately prior to the election.

The Role of the Eurobarometer in the Study of European Elections and the Development of Comparative Electoral Research

The lasting significance of the Eurobarometer, created by Jacques-Rene Rabier, for empirical social research and the politics of European integration can hardly be overestimated. Its most distinguished features are its cross-national comparative nature and its longitudinal character. Either of these two characteristics by itself would already make it a very important project. After all, both national longitudinal surveys and cross-national transversal studies are usually deemed to be invaluable, and neither of these two kinds of studies exist in abundance. The possibility of conjoint cross-national and longitudinal comparison, however, renders the Euro-barometer into a truly unique enterprise, the scientific and applied potential of which will be difficult to exhaust.