Elias Dinas

Measuring parties' ideological positions with manifesto data: A critical evaluation of the competing methods

Within the rapidly growing literature on positioning political parties along policy dimensions, the rich data series collected by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) has been widely considered as the most systematic and objective source of information. For estimating parties’ positions on the Left—Right dimension alone, several different methods have been proposed which make use of the CMP data. However, unless a new method is proposed, there will seldom be any attempt to check the robustness of the findings across different measurement strategies. In this article, we focus on the parties in Greece, which have been notoriously incorrectly positioned by the ‘standard’ method proposed by the CMP. We contrast the ‘standard’ method with various proposed alternatives and show that the latter outperform the former both in terms of face and convergent validity and in terms of reliability. In addition, we show that this cross-checking is essential, since different methods often lead to diametrically opposite results.

The 2012 Greek Parliamentary Elections: Fear and Loathing in the Polls

In his spatial representation of party competition, Downs (1957) made an important distinction between a stable democratic regime and a dysfunctional political system with a high probability of civil conflict. In the first case, public opinion in the main underlying ideological dimension resembles a normal distribution with a single peak on or near the midpoint of the ideological continuum. The second case was depicted by a bimodal distribution with two modes near the two extremes of the same ideological dimension. A graphical illustration of the two patterns is shown in Figure 1. The last two Greek general elections signify a two-step process from the first stage to the second. Since 1981 and until the 2009 election, the Greek political system resembled a typical case of two-partyism. Aided by an electoral system that has always allowed significant deviations from proportionality, the two major parties, Panellinio Sosialistiko Kenema (Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK) on the centre-left and Nea Democratia (New Democracy, ND) on the centre-right, were competing for the reins of government. Few smaller parties have always found their way to the parliament but their vote shares and their number of seats was much lower from the two major parties. As shown in Figure 2, this pattern drastically changed in 2012. The May election saw a dramatic decline in the vote shares of the two major parties, giving room to a uniform-like distribution of preferences. The results led to a deadlock and soon a decision was taken for new elections. If the May elections served to confirm a widespread belief about the end of the old party system, the June election marked a new departure point. On the one hand, PASOK’s collapse converted ND into the only viable representative of a pro-EU solution. On the other hand, it was Synaspismos Rizospastikis Aristeras (Coalition of the Radical Left,

The Formation of Voting Habits

Rather than adhering to the cost-benefit calculus often employed in the study of turnout, a recent stream in this literature refers to voting as habit forming. The empirical findings supporting this developmental approach are still scarce, however. Using voting-age discontinuities among almost equally aged individuals, this study enables the identification of the effect of voting in one election on turnout in future elections. Tracing individuals for more than 30 years of their lives, the long-term effect of early voting experiences on peoples turnout profiles is also examined. The findings show early voting experiences shape future voting profiles. Moreover, casting a ballot does not boost non-electoral participation.

Opening “Openness to Change”: Political Events and the Increased Sensitivity of Young Adults

The impressionable years thesis asserts that early adulthood is accompanied by increased attitudinal vulnerability. Although there is tentative empirical evidence to support this idea, it remains unclear whether this sensitivity is due to exposure to change-inducing circumstances, typically encountered in early adulthood, or due to the weight attached by young people to new information. I address this question, focusing on a political event—the Watergate—that offers a test of youth’s heightened susceptibility, holding exposure constant. The results confirm the impressionable years thesis and shed light on how it is most likely to be manifested empirically.

From dusk to dawn Local party organization and party success of right-wing extremism

A marginal racist organization, Golden Dawn, managed to attract first the votes of almost one out of 14 Greek voters and then global media and public attention. How did an extreme right groupuscule invade the political terrain of an EU-10 member state? Existing attempts to account for this phenomenon point to demand-side explanations, related to the political turmoil that followed the notorious debt crisis and the accompanying austerity measures. These explanations, however, fail to account for the genesis of this trajectory. We delve into this exact question, focusing on the election that marked the emergence of the Golden Dawn and permitted further electoral penetration. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that the party took advantage of favourable political circumstances developing a grassroots network of protection that helped it enter the central political arena.

Why Does the Apple Fall Far from the Tree? How Early Political Socialization Prompts Parent-Child Dissimilarity

Children are more likely to adopt their familys political views when politics is important to their parents, and the children of politically engaged parents tend to become politically engaged adults. When these transmission dynamics are considered together, an important hypothesis follows: the children who are most likely to initially acquire the political views of their parents are also most likely to later abandon them as a result of their own engagement with the political world. Data from the Political Socialisation Panel Study provide support for this hypothesis, illuminate its observational implications and shed light on the mechanisms, pointing to the role of new social contexts, political issues and salient political events. Replications using different data from the US and the UK confirm that this dynamic is generalizable to different cohorts and political periods.

A Categorization Theory of Spatial Voting: How the Center Divides the Political Space

This article presents a categorization theory of spatial voting, which postulates that voters perceive political stances through coarse classifications. Because voters think in terms of categories defined by the ideological center, their behavior deviates from standard models of utility maximization along ideological continua. Their preferences are characterized by discontinuities, rewarding parties on their side of the ideological space more than existing spatial models would predict. While this study concurs with prior studies suggesting that voters tend to use a proximity rule, it argues that this rule mainly serves to distinguish among parties of the same side. Overall, the results suggest that voters’ party evaluations are characterized by a nontrivial identity component, generating in-group biases not captured by the existing spatial models of voting.

Do European Parliament Elections Impact National Party System Fragmentation

Why have European large parties lost electoral ground in recent decades? Whereas most explanations draw on theories of dealignment, this article advances a novel, institutional, argument by focusing on the introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament (EP) in 1979. Archetypes of second-order elections, EP elections are characterized by lower vote shares for (a) large and (b) incumbent parties. Bridging the second-order elections theory with theories of political socialization, we posit that voting patterns in EP elections spill over onto national elections, especially among voters not yet socialized into patterns of habitual voting. In so doing, they increase the national vote shares of small parties. This proposition is examined using an instrumental variables approach. We also derive a set of testable propositions to shed light on the underlying mechanisms of this pattern. Our findings show that EP elections decrease support for big parties at the national arena by inculcating voting habits.

The National Effects of Subnational Representation: Access to Regional Parliaments and National Electoral Performance

According to scholarly wisdom, party competition at the subnational level plays a negligible role in national elections. We provide theory and evidence that qualifies this view. Subnational elections determine entrance into subnational parliaments, which provides essential organizational resources: members and money. Since in most cases the same political actors compete at all levels of government, they can make use of these resources to improve their status in national party competition. We test our argument exploiting two institutional features of the German multi-level electoral context: the discontinuities generated by the 5% electoral threshold in German state elections, and the occurance of German state elections at different times in the federal election cycle. We find that parties that marginally cross the threshold for state parliamentary representation gain more members, and eventually perform better in national elections, but only if the party has sufficient time to organize between the state and the federal election. Consistent with our organizational explanation, bottom-up effects are more pronounced where state parliamentary parties receive more financial resources. Alternative mechanisms are tested, and receive no empirical support.

Revisiting the role of process incentives as a determinant of university students' protest

Drawing on the original data collected during a period of university student protest in Greece, we explore whether the expected gains from the act of protesting itself influence an individual’s decision to participate in collective action. More particularly, we investigate the extent to which the process incentives qualify the weight individuals attach to the primary elements of the original cost–benefit equation of rational choice theory as well as other considerations in their decision-making process. Our findings point out that the magnitude of the effect of the process incentives is very strong and its inclusion in a rational choice model improves our understanding of students’ participation in protest activities. Turning to indirect effects, we show that process incentives behave as a first stage precondition for the students’ decision to participate in collective action. In the absence of perceived benefits associated with the process of protesting, the importance of attaining the public good becomes much less important in their decision-making process.