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The Company You Keep: How Voters Infer Party Positions on European Integration from Governing Coalition Arrangements
Author(s) -
Adams James,
Ezrow Lawrence,
Wlezien Christopher
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12231
Subject(s) - political science , dimension (graph theory) , elite , heuristic , political economy , perception , sorting , politics , public relations , sociology , law , computer science , epistemology , mathematics , artificial intelligence , pure mathematics , programming language , philosophy
Recent studies document that voters infer parties’ left‐right positions from governing coalition arrangements. We show that citizens extend this coalition‐based heuristic to the European integration dimension and, furthermore, that citizens’ coalition‐based inferences on this issue conflict with alternative measures of party positions derived from election manifestos and expert placements. We also show that citizens’ perceptions of party positions on Europe matter, in that they drive substantial partisan sorting in the electorate. Our findings have implications for parties’ election strategies and for mass‐elite policy linkages .