Political Ideology and Voting

POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES CAN be understood as worldviews or belief systems that provide individuals with a particular way of understanding their social experience and their place in it. Furthermore, political ideologies help individuals to structure their ideas about how society should be organized. Conservatism, liberalism, communism, socialism, and fascism can be considered classic examples of some of the most influential political ideologies. Additionally, this way of approaching political ideologies poses some important challenges to the contention that this is an era characterized by the “end of political ideologies.”

In representative regimes, elections—especially when they can be considered as free and fair—are the crucial moment when citizens choose their government, and key mechanisms for renewing political legitimacy and enforcing political accountability. Governments will try to obtain a new mandate and voters have the opportunity to hold them accountable either by maintaining them in office or replacing them with a new political party or party coalition. Accordingly, [Page 519]studies of voting behavior address why and how people choose to vote for particular parties or candidates. Voting behavior is heavily shaped by the political attitudes, policy preferences, and partisan loyalties of individuals, as well as by the political and institutional context of the electoral process. Finally, when voters take into consideration their own policy preferences and concerns, and approach incumbent and challenger candidates on the basis of an evaluation of their past performance and current promises, the role of electoral processes as effective mechanisms of political legitimacy and accountability is increased.

Political ideologies are of particular interest for the study of voting and voting behavior because they can play a critical role in influencing voters' political attitudes, policy preferences, government assessments, and partisan loyalties, and, therefore, influence not only individual voting behavior, but also which parties win and lose elections. In order to clarify the extent to which this is the case in contemporary democratic regimes, it is necessary to consider some of the most important current voting behavior trends.

With scientific public opinion polling, it was possible to discover that during the 1950s and 1960s—particularly in western European countries and the United States—party identification and voting behavior trends were very stable. This was mainly due to the fact that voting behavior during that time was more the expression of loyalty for a particular political party and less an act of choice. Specifically, in the case of western European countries, voters tended to be strongly identified with a political party that explicitly represented the interests of their class or social group (social cleavages fashioned political attitudes and behavior). However, starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most established democracies started to experience a significant process of partisan dealignment (the weakening of the previous close ties among voters, social groups, and political parties). This, in turn, led to higher levels of voting volatility, more frequent unexpected electoral outcomes, more sophisticated individual voting decisions (such as tactical voting and ticket-splitting), and even a considerable number of voters deciding how to vote closer to Election Day.

These declines in party identification and in cleavage politics forced scholars to address what was replacing party and social group loyalties as the main determinants of individual voting behavior. Many of these societies were able to find a successful resolution to past and long-standing conflicts, which explains, for example, why class identities become less relevant. At the same time, almost all these societies experienced the rise of several relatively new interests, concerns, and issues that became extremely relevant for both formal and informal political participation (such as gender, minority, religious, and ecological issues). This gives the impression of societies fragmented along many lines of competing interests, rather than a few lines of social cleavages. Therefore, some of the previously key long-term predispositions (social and class cleavages and party identification) lost centrality vis-a-vis more short-term influences (such as the state of the economy and other specific issues, party and leader images, and electoral campaigns).

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