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Warsaw 2009: Presentations and short courses

How do voters vote when they have no ideology?

Session: The study of left and right in political science

Author:

Lluis Orriols Galve; University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Abstract:

Although they make up a considerable share of the electorate, the literature has overlooked the voting behaviour of voters who report no ideology. Using Spanish electoral data from the 1979-2008 electoral period, we seek to identify which alternative cues these voters may use when they cast their ballot – providing ideology is not available. We do not find that evaluations of the incumbent’s performance have a higher influence on non-ideological voters as the retrospective voting literature suggests. Nor we find that other shortcuts such as candidate evaluations or party identification are more used by this group when they vote. Instead, our results indicate that non-ideological voters have exchanged the traditional ideological shortcut for the simple pro-incumbent voting as a decision rule.

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How do voters vote when they have no ideology? (227.5 KB)