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Position, Competence, and Commitment. The three Dimensions of Issue Voting

Stefaan Walgrave

University of Antwerp stefaan.walgrave@uantwerpen.be

Jonas Lefevere

Vesalius College jonas.lefevere@gmail.com

Anke Tresch

FORS / University of Lausanne ankedaniela.tresch@unil.ch

Paper to be presented at the ECPR General Conference in Oslo, 6-9 September 2017

Very first draft—please do not cite or circulate

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INTRODUCTION

Withering cleavages, crumbling party loyalties, and increasing electoral volatility have

challenged the prevailing structural explanations of voting behavior and have prompted

electoral scholars to look for alternative explanations of the vote (Dalton 1984). One of the

candidates that has attracted scholarly attention is issue voting: voters cast their ballot for a

party based on political issues. Political polarization on the elite level in the US has alienated

moderate voters, which in turn are more likely to take their perception of how parties deal

with issues into account (Nie, Verba, and Petrocik 1999; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal

2006). Whether the same rise in issue voting is present in European democracies is much less

obvious. But also in Europe issue voting supposedly is an important determinant of the vote

(Aardal and van Wijnen 2005; but see: Green and Hobolt 2008).

While the literature on issue voting is substantial, remarkably few work has looked

into the multiple ways in which issues are connected to parties (or candidates) in voters’

mind. The dominant approach is the spatial framework of voting behavior, which goes back to

Down’s (1957) model of electoral competition. The idea is simple: voters cast their ballot for

the party (or candidate) that they perceive to hold a position that is closest to their own policy

preferences (e.g., Enelow and Hinich, 1984) or that stays on the same side of an issues as they

do (e.g., Rabinowitz and Macdonald, 1989). A second aspect of issue voting can be labelled

as the competence dimension of issue voting. Here the idea is not so much that people vote

for parties with whom they agree positionally but rather that some parties are considered more

competent to handle and ‘solve’ specific policy issues. Issue voting, in this line of work,

consists of voting for the party that one considers as most competent to tackle salient issues.

Third, and more recently, another way in which parties are linked to voters has gained some

traction in the literature. Apart from being perceived as positionally close and competent,

parties can be perceived as being especially committed to deal with an issue—they are

supposed to consider the issue a priority for political action. Voters bother more about some

issues than about others and they prefer parties that will commit to act on these issues, or

consider it to be competent to deal with those issues.

Hence, following recent work by van der Brug (2017), we argue that at least three

different versions of issue voting exist—a positional, a competence and a commitment variant

of issue voting. However, the literatures addressing these three types of issue voting are rather

disconnected. Coming from different, even opposed, schools of thought, these theories co-

exist without much integration and/or confrontation. The number of studies combining two

perspectives is limited (see, e.g. Green and Hobolt 2008 who integrate position and

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competence), and studies accounting for all three perspectives are close to being inexistent

(but see Lachat 2014). This study’s aim is to compare the three views on issue voting. Do

positional, competence and commitment considerations with regard to specific policy issues

independently affect people’s voting behavior?

We draw on the cases of Belgium and Switzerland, two small European democracies,

and use their national election studies from 2014 (Belgium) and 2015 (Switzerland)

containing novel measures of the three dimensions with regard to several policy issues. As

expected, results show that the three dimensions of the issue-party connection all

independently affect party voting. People tend to vote for the party with whom they agree

positionally on specific policy issues, that they consider to be most competent to deal with

specific issues, and that they think is especially committed to tackling specific issues. For the

commitment dimension, we also find that its effect is moderated by the salience that voters

attribute to issues: voters tend to vote for parties that they consider as committed on an issue

of importance to themselves. For the positional and competence considerations, we do not

find a consistent interaction effect with issue salience.

THREE DIMENSIONS OF ISSUE VOTING

Voters’ issue perceptions can affect their electoral choice in at least three ways. Firstly, with

regards to perceptions of parties’ issue positions, the spatial school of voting behavior forms

the most influential account of how issue considerations affect people’s vote for a party (or a

candidate). Two different types of spatial models have emerged: proximity models suppose

that voters care about how close candidates’ or parties’ positions are to their own (e.g.,

Enelow and Hinich, 1984), while directional models stipulate that voters primarily care about

whether candidates and parties stay on the same side of an issue as they are (e.g., Rabinowith

and Macdonald, 1989). Many debates in this field relate to the political sophistication voters

need to be able to make up their mind based on issue positions (e.g. Carmines and Stimson

1980), to which model provides the best explanation of voters’ behavior and to how they can

be integrated in a unified theory. But the sheer fact that positional considerations with regard

to issues affect the vote has received strong empirical support (see for example: Merrill and

Grofman 1999).

Starting in the 1980s but quickly gaining ground in the last decade, an alternative

account of issue voting holds that people vote for the party that they consider to be most

competent to tackle, or solve, an issue. This work was triggered by Stokes’ (1963) influential

work on valence issues and later developed into a cottage industry around the concept of

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‘issue ownership’ or ‘issue competence’ (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996). The issue

ownership theory, or competence model, of voting assumes that voters cast their ballots on the

basis of valence issues. These are issues on which both voters and parties agree on the same

overall policy goals (e.g., fighting terrorism or unemployment). As a result, on valence issues

parties cannot be differentiated on policy position, but only on their issue-handling

competence. It has found that when people consider a party as best able to handle an issue,

they tend to vote for it. Note that there also is another literature considering the more general

competence of parties or candidates that is unrelated to specific issues but transcends them,

Jennings and Green (2012b) call it ‘macro competence’—we are not going to address that

literature here. The competence issue ownership literature is pretty substantial and many

studies have found voting to be affected by it (e.g. Bellucci 2006; Green and Hobolt 2008;

Bélanger and Meguid 2008; Green and Jennings 2012a).

There is a second variant of the issue ownership argument that yields a third dimension

of issue voting. Initiated by van der Brug (2004) and Bellucci (2006), some scholars have

recently started to talk about ‘associative’ issue ownership—a concept coined by Walgrave

and colleagues (2012). The idea is that people tend to vote for parties that they consider to be

especially committed to tackle the policy issues they themselves care about. This recent works

hold that issue voting is not only a matter of agreeing with parties positionally and of

considering parties as competent (or not) to deal with specific policy issues, but that it is also

a matter of appreciating the priority parties give to specific issues. This recent, and smaller,

variant of issue voting scholarship has produced some evidence that commitment perceptions

do affect the vote (Bellucci 2006; Walgrave, Lefevere, and Tresch 2012; Lachat 2014).

We argued so far that there are (at least) three ways in which issues can be linked to

parties in voters’ minds. And, we referenced empirical work that found these three issue-

related considerations to have an impact on voting behavior. This raises the question as to

what extent position, competence and commitment work together in impacting which party a

voter chooses. The three dimensions may work independently or they may reinforce each

other. Also, it could be that one of these issue considerations has a stronger effect on the vote

than the other dimensions. We do not really know. The reason is that empirical work

examining the three issue voting dimensions at the same time is, as far as we can tell, almost

entirely lacking.

To be sure, there is some work that combines the positional and competence accounts.

Green and Hobolt’s (2008) study of British elections, for example, finds that both positional

and competence considerations play a role, but over time the effect of position has withered

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while the effect of competence has become stronger. The reason is that the distance between

the two main parties and their electorates—Labour and the Conservatives—has drastically

declined since the end of the 1980s. Hence, in a situation of positional convergence, voters

have more difficulties distinguishing parties’ policies and thus more strongly rely on their

perception of party competence than on positional considerations. Problematic in their

account is that the measure of issue competence relies on a proxy measure – parties were

rated as being capable of ‘strong government’ – which does not directly tap parties’ ability to

handle specific issues. Bélanger and Meguid’s (2008) work in Canada is another rare example

of a study combining positional and competence considerations as drivers of the vote. Similar

to Green and Hobolt (2008: 462), who hold that competence should matter more when

valence issues dominate an election, Bélanger and Meguid argue (2008: 483) that competence

cannot be expected to directly affect the vote in case of position issues. Rather, it should

mostly affect the vote if citizens share the party’s issue position. Consequently, for the two

position issues in their study (taxes and social programs) they interact the competence

measure with a voter’s issue position (and issue salience). They find that the effect of

competence on the vote is less conditioned by issue salience for position issues than for

valence issues. Van der Brug’s (2004) study in the Netherlands is the only one we know of

that combines the positional and commitment dimensions of issue voting. There is no main

effect of perceived commitment of a party towards a specific issue, he finds, but the effect is

mediated by position. By emphasizing a certain issue, parties affect voters’ perception that the

party is committed to an issue but this perception has no direct influence on the vote. Rather,

it leads to a change in voters’ perception of parties’ ideological position and this, in turn, has

an effect on the vote. Based on a non-representative Belgian convenience sample, Walgrave et

al. (2012) incorporated competence and commitment measures and found both to matter for

voting in 2009. The only study incorporating all three dimensions of issue voting is, to the

best of our knowledge, Lachat’s (2014) work on the 2011 Swiss elections. Focusing on

positional issues, he finds that positional considerations directly affect voters’ party utilities

for almost all issues, and the same applies for the competence dimension. The effect of

commitment considerations, in contrast, is moderated by positional congruence. Only when

people agree with a party on an issue, does their perception of whether the party is committed

to tackle the issue matter for their vote. Although this study makes a significant contribution

to our understanding of how different issue-related considerations jointly affect the vote, it

draws on a problematic competence measure that asks for the party that has the ‘best

solutions’ for a given issue. This question wording confounds voters’ assessment of party

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competence with positional considerations (see for example: Walgrave, Lefevere, and Tresch

2015). Thus, it is hard to know what Lachat’s results actually imply for the three dimensions

of issue voting.

In sum, there are at least three ways in which voters’ issue considerations may influence

voting behavior. However, given that almost no prior studies simultaneously include the three

dimensions in models of the vote, we do not really know whether position, competence and

commitment affect the vote independently from one another or in interaction with each other,

and which dimension carries most weight in voters’ party choice. In addition, some have

argued that the effect of positional agreement, competence perceptions, and commitment

should be conditioned by issue salience; these issue considerations should mostly matter for

issues that people consider to be important. In the abundant work that examines the positional

dimension of issue voting, some earlier studies interacted issue position (perceptions) with

issue salience (for an early study see: Rabinowitz, Prothro, and Jacoby 1982). Bélanger and

Meguid (2008) theorize and find that competence perceptions in Canada especially matter for

the vote when voters consider a party to be most competent to deal with an issue and when

they consider the issue to be important. Work by Walgrave and colleagues (2012) about the

commitment dimension in Belgium comes to the same conclusion: apart from a main effect of

associative issue ownership on voting, they find the commitment effect to be moderated by

issue salience. In conclusion, apart from the fact that we expect to find a main effect of each

of the three issue considerations on the vote, we also expect that each of these dimensions

affect vote choice in interaction with issue salience. Furthermore, we also expect that

positional considerations moderate the effect of competence and, especially, commitment on

the vote.

DATA AND METHODS

We examine the effect of the three dimensions of issue voting drawing on data from two

countries, Belgium and Switzerland. These countries were not chosen because of their

particularly different political systems, but rather because good data for these two countries

are available. Both are small parliamentary democracies with proportional electoral systems,

and both have very fragmented party systems (in both countries, thirteen parties are

represented in the national parliament). Both are federal countries with a lot of competences

decentralized and under regional or cantonal rule. The main difference is that the Swiss

system does not have a classic parliamentary system. In Switzerland, according to the

“concordance” principle, executive power is shared by the main political parties, which

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receive a number of seats that is roughly proportional to their parliamentary strength. As a

result, the same four main parties have formed the government for decades without a common

coalition program (e.g. Kriesi and Trechsel 2008). In addition, parliament cannot unseat the

government, and the government cannot dissolve parliament. Furthermore, the Swiss system

is characterized by strong direct democratic institutions, which are almost entirely absent in

Belgium. Yet, despite these differences we do consider these to be two quite similar settings

with regards to issue voting. We do not put forward expectations on cross-country differences,

but rather anticipate similar results in the two countries. Such similarities, if we indeed find

them, would enhance our confidence in our findings’ generalizability to other nations. One

final remark about the country cases: since Belgium does not have a unified party system but

a separate Flemish and Walloon party space—Francophone parties only compete in Wallonia

while Flemish parties only compete in Flanders—we consider Belgium to consist of two

regional cases (we neglect the complex bilingual Brussels case here). So, in all, we examine

the effect of issue considerations on vote choice in three political systems.

Evidence comes from the last national elections studies in Belgium and Switzerland.

In Belgium, we resort to the post-electoral wave of the 2014 national election study, which

was implemented in the form of a telephone survey. The initial population sample (N=4,511)

was randomly drawn from the state’s national register. The first wave was implemented

before the elections and was done in a face-to-face fashion. Response rate of this first wave

was 45% (N=2,019). Of that sample, 76% (N=1,532) participated in the second post-electoral

wave after the elections on May 25th. Due to item non-response, the sample size for the actual

analysis is lower: N=1,469 (N=798 in Flanders and N=671 in Wallonia). We use un-weighted

data. In Switzerland, we rely on data from a combined panel/rolling cross-section online

survey conducted as part of 2015 Swiss Election Studies (SELECTS). Over the course of the

campaign, the same respondents were interviewed four times. The initial sample was drawn

from the national official registry and included 29,500 Swiss citizens. Among them, 11,009

individuals participated in the first, pre-campaign wave of interviews that started in mid-June

and ended in late July. The second wave took place during the campaign and took the form of

a rolling cross-section: in the 60 days before Election Day (October 19), about 120 interviews

per day were completed with respondents from wave 1 (N=7,295). The third and fourth waves

were organized after the elections. In the third wave, all respondents from wave 1 where again

contacted and asked about their electoral choice and political opinions (N=7,601). The final

wave was conducted among respondents of wave 3 (N=5,411) and started the day after the

Federal Council (Swiss government) elections on December 9 (see, Lutz, 2016: 2-3). For this

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paper, we rely on the third wave to measure party vote and on the first wave to measure the

three issue considerations. Due to item non-response, the sample used in the actual analysis is

N=5,251.

The dependent variable of the analyses below is the Party Vote registered after the

elections. It consists of dummy variables per party that are coded as 1 if a voter voted for the

party and 0 if s/he did not. The coding of the party vote variable implies that we have several

nested observations per respondent (one observation for each party-issue combination). When

respondents can only choose one among several alternatives, conditional logit is often seen as

an appropriate model. However, this model has also some important drawbacks for our

purposes. In fact, issue salience, an important moderating variable, is constant over

alternatives. This is also the case for other confounding factors that we would like to control

for (age, gender, education, political knowledge). For these reasons, we decided to estimate

(for this first version of the paper) cross-classified multi-level logistic regression models, with

random intercepts at the respondent and party-issue level.1

In Belgium, the three issue considerations were tapped with regard to eight issues:

employment, environment, crime, immigration, economy, state reform, defense and taxes.

These issues represent a mix of position and valence issues. In Switzerland, five issues were

enquired: Europe, social affairs, environment, economy, and immigration. The three issue

considerations were measured using the question wording as presented in Table 1. Note that

the question wordings in the two countries are not identical in the two countries. In Belgium,

we have no measure that directly taps into party commitment. The available question is a

measure of “associative issue ownership”, which is believed to result from a long history of

party attention and commitment towards an issue (Walgrave et al., 2012). In Switzerland, the

question wording more directly deals with commitment. Regarding party competence, the

Belgian survey asks about parties’ ability to deliver on their program, whereas the Swiss

question wording more generally asks about parties’ competence on issues. Importantly, the

Belgian question wording adds a non-partisan cue, urging voters to evaluate parties’

competence regardless of their agreement with the parties’ positions. However, previous

experimental work has shown that these question wordings tap similar attitudinal constructs

(see: Walgrave et al. 2016). We are thus confident that the country comparisons are valid.

1 We also ran cross-classified linear regressions with an alternative specification of the dependent variable : a propensity-to-vote measure (scale from 0 to 10) in Switzerland and measure of overall party sympathy in Belgium. The results look highly similar. This approach has the disadvantage, however, that we have no possibility to control for party evaluation in the models, given that the Belgian survey does not include a measure of party identification.

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The position agreement measures differ more substantially: in Belgium positional

agreement is assessed subjectively by the voters themselves, in Switzerland it is calculated

based on objective distances with the average party voter—that is on our calculation and not

on an assessment by the voters themselves.

Table 1 – Measures of the three issue considerations

Concept Question wording Belgium

Question wording Switzerland

Coding

Issue Position

When you think of these issues, can you indicate with which parties’ positions you generally agree? You can mark multiple parties

Distance (reversed) between voters’ and party’s position on an issue, on a five point scale, so that higher scores imply smaller distances, and greater agreement. Party position is inferred through the mean position of the party electorate.

Belgium: takes a value of 1 if the respondent marked the party as agreeing with it, and 0 if the respondent did not. Switzerland: takes a value from 1 to 5 indicating greater positional agreement.

Issue Competence

Which party do you consider best able to implement its program concerning ISSUE, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the party?

Which party is the most competent to handle ISSUE?

Takes a value of 1 if the party is mentioned, 0 if not.

Issue Commitment

Which party do you spontaneously think about when you think about ISSUE?

According to you, which party cares most about ISSUE?

Takes a value of 1 if the party is mentioned, 0 if not.

Issue Salience was measured drawing on the following questions: If the elections were to be

held today, based on which issues would you make your choice between the parties?

(Belgium; 1=very unimportant for my vote choice; 5=very important); According to you, how

important are the following issues? (Switzerland; 1=very unimportant; 4=very important). In

addition to the variables of interest, we control for respondent’s Political Knowledge. In both

countries, the measure is based on five factual knowledge questions where higher scores equal

more correct answers. Issue voting is likely to vary between voters with a high or a low level

of political knowledge. In addition, knowledge may also be expected to increase the

likelihood to identify parties’ issue competence and commitment. Finally, as is customary we

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include Sex, Age, and Education (1 = Lower or no education, 2 = High school (reference), 3 =

Higher education) as controls.

Unfortunately, the Belgian data does not include a measure of party identification,

which is often used as a control variable in prior work (see, e.g. Bélanger & Meguid, 2008;

Green and Hobolt, 2008; Lachat, 2014). The only alternative available in both countries was a

measure of overall party evaluation in Belgium, and electoral utilities in Switzerland. In

Belgium, voters were asked “How sympathetic do you consider each of these parties?”.

Respondents could score parties from 0 (Very unsympathetic) to 10 (Very sympathetic). In

Switzerland, voters were asked “Can you indicate the probability that you would ever vote for

the following parties?”. Respondents could answer on a scale ranging from 0 (“Very low

probability”) to 10 (Very high probability). We decided not to include this in our main models

due to the fact that overall party evaluation is so closely related to actual vote choice (Van der

Eijk, Van Der Brug, and Franklin 2006). However, in the Appendix we present all models

with the party evaluation/utility measure included as a control. In the results section, we refer

to these models in our discussion of the multivariate findings.

A final note with regard to the possible endogeneity of the three issue considerations is

in order. We consider Party Vote as the dependent variable, and the three issue considerations

as the independent variables. Yet, this direction of causality is not per se given. In fact,

scholars have increasingly voiced worries about the endogeneity of, especially, issue

competence evaluations. There is now a consensus that party preference also drives issue

competence perceptions (see: Wagner and Zeglovits 2014; Walgrave, Lefevere, and Tresch

2014; Therriault 2015; Walgrave et al. 2016; Walgrave and Lefevere 2017). This work also

shows that the commitment dimension is much less affected by preceding party preference.

Earlier work has formulated similar reservations with regard to the self-declared perception of

positional agreement between voters and their parties (see for example: Macdonald and

Rabinowitz 1997). Since there is no way for us to check for endogeneity we do not address

this possibility here and move on as if the causal arrow only ran from issue considerations to

the vote and not (also) the other way around. Due to the panel design of the Swiss study, our

measures of competence, commitment and issue salience precede the measurement of party

vote. The problem of post-rationalization should thus be more limited.

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RESULTS

The independence of the three issue voting dimensions

Are the three dimensions of position, competence and commitment independent from each

other? In other words, do voters distinguish between the closest, most competent and most

committed party on an issue or do they always name the same party on all three dimensions?

Earlier work on voters’ competence and commitment perceptions suggests that these

dimensions are not fully orthogonal but to some extent dependent (Walgrave, Lefevere, and

Tresch 2012).

Some correlation between these three issue considerations is to be expected. A voter

that marks party A as being the party with whom s/he agrees on issue X, has a greater than

random chance to consider party A also as the party that is most competent to deal with issue

X and to be most committed to put its best efforts in tackling issue X. But can we still

consider the three dimensions as being separate things? Table 2 below presents average

(across all issues) rank order correlations between the three issue considerations per country

(region).

Table 2 – Spearman’s Rank Order Correlations (Rho) between the three issue considerations per country (region)

Flanders (N=49,976)

Wallonia (N=35,198)

Switzerland (N=175,840)

Issue Position & Issue Competence .51 .49 0.08 Issue Competence & Issue Commitment .40 .45 0.54 Issue Position & Issue Commitment .37 .42 0.04 Note: In Switzerland, position was measured on a continuous scale. Therefore, we ranked the parties according

to their distance from the respondent’s position (e.g. the closest party received a rank of 7, the farthest party a

rank of 1). This way, we could use a similar correlation measure for all countries and considerations.

In Belgium, all correlations hoover around .45. While related, the three issue considerations

tapped here are definitely not one and the same thing. For Switzerland, competence and

commitment are slightly more correlated compared to Belgium, but are also far from

completely overlapping. With regard to position, the Swiss data yield much lower

correlations, which may be due to the objective measure used (instead of respondent self-

reporting in Belgium). However, also here we observe that competence is more strongly

correlated to position than commitment.

Yet, overall it does not seem to be the case that the concepts are identical: voters

manage to differentiate the three different ways in which parties are connected to issues. One

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possible cause of the considerable size of the correlations is the fact that the issue

considerations are partially endogenous with the vote. Voters tend to consider the party they

vote for the one with which they agree most, the party that is most competent on all issues,

and the party that is most committed to most issues. Figure 1 shows the percent of

respondents that vote for a party, broken down by the amount of issues for which that party is

considered as most competent and committed by the respondents, and on which they agree

with the party. The graph shows that the percent of voters that would vote for a party that is

not considered as most competent, committed and in agreement on any issue is very low: 7%

in Flanders and 8% in Wallonia. As soon as parties are considered best on a single issue, more

voters will vote for it: 23% in Flanders and 21% in Wallonia. As parties are considered best

on more and more issues, the percent of voters that also end up voting for them steadily

increases as well. The relationship is not perfectly linear, but note that this simple analysis

does not account for issue salience – it might be the case that a party owns many issues, none

of which the voter considers particularly important.

Figure 1: Party vote by number of issues for which party is considered as most committed, competent and in agreement with the voter

Another way of examining the independence of the three issue considerations is looking at the

share of voters that consider the same party as competent and committed, or competent and in

agreement with them. This gives us insight into the overlap of the various issue considerations

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%100%

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

PercentofVotersVotingforaParty,byamountofissuesonwhichthepartyisconsideredmostcommitted,competent,andinagreementwith

voter.

Flanders Wallonia

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at play. Table 3 shows the percent of respondents that chose the same party for different

combinations of the three issue considerations.

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Table 3: Overlap between three issue considerations amongst respondents, per issue and country (region). % of sample that has the same party as…

Flanders Crime Defense

Economy

Employment Environment Immigration State

Reform Taxes

Competence + Commitment 44% 64% 56% 54% 73% 39% 52% 39% Competence + Position1 65% 72% 66% 67% 75% 61% 65% 64% Commitment + Position1 49% 62% 60% 65% 74% 44% 53% 42% Competence + Commitment+ Position1

34% 51% 43% 44% 62% 28% 38% 27%

N 671 538 656 687 721 719 639 619

Wallonia Crime Defense

Economy

Employment Environment Immigration State

Reform Taxes

Competence + Commitment 54% 63% 65% 68% 77% 54% 65% 56% Competence + Position1 65% 70% 69% 77% 79% 65% 76% 71% Commitment + Position1 60% 65% 65% 74% 78% 53% 69% 57% Competence + Commitment+ Position1

40% 50% 50% 59% 67% 40% 54% 43%

N 424 396 550 571 647 436 403 515

Switzerland EU Immigration

Social Policy

Environment

Economy

Competence + Commitment 66% 59% 70% 70% 77% Competence + Position2 22% 16% 25% 16% 16% Commitment + Position2 20% 16% 22% 17% 16% Competence + Commitment+ Position2

16% 14% 19% 14% 14%

N 5589 6397 6823 7037 6401 Note: percentages based on sample of respondents that indicated a party for all three variables. Respondents that answered “none of the parties”, “all parties equal” or “don’t know” are thus excluded, as are respondents that indicated “don’t know” on the question regarding their agreement with the various parties on the issue. 1Respondents could indicate that they agree with multiple parties on the issue: as such, these figures only show the amount of respondents that agree with the party they indicated as the issue owner, but it might be that they also indicated that they agree with other parties on the issue. 2 We calculate a ‘closest party’ variable, which is 1 if the party is the closest party to the respondent’s position, and 0 if not.

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A number of general trends seem to emerge from the table. First, in spite of some variation

between issues, within each country the overlap between position, competence and

commitment seems relatively stable across issues. Secondly, within each country/region the

degree of overlap systematically differs depending on the specific issue considerations.

Examining the pairwise overlaps, competence and position are always the most overlapping in

both Flanders and Wallonia. In Switzerland, commitment and competence are the most

overlapping, though the different measurement of position is probably the cause of the (much)

lower pairwise overlap with this consideration.

The effect of position, competence, and commitment on vote choice

Table 4 presents the results of six multilevel binomial logistic regressions, two per country

(region). The first model per country estimates direct effects, the second models add

interaction terms of the three issue considerations with issue salience.

The results point to strong similarities among the three countries (regions),

notwithstanding the sometimes different operationalization of the key variables (see above,

especially the positional and commitment dimension). To start, the main effects of position,

competence and commitment are very similar. In all three models, these effects are

statistically significant. This testifies of the fact that the three issue voting dimensions matter,

and independently from one another. Also the strength of the effects is similar across the three

political systems under scrutiny. We calculated marginal effects based on the models 1, 3 and

5, which represent the impact of a one-unit change of the independent variable on the

dependent (keeping the other variables at their mean values). As the three variables of interest

are dichotomous, the marginal effects capture the full range of the variable’s impact on the

vote. The mean probability to vote for a party in Flanders increases with respectively 9%, 4%

and 1% when that party is considered to be in agreement with the voter (position), considered

most competent, or most committed on the issue. Knowing that the average electoral score of

any party in Flanders is 14% (=100% divided by seven parties), these effects are considerable.

Together and cumulated, the three issue considerations exactly double the chance that a voter

would vote for that party (9+4+1=14). In Wallonia, the marginal effects are 6% (position), 3%

(competence) and 2% (commitment); with an average voting probability of 14% per party as

well, the total effect of the three issue considerations is only slightly smaller. In Switzerland,

the marginal effects are 5% for position 16% for competence and 3% for commitment.

However, note that position is measured on a five-point scale in Switzerland. Distance

effectively ranges roughly 3.8 points on these scales, so the impact of position over the

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entirety of the scale is 19%. These results suggest that the main and direct effect of position is

biggest, followed by competence and commitment.

17

Table 4 - Cross classified logistic regressions predicting vote choice. Observations clustered at the respondent and party-issue level.

Note: *** = p < .001, ** = p < .01, * = p < .05.

Model 1 Flanders

Main Effects

Model 2 Flanders

Interactions

Model 3 Wallonia

Main Effects

Model 4 Wallonia

Interactions

Model 5 Switzerland Main Effects

Model 6 Switzerland Interactions

Variable Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Issue Position 1.45*** (0.04) 1.35*** (0.15) 1.24*** (0.05) 1.06*** (0.19) 0.57*** (0.01) 0.33*** (0.04) Issue Competence 0.71*** (0.05) 0.21 (0.18) 0.66*** (0.06) 0.85*** (0.24) 1.91*** (0.02) 1.11*** (0.09) Issue Commitment 0.19*** (0.05) -0.72*** (0.19) 0.44*** (0.05) -0.39 (0.22) 0.34*** (0.03) 1.43*** (0.10) Issue Salience -0.03+ (0.02) -0.10*** (0.02) -0.01 (0.02) -0.05* (0.03) -0.01 (0.01) -0.09*** (0.02) Position * Salience 0.02 (0.04) 0.04 (0.05) 0.07*** (0.01) Competence * Salience 0.12** (0.04) -0.05 (0.06) 0.25*** (0.03) Commitment * Salience 0.23*** (0.04) 0.20*** (0.05) 0.57*** (0.03) Sex -0.00 (0.03) -0.01 (0.03) 0.07 (0.05) 0.06 (0.05) 0.06*** (0.02) 0.06*** (0.02) Education (ref: high school)

- No diploma / Elementary -0.13* (0.06) -0.13* (0.06) 0.13 (0.10) 0.12 (0.10) -0.05 (0.09) -0.06 (0.09) - Higher education -0.05 (0.03) -0.05 (0.03) 0.07 (0.06) 0.07 (0.06) 0.02 (0.02) 0.02 (0.02)

Age -0.00 (0.00) -0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) -0.00 (0.00) -0.00 (0.00) Political Knowledge -0.04** (0.01) -0.04** (0.01) -0.03 (0.02) -0.03 (0.02) -0.00 (0.01) 0.00 (0.01) Constant -2.64*** (0.17) -2.38*** (0.18) -3.25*** (0.28) -3.09*** (0.29) -1.98*** (0.14) -1.78*** (0.15) Log likelihood -14714.44 -14683.03 -11219.72 -11210.1 -59884.02 -59444.05 AIC 29452.89 29396.07 22463.43 22450.2 119792.0 118918.1 BIC 29558.96 29528.66 22565.81 22578.17 119913.4 119069.8 Nobservations 50,992 50,992 37,478 37,478 182.679 182.679 Nrespondents 798 798 671 671 5,251 5,251 Nparty-issue 48 to 64 48 to 64 7 to 56 7 to 56 7 to 35 7 to 35

18

Looking at the interaction models 2, 4 and 6, shows that in all three countries (regions), there

is a positive and significant interaction effect of issue commitment and issue salience on vote

choice. This results confirms earlier conclusions by Walgrave and colleagues (2012). The two

other interaction effects—salience with competence and with position—produce less

consistent results. In Switzerland, these interactions are significant, but in terms of size are

comparable to the Flemish and Walloon results —the Swiss sample being much larger than

the Flemish and Walloon samples. In Flanders, competence interacts significantly with

salience but position does not. In Wallonia none of these other two interaction effects reaches

statistical significance (one of them goes in the same direction).

Figure 2 plots these interaction effects. The figures illustrate the remarkably similar

effect of the interaction of issue commitment and issue salience on the vote in all three

regions. The steepness of the slopes is similar. In each of the three cases, increasing levels of

salience reinforce the effect of issue commitment perceptions on the vote. For the other two

issue considerations we observe more variation across regions. Issue competence interacts

positively with issue salience in Flanders and Switzerland, but in both cases competence

always exerts a significantly positive effect on the vote, regardless of the salience of the issue.

This effect is entirely absent in Wallonia, though. Finally, the figures confirm that positional

considerations are not moderated by issue salience.

In the appendix (Table A1) we run the same models by controlling for party

evaluation. Although party evaluation is closely related to the dependent variable, the direct

effects of position, competence and commitment remain (mostly) significant – though they

become less sizeable. However, the interaction between commitment and salience is no longer

significant in the Belgian regions. In Switzerland, the direct and interaction effects both hold

up, only the interaction between position and salience no longer reaches statistical

significance.

19

Figure 2 - Marginal effects of Interactions based on models 2, 4, 6

20

In a last step, we present models including an interaction between position and competence,

and position and commitment. Previous research has argued that the effect of commitment

(aka associative issue ownership), and to a lesser extent of competence, should be moderated

by positional agreement between voters and parties (e.g., Bélanger and Meguid, 2008; Lachat,

2014; van der Brug, 2017). The reason is that a voter can acknowledge a party’s commitment

to handle an issue without necessarily agreeing with the party’s policies on the issue. In this

case, commitment is arguably less likely to affect the vote. The results in Table 5 clearly

provide support for this line of reasoning in Switzerland, where positional considerations

moderate the effect of commitment and competence.

Table 5 - Cross classified logistic regressions predicting vote choice. Observations clustered at the respondent and party-issue level.

Note: *** = p < .001, ** = p < .01, * = p < .05.

In the Belgian regions, the interactions are mostly insignificant. However, if we illustrate the

effects in a marginal effects plot (Figure 3), we can see a similar pattern in all three regions:

the more voters disagree with a party, the more the impact of commitment on the vote

decreases (or almost disappears).

Flanders

Wallonia Switzerland

Variable Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Issue Position 1.47*** (0.05) 1.34*** (0.06) -0.59*** (0.01) Issue Competence 0.78*** (0.07) 0.88*** (0.09) 1.58*** (0.04) Issue Commitment 0.16* (0.07) 0.44*** (0.07) 0.62*** (0.04) Issue Salience -0.03+ (0.02) -0.01 (0.02) -0.01 (0.01) Competence * Position -0.12 (0.09) -0.37*** (0.11) -0.38*** (0.04) Commitment * Position 0.07 (0.09) -0.00 (0.10) 0.33*** (0.04) Sex -0.00 (0.03) 0.07 (0.05) 0.06*** (0.02) Education (ref: high school)

- No diploma / Elementary

-0.13* (0.06) 0.13 (0.10) 0.03 (0.04)

- Higher education -0.05 (0.03) 0.07 (0.06) 0.02 (0.02) Age -0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) -0.00 (0.00) Political Knowledge -0.04** (0.01) -0.04 (0.02) 0.00 (0.01) Constant -2.64*** (0.17) -3.26*** (0.28) -1.97*** (0.14) Log likelihood -14713.49 -11213.74 -59818.7 AIC 29454.98 22455.48 119665.4 BIC 29578.73 22574.92 119807 Nobservations 50,992 37,478 182,679 Nrespondents 798 671 5,251 Nparty-issue 48 to 64 7 to 56 7 to 35

21

Figure 3 – Marginal effects of interactions based on models in Table 5

22

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The study started with the observation that there are three different streams of literature with

regard to issue voting, although not all of them refer to themselves as being about ‘issue

voting’, and that these three literatures are almost entirely disconnected from one another.

Scholars who look into issue voting from a positional or spatial perspective only look at the

overlap between party positions and voter preferences with regard to specific issues; students

of issue ownership are mostly interested in how voters’ perception of parties’ issue

competence affect their voting behavior; and a newer stream of work that fares under the

associative issue ownership label examines whether voters’ beliefs that some parties are

especially committed to deal with some specific issues affects how they vote. Until recently,

these three strands of work have mostly been disconnected from each other. Our goal with

this study was to see whether the three types of issue voting can be reconciled and to

investigate to what extent they are complementary and each contribute to explaining voting

behavior.

Drawing on novel evidence from three political systems and spanning a large number

of issues, we can conclude that each of the three issue considerations separately, and

controlling for each other, contribute to explaining which party people vote for. The results

suggest that the three dimensions of issue voting are to some extent independent drivers of

voting behavior. Somehow, when people evaluate parties on issues they consider parties’

position, parties’ competence and parties’ commitment with regard to issues. Moreover, the

evidence points out that these issue considerations matter more for some issues than for

others. The salience of issues consistently increases the effect of issue commitment

considerations, and the same is the case, albeit less robustly, with regard to competence

considerations. Positional agreement does not weigh heavier on the vote with regard to salient

than with regard to non-salient issues though, which is an unexpected result warranting

further inquiry.

The take-home message from the study is simple. Though position and competence

constitute the major issue-related drivers of voting behavior, the impact of perceptions of

parties’ commitment also matter—directly and in interaction with issue salience and

positional considerations. In short, there is more to issue voting than position or competence

alone. Commitment considerations motivate the vote as well, and not taking them into

account impoverishes our understanding of how people arrive at a voting decision. Knowing

from previous work that commitment perceptions are less endogenous than competence

perceptions—they are less affected by pre-existing party preferences—our main advice would

23

be to incorporate people’s perceptions of which parties are particularly motivated to act upon

specific issues in our models of issue voting in particular and of voting more generally.

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APPENDIX: MODEL ESTIMATES, CONTROLLING FOR PARTY EVALUATION

Table A1 - Cross classified logistic regressions predicting vote choice. Observations clustered at the respondent and party-issue level.

Note: *** = p < .001, ** = p < .01, * = p < .05

Model 1 Flanders

Main Effects

Model 2 Flanders

Interactions

Model 3 Wallonia

Main Effects

Model 4 Wallonia

Interactions

Model 5 Switzerland Main Effects

Model 6 Switzerland Interactions

Variable Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Coeff S.E. Issue Position 0.80*** (0.05) 0.47** (0.18) 0.64*** (0.06) 0.59* (0.23) 0.22*** (0.02) 0.22*** (0.06) Issue Competence 0.08 (0.06) -0.09 (0.22) 0.40*** (0.07) 0.84** (0.29) 0.78*** (0.03) 0.35** (0.12) Issue Commitment 0.35*** (0.06) 0.15 (0.21) 0.36*** (0.06) -0.05 (0.27) 0.16*** (0.04) -0.63*** (0.13) Issue Salience -0.04+ (0.02) -0.08** (0.03) -0.01 (0.03) -0.02 (0.03) -0.05*** (0.01) -0.12*** (0.03) Position * Salience 0.08+ (0.04) 0.01 (0.06) 0.00 (0.02) Competence * Salience 0.05 (0.05) -0.11 (0.07) 0.13*** (0.04) Commitment * Salience 0.04 (0.05) 0.10 (0.06) 0.25*** (0.04) Sex -0.10 (0.10) -0.10 (0.10) -0.04 (0.14) -0.04 (0.14) -0.03 (0.04) -0.03 (0.04) Education (ref: high school)

- No diploma / Elementary -0.06 (0.21) -0.06 (0.21) -0.19 (0.28) -0.19 (0.28) 0.72** (0.24) - Higher education -0.08 (0.10) -0.08 (0.10) 0.04 (0.15) 0.04 (0.15) -0.16*** (0.04) -0.18*** (0.03)

Age 0.01* (0.00) 0.01* (0.00) 0.01 (0.00) 0.01 (0.00) 0.01*** (0.00) 0.01*** (0.00) Political Knowledge -0.07+ (0.04) -0.07+ (0.04) 0.03 (0.06) 0.03 (0.06) -0.09*** (0.01) -0.09*** (0.01) Party Evaluation 0.95*** (0.02) 0.95*** (0.02) 1.09*** (0.02) 1.09*** (0.02) 0.76*** (0.01) 0.76*** (0.01) Constant -8.09*** (0.30) -7.94*** (0.30) -9.78*** (0.44) -9.76*** (0.45) -6.97*** (0.18) -6.39*** (0.20) Log likelihood -11321.52 -11316.43 -8431.889 -8430.028 -39887.43 -39836.51 AIC 22669.04 22664.86 16889.78 16892.06 79800.85 79703.03 BIC 22783.7 22805.97 16999.87 17027.56 79931.86 79854.19 Nobservations 50,992 50,992 35,198 35,198 182.679 182.679 Nrespondents 798 798 667 667 5,251 5,251 Nparty-issue 48 to 64 48 to 64 8 to 56 8 to 56 7 to 35 7 to 35