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Why Voters Decide Late: A Simultaneous Test of Old and New Hypotheses at the 2005 and 2009 German Federal Elections

2012; Routledge; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09644008.2012.716042

1743-8993

Rüdiger Schmitt‐Beck, Julia Partheymüller,

Social Media and Politics

Abstract Against the background of a substantial rise of the number of late-deciding voters at recent elections the paper simultaneously tests four complementary hypotheses on the background of contemporary electors' timing of decision making. The traditional floating voter hypothesis fares best in this analysis: lacking partisan predispositions and a general detachment from politics appear as the main reasons why people take longer to make up their minds. Indifference and attitudinal ambivalence as well as mixed party-political signals from voters' social networks also lead to electors postponing their voting decisions. The hypothesis that late deciding is a consequence of increased availability and attention to mediated political information is refuted. Several long-term trends are discussed as reasons for the increase of late deciding. Notes Ian McAllister, ‘Calculating or Capricious? The New Politics of Late Deciding Voters’, in David M. Farrell and Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (eds), Do Political Campaigns Matter? Campaign Effects in Elections and Referendums (New York: Routledge, 2002), p.24. Fritz Plasser, Peter A. Ulram and Gilg Seeber, ‘Erdrutschwahlen: Momentum, Motive und neue Muster im Wahlverhalten’, in Fritz Plasser and Peter A. Ulram (eds), Wahlverhalten in Bewegung: Analysen zur Nationalratswahl 2002 (Wien: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 2003), p.106. Galen A. Irwin and Joop J.M. van Holsteyn, ‘What are they Waiting For? Strategic Information for Late Deciding Voters’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research 20/4 (2008), p.483. Russell J. Dalton, Ian McAllister and Martin P. Wattenberg, ‘The Consequences of Partisan Dealignment’, in Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg (eds), Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.48–50. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, ‘Kampagnenwandel und Wählerwandel. “Fenster der Gelegenheit” für einflussreichere Wahlkämpfe’, in Ulrich Sarcinelli and Jens Tenscher (eds), Machtdarstellung und Darstellungsmacht: Beiträge zu Theorie und Praxis moderner Politikvermittlung (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003), p.205. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck and Thorsten Faas, ‘The Campaign and its Dynamics at the 2005 German General Election’, German Politics 15/4 (2006), pp.393–419; Stefan Merz, Das Kreuz mit dem Kreuz: Unentschlossene Wähler in Deutschland (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010), pp.75–81; Thomas Plischke and Michael Bergmann, ‘Entscheidungsprozesse von Spätentscheidern bei der Bundestagswahl 2009’, in Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (ed.), Wählen in Deutschland: Special Issue 45 of the Politische Vierteljahresschrift (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), pp.489–513. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), pp.78–80. Michael Lewis-Beck, William G. Jacoby, Helmut Norpoth and Herbert F. Weisberg, The American Voter Revisited (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp.71–2. James Forrest and Gary N. Marks, ‘The Mass Media, Election Campaigning and Voter Response’, Party Politics 5 (1999), pp. 99–114; Romain Lachat and Pascal Sciarini, ‘When do Election Campaigns Matter, and to Whom? Results from the 1999 Swiss Election Panel Study’, in David M. Farrell and Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (eds), Do Political Campaigns Matter? Campaign Effects in Elections and Referendums (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.41–57; Patrick Fournier, Richard Nadeau, André Blais, Elisabetz Gidengil and Neil Nevitte, ‘Time-of-Voting Decision and Susceptibility to Campaign Effects’, Electoral Studies 23 (2004), pp.661–81; Agnieska Dobrzynska, André Blais and Richard Nadeau, ‘Do the Media Have a Direct Impact on the Vote? The Case of the 1997 Canadian Election’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research 15 (2003), pp.27–43. Hans Rattinger et al., Zwischen Langeweile und Extremen: Die Bundestagswahl 2009 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011), pp.74–5. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernhard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, 3rd edition (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1968). Harry Daudt, Floating Voters and the Floating Vote: A Critical Analysis of American and English Election Studies (Leiden: Kroese, 1961). Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice, pp.53-–6. Campbell et al., The American Voter, p.79; David J. Gopoian and Sissie Hadjiharalambous, ‘Late-Deciding Voters in Presidential Elections’, Political Behavior 16/1 (1994), p.58. Romain Lachat, A Heterogeneous Electorate: Political Sophistication, Predisposition Strength and the Voting Decision Process (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007). Steven H. Chaffee and Sun Yuel Choe, ‘Time of Decision and Media Use during the Ford–Carter Campaign’, Public Opinion Quarterly 44/1 (1980), pp.53–69; Steven Chaffee and Rajiv Nath Rimal, ‘Time of Vote Decision and Openness to Persuasion’, in Diana Mutz, Paul M. Sniderman and Richard A. Brody (eds), Political Persuasion and Attitude Change (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996) pp.267–91; Carsten Reinemann, Olaf Jandura, Marcus Maurer and Thomas Zerback, ‘Wer sind die Spätentscheider? Erste Befunde einer Mehr-Methoden-Studie zur Bundestagswahl 2009’, in Heinrich Oberreuter (ed.), Am Ende der Gewissheiten. Wähler, Parteien und Koalitionen in Bewegung (München: Olzog, 2011), pp.247–70; D.M. Butler and A.L. De La O, ‘The Causal Effect of Media-Driven Political Interest on Political Attitudes and Behavior’, Quarterly Journal of Political Science 5 (2010), pp.321–37. Russell J. Dalton, ‘Cognitive Mobilization and Partisan Dealignment in Advanced Industrial Democracies’, Journal of Politics 46/1 (1984), pp.264–84; Russell J. Dalton, ‘Citizen Attitudes and Political Behavior’, Comparative Political Studies 33/6 (2000), pp.912–40; Russell J. Dalton, ‘The Decline of Party Identifications’, in Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg (eds), Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.19–36. Irwin and Holsteyn, ‘What Are They Waiting For?’ Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice. Ibid., p.56. See also Campbell et al., The American Voter, pp.80–88. Lewis-Beck et al., The American Voter Revisited, pp.71–7; D. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Shields, The Persuadable Voter. Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp.82–106. Diana Mutz, ‘The Consequences of Cross-cutting Networks for Political Participation’, American Journal of Political Science 46/4 (2002), pp.838–55. Lilach Nir, ‘Ambivalent Social Networks and their Consequences for Participation’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research 17/4 (2005), pp.422–42. See also Howard Lavine, ‘The Electoral Consequences of Ambivalence toward Presidential Candidates’, American Journal of Political Science 45 (2001), pp.915–29. Mutz, ‘The Consequences of Cross-cutting Networks’; see also Scott D. McClurg, ‘The Electoral Relevance of Political Talk: Examining Disagreement and Expertise Effects in Social Networks on Political Participation’, American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006), pp.747–8; David Nicolas Hopmann, ‘The Consequences of Political Disagreement in Interpersonal Communication: New Insights from a Comparative Perspective’, European Journal of Political Research 51 (2012), pp.265–87. Nir, ‘Ambivalent Social Networks’. Gopoian and Hadjiharalambous, ‘Late-Deciding Voters’, pp.67–8. Both studies were conducted by phone, based on random samples of German citizens aged 18 and above. The pre-election waves were realised as rolling cross-section (RCS) surveys which means that interviews were evenly spread over an extended period of time – six weeks with about 86 interviews per day on average in 2005, and two months with about 100 interviews per day on average in 2009 – in such a way that the respondents included on each day constitute random samples of the population of the study (N[2005] = 3,583; N[2009] = 6,008; Panel cases: N[2005] = 2,420; N[2009] N = 4,027). The 2005 election survey was carried out by Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck and Thorsten Faas (Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Thorsten Faas and Christian Holst, ‘Der Rolling Cross-Section Survey: Ein Instrument zur Analyse dynamischer Prozesse der Einstellungsentwicklung: Bericht zur ersten deutschen RCS-Studie anlässlich der Bundestagswahl 2005’, ZUMA-Nachrichten 58 (2006), pp.13–49), the 2009 survey was conducted as part of the German Longitudinal Election Study GLES (principal investigators: Hans Rattinger, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck and Bernhard Weßels) under the responsibility of Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Thorsten Faas and Ansgar Wolsing, ‘Kampagnendynamik bei der Bundestagswahl 2009: Die Rolling-Cross-Section-Studie im Rahmen der ‘German Longitudinal Election Study’ 2009', Working Papers – Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung 134 [2010]). The datasets can be obtained from the GESIS data archive (archive nos. ZA4991 and ZA5303). Although questions of this type are commonly used and without alternative except in the case of multi-wave pre-election panel studies, their validity has sometimes been called into question. However, evidence suggesting a dubious validity has only been found in studies from the United States where campaigns are in many respects unusual, including their extreme length. Fournier et al. have developed a method for ascertaining such instruments' validity for pre-election RCS surveys with post-election panel waves. Their test aims at checking whether respondents are able to identify relatively accurately in retrospect how long before the election they irrevocably decided which party to vote for. It takes advantage of the RCS design of pre-election waves by looking at the stability of vote choices between the pre- and the post-election waves according to reported time-of-voting decisions. Respondents are categorised as stable if they recalled in the post-election wave to have voted for the party they had intended to support in the pre-election survey, and as unstable if they reported having voted for a party other than the one indicated by their previous vote intention, or if they had been undecided at the time of the pre-election interview, but reported to have voted for a party in the post-election wave. Respondents are categorised for each time-of-decision period according to the timing of the pre-election interviews (which is a random variable due to the RCS design of the pre-election wave) – i.e. whether they were interviewed before, during, or after their reported time of decision. The critical criterion for the validation of the accuracy of the time-of-voting-decision recall instrument is the degree to which responses indicate instability in vote choice before the reported time of decision and stability afterward. The study's findings which are based on data pertaining to the 1997 Canadian parliamentary election are encouraging. They suggest that for parliamentary elections with their typically rather short time horizon instruments of the type we use are sufficiently valid (Patrick Fournier, Richard Nadeau, André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil and Neil Nevitte, ‘Validation of Time-of-Voting-Decision Recall’, Public Opinion Quarterly 65 [2001], pp.95–107). In order to ascertain the validity of our measures we have employed the same technique. Table 2, below, shows the results of our analysis. TABLE 2 PERCENTAGE OF STABLE VOTE CHOICE ACCORDING TO REPORTED TIME OF DECISION AND TIME OF INTERVIEW Download CSVDisplay Table According to this analysis, in our data the shares of stable respondents are always considerably higher among those interviewed after their recalled time of decision than among those interviewed before. In fact, we overall find very similar levels of stability as in the Canadian case for both the 2005 and the 2009 federal elections. As additional evidence we can refer to the fact that for both elections we also see a high correlation between our measures of decision time and the recalled subjective difficulty of vote choices (2005: r = 0.49, p < 0.001; 2009: r = 0.43, p < 0.001). For the calculation of marginals the data is weighted by education. Schmitt-Beck and Faas, ‘The Campaign and Its Dynamics’. Megan M. Thompson, Mark P. Zanna and Dale W. Griffin, ‘Let's Not be Indifferent about (Attitudinal) Ambivalence’, in Richard E. Petty and Jon A. Krosnick (eds), Attitude Strength: Antecedents and Consequences (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), pp.369–71; Mutz, ‘The Consequences of Cross-cutting Networks’; Nir, ‘Ambivalent Social Networks’. In the context of a multi-party system such as the German one with five parliamentary parties the modified versions of the Griffin index used by Mutz and Nir are inappropriate because they are restricted to two alternatives (i.e. candidates). The index used in our analyses therefore further adapts the index to the multiparty context and is constructed as follows: Attitudinal ambivalence = MEAN(P1, …, P5) – 2*SD(P1, …, P5), with P1, …, P5 being the thermometer ratings for the five parties. That this demonstrates a straightforward generalisation of the two-candidate case examined by Mutz and Nir becomes apparent when one considers that their formula (Attitudinal ambivalence = (C1 + C2)/2 – |C1–C2| with C1 and C2 being the thermometer ratings for the two presidential candidates) after a series of basic mathematical transformations can be rewritten the following way: MEAN(C1, C2) – 2*SD(C1, C2). Mutz, ‘The Consequences of Cross-cutting Networks’. Nir, ‘Ambivalent Social Networks’. The index is constructed as follows: Social network ambivalence = MEAN(A, D) – 2*SD(A, D) with A being the number of discussants with whom the respondent agrees (range 0 to 2) and D being the number of discussants with whom the respondent disagrees (range 0 to 2). The question wording differed between the surveys for this variable. In 2005 respondents were invited to evaluate the following opinion statement on a five-point scale (strongly agree, …, strongly disagree): ‘Which party one votes for makes no difference for what goes on in politics’. In 2009 the following question was used: ‘What do you think of the political parties during the current election campaign? Can you identify large political differences, smaller differences or no differences at all between the parties?’ In each case responses were coded such that high values indicate large differences between the parties. Panel attrition affects the distributions of some of our predictors to a limited degree. Compared to the first wave, participants of the post-election wave were on average somewhat more politically involved, that is, more partisan, politically interested and attentive to media reporting. Moreover, they experienced slightly more dissent in their social networks (especially for primary relationships) and were less indifferent as well as more educated. For all other predictors no significant differences between first and second wave participants could be detected. This implies that against the yardstick of our hypotheses (with the exception of the communication hypothesis) conditions among post-election wave respondents were somewhat less conducive for late deciding than in the full sample of the first wave. Nir, ‘Ambivalent Social Networks’. The other relationships of the 2009 models are not affected when this variable is omitted in model specifications that closely mirror their 2005 counterparts. Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice. Gopoian and Hadjiharalambous, ‘Late-Deciding Voters’, p.70; Charles D. Whitney and Steven B. Goldman, ‘Media Use and Time of Vote Decision: A Study of the 1980 Presidential Election’, Communication Research 12/4 (1985), pp.511–29; Chaffee et al., ‘Time of Vote Decision’. Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice. Chaffee and Choe, ‘Time of Decision’; Chaffee and Rimal, ‘Time of Vote Decision’. Mutz, ‘The Consequences of Cross-cutting Networks’; Nir, ‘Ambivalent Social Networks’. Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice. See also Chaffee and Choe, ‘Time of Decision’; Whitney and Goldman, ‘Media Use’; Gopoian and Hadjiharalambous, ‘Late-Deciding Voters’; McAllister, ‘Calculating or Capricious?’; Schmitt-Beck, ‘Kampagnenwandel und Wählerwandel‘. Nir, ‘Ambivalent Social Networks’. Chaffee and Choe, ‘Time of Decision’; Chaffee and Rimal, ‘Time of Vote Decision’; Reinemann et al., ‘Wer sind die Spätentscheider?’. Susanna Dilliplane, ‘All the News You Want to Hear: The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Political Participation’, Public Opinion Quarterly 75 (2011), pp.287–316; Jörg Matthes, ‘Exposure to Counterattitudinal News Coverage and the Timing of Voting Decisions’, Communication Research 39 (2012), pp.147–69. Lilach Nir and James N. Druckman, ‘Campaign Mixed-Message Flows and Timing of Vote Decision’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research 20 (2008), pp.326–46. Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice. Dalton, ‘The Decline of Party Identifications’; Russell J. Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Russell J. Dalton, The Apartisan American. Dealignnment and Changing Electoral Politics (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), pp.131–3; Kai Arzheimer, ‘“Dead Men Walking?” Party Identification in Germany, 1977–2002’, Electoral Studies 25/4 (2006), pp.791–807. Roberto Biorcio and Renato Mannheimer, ‘Relationships between Citizens and Political Parties’, in Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Dieter Fuchs (eds), Citizens and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.206–26; Dalton, Democratic Challenges; Pippa Norris, Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Robert Huckfeldt, Paul Johnson and John Sprague, Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Dalton, ‘Cognitive Mobilization’; Dalton, ‘Citizen Attitudes’.