Misperceptions and Effective Representation - The Impact of Electoral Systems, Political Parties and Individual Characteristics on Voters’ Perceptions of Party Positions

According to the responsible party, parties are assumed to present prospective policy programs on to which voters make their choices. The voters are assumed to vote for the party whose policy program is closest to their own policy preferences. The elections are in this context reckoned as a process of mandate giving where parties, when in government, will strive for realizing their policy programs. Voters' perceptions of party positions are essential in this context since they affect the extent to which voters are meaningfully represented in a political system. Common and accurate perceptions are hence a prerequisite for effective policy representation. Prior research on perception among voters have, however, mainly focused on the impact of internal features among voters on the perceptual process while in general less research has been spent on the impact and characteristics of external stimulus. A relevant question in this aspect is thus if and to what extent the electoral and the political context also matters for voters' perceptions. The focal point in this study is on how voters' perceptions are affected not only by individual characteristics but also by various contextual factors related to the political parties and the political systems. With data from the CSES modules 1 and 2 on individual voters and various system characteristics from election surveys in 29 countries, this article shows that individual factors such as individuals left-right positions, education and gender are important factors behind voters' perceptual deviations (i.e. the deviation between individual's placement of parties and the median party position made by all voters). However, the strongest impact is to be found in the degree of divergence in a party's left-right position together with party size, party labels and the degree of competition within a system. In general it seems as ‘wishful thinking' seems to occur when the policy positions of parties are blurred due to either that a position is shared by several parties, or if a party is big or do not have a brand name that gives a clue to its expected position or the degree of competitiveness with in a system