The ideological and issue positions of parties are known to shape citizens’ political attitudes and voting behaviour. One important way to obtain estimates of parties’ positions is to ask experts to place parties on salient ideological dimensions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has been collecting such estimates for democracies in Europe and elsewhere. CHES Canada adds to this project by providing estimates of party positions and characteristics of Canadian federal parties and provincial parties in Ontario and Quebec. This note introduces this new data source, clarifies how the data were collected and illustrates how the data can be used to (comparatively) study party politics in Canada.

The extent to which citizens comply with newly enacted public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns strongly affects the propagation of the virus and the number of deaths from COVID-19. It is however very difficult to identify non-compliance through survey research because claiming to follow the rules is socially desirable. Using three survey experiments, we examine the efficacy of different ‘face-saving’ questions that aim to reduce social desirability in the measurement of compliance with public health measures. Our treatments soften the social norm of compliance by way of a short preamble in combination with a guilty-free answer choice making it easier for respondents to admit non-compliance. We find that self-reported non-compliance increases by up to +11 percentage points when making use of a face-saving question. Considering the current context and the importance of measuring non-compliance, we argue that researchers around the world should adopt our most efficient face-saving question.

While youth suffrage is widely debated, the causal effects of being eligible to vote on adolescents' political attitudes are less well known. To gain insights into this question, we leverage data from a real-life quasi-experiment of voting at 16 in the city of Ghent (Belgium). We compare the attitudes of adolescents that were entitled to vote with their peers that just fell below the age cut-off. We also examine the effects of the enfranchisement at 18-years-old. While we find an effect of youth enfranchisement on attention to politics, there is no evidence for an effect of enfranchisement on political engagement overall.

Recent publications argue that the traditional gender gap in voting has decreased or reversed in many democracies. However, this decrease may apply only to some types of elections. Building on prior studies, this article hypothesizes that although women participate at the same or higher rates than men in national elections, they participate less in supranational elections. The authors investigate this possibility empirically by analyzing the evolution of the gender gap in voter turnout in elections to the European Parliament (EP). The article makes three important contributions. First, it shows the presence and stability of the traditional gender gap in EP elections. Secondly, it finds that gender differences in political interest are the main source of this gender gap. Thirdly, these gender differences in political interest are, in turn, context dependent. They are strongly associated with cultural gender differences, which are captured through differences in boys’ and girls’ maths scores.

Government cohesiveness is known to moderate retrospective voting. While previous work on this topic has focused on characteristics of the government, we build on the literature on clarity of responsibility and the literature on valence to argue that the extent to which government and opposition are ideologically distinct also moderates retrospective voting. Two alternative expectations follow from these two theoretical perspectives. While the clarity of responsibility framework leads to the expectation that a larger difference between government and opposition will strengthen retrospective voting, the valence literature presumes that retrospective voting is stronger when ideological differences are small. Using the data of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, we find evidence that is in line with the clarity of responsibility framework: the higher the degree of ideological polarization between government and opposition, the larger the effect of retrospective performance evaluations on the vote.

Changes in voters' behavior and in the campaign strategies that political parties pursue are likely to have increased the importance of campaigns on voters' electoral choices. As a result, scholars increasingly question the usefulness and predictive power of structural forecasting models, that use information from “fundamental” variables to make an election prediction several months before Election Day. In this paper, we empirically examine the expectation that structural forecasting models are increasingly error-prone. For doing so, we apply a structural forecasting model to predict elections in six established democracies. We then trace the predictive power of this model over time. Surprisingly, our results do not give the slightest indication of a decline in the predictive power of structural forecasting models. By showing that information on long-term factors still allows making accurate predictions of electoral outcomes, we question the assumption that campaigns matter more now than they did in the past.

Considerable research shows the presence of an economic vote, with governments rewarded or punished by voters, depending on the state of the economy. But how stable is this economic vote? A current argument holds its effect has increased over time, because of weakening long-term social and political forces. Under these conditions, short-term forces, foremostly the economic issue, can come to the fore. A counter-argument, however, sees the economic vote effect in decline, due to globalization. Against these rival hypotheses rests the status-quo argument: the economic vote effect remains unchanged. To test these claims, we estimate carefully specified models of the incumbent vote, at both the individual and aggregate levels. Western European elections provide the data, with particular attention to Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Perhaps surprisingly, we find the economic vote to be stable over time, a ‘standing decision’ rule that voters follow in national elections.

Scholars of electoral behaviour regularly link political dissatisfaction to two types of behaviour: voting for populist parties and unstable voting behaviour. It is therefore not surprising that the electorates of populist parties are generally assumed to be rather volatile. In this article, we argue that this is not necessarily the case – in particular in a context of increasingly strong and viable populist parties. We make use of data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project to show that voters for populist parties are neither more nor less volatile than voters for mainstream parties. Political dissatisfaction among voters for populist parties even increases the likelihood of stable voting for populist parties. The supply of populist parties further conditions the stability of the populist vote, as voters in systems with established populist parties are more likely to vote stably for populist parties. Finally, we find that in a context of strong and stable populist parties, the effect of political satisfaction on vote switching is somewhat reduced.

The campaign leading to the 2016 US presidential election included a number of unconventional forms of campaign rhetoric. In earlier analyses, it was claimed that the Trump victory could be seen as a form of protest voting. This article analyzes the determinants of voters’ choices to investigate the validity of this claim. Based on a sample of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, our analyses suggest that a Trump vote cannot be explained by a lack of trust in politics or low levels of satisfaction with democracy, as would be assumed given the extant literature on protest voting. However, indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote—even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants. Despite ongoing discussion about the empirical validity of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments, both concepts proved to be roughly equally powerful in explaining a Trump vote.

Previous research has argued that while economic voting is quite consistently found to be an important mechanism in the rest of Canada, it is rather weak in Quebec. Guérin and Nadeau (1998) have demonstrated that whether or not citizens in Quebec vote economically depends on the party system. Following their lead, we expect that the presence of a dominant regionalist party in Quebec after 1993 (the Bloc Québécois) inhibited Quebeckers from voting economically. However, our results do not offer evidence for this hypothesis. Furthermore, we find only weak evidence of economic voting being moderated by voters’ attitudes towards Quebec independence. Our study hence suggests that the impact of economic accountability in Canada is not hindered by a strong regional party or by the salience of the issue of Quebec independence. The economic vote, it seems, is more stable and general than it is regularly argued to be.

Low levels of political trust are associated with a preference for protest parties. Some authors have argued that in this manner protest parties indirectly contribute to the stability of electoral democracy, functioning as a ‘safety valve’ for political discontent. In this article, we investigate the relationship between protest voting and political trust in a dynamic perspective, relying on a five-year Belgian panel study. We confirm that citizens with low levels of political trust are more likely to vote for protest parties. Additionally, we point out that decreasing levels of trust significantly increase the probability of voting for a protest party, even controlling for absolute levels of trust. Most importantly, having voted for a protest party in 2009 is linked to a subsequent further drop in political trust during the 2009–14 observation period. The panel analysis suggests that distrust and protest voting reinforce one another, leading to a potential spiral of distrust.

After decennia of research on economic voting, it is now established that the state of the economy affects voting behaviour. Nevertheless, this conclusion is the result of a focus on predominantly national-level economies and national-level elections. In this paper, we show that at a local level as well, mechanisms of accountability linked to the economy are at work. The local economic context affected voting behaviour in the 2012 Belgian municipal elections, with a stronger increase of unemployment rates in their municipality significantly decreasing the probability that voters choose an incumbent party. Additionally, we observe that voters are not opportunistically voting for incumbents who lower tax rates. Instead, voters seem to be holding local incumbents accountable for local economic conditions. We hence conclude that voters care about economic outcomes, not about what specific policies are implemented to reach these outcomes.

The economic voting literature has been dominated by the incumbency-oriented hypothesis, in which voters reward or punish governments at the ballot box according to the nation's economic performance. The alternative (policy-oriented) hypothesis, in which voters favor parties that are closest to their issue position(s), has been neglected in this literature. This article explores policy voting with respect to an archetypal economic policy issue—unemployment. Voters who favor lower unemployment should tend to vote for left parties, since they “own” the issue. Examining a large time-series cross-sectional pool of Western European nations, this study finds some evidence for economic policy voting. However, it is conditioned by incumbency. According to varied tests, left incumbents experience a net electoral cost if the unemployment rate climbs. Incumbency, then, serves to break any natural economic policy advantage that might accrue to the left due to the issue of unemployment.