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Risk attitudes and the propensity to vote for a new party in multi-party systems

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Abstract

The effect of risk attitudes on voting behavior is the subject of increasing attention in the literature. This paper investigates the effect of risk attitudes on the likelihood of voting for a new party in multi-party systems. I argue that voting for a new party entails more uncertainty than voting for an established one; because the policy stance, the electoral success, and the efficiency of the agent–principal relationship are more difficult to predict. Consequently, risk-averse voters should be less likely to vote for a new party than risk-acceptant voters, ceteris paribus. This paper uses the Swiss case, where two new parties appeared on the political scene at the federal level between 2007 and 2011, to evaluate this proposition. The results show that the more risk averse a voter is, the less likely he is to vote for a new party.

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Notes

  1. Indeed, Switzerland is known as being a country with a very inclusive political system (see for example, Lijphart (1999) and Powell (2000)), which is probably an important factor of the stability of the partisan composition of representatives at the national level. As the party system is quite stable, Swiss voters generally use party ties when they vote.

  2. Personal translation

  3. It is important to note, however, that several scholars aimed at nuancing this assumption. Indeed, a few studies discuss the idea that, according to different personality traits, people might be more risk seeking in the domain of gains and more risk averse in the domain of losses or, inversely, risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses (see for example, Kowert and Hermann 1997; Lauriola et al. 2005). Moreover, it has been shown that risk attitudes vary across contexts, although there is a general underlying component specific to each individual (Dohmen et al. 2011).

  4. Moreover, the uncertainty of the size of the new party also has an effect on the uncertainty of its bargaining power if represented in parliament.

  5. The individual candidates of a new party are not necessarily all challengers per se, however their party label is.

  6. He did so with the help of Verena Diener, an MP at the cantonal level

  7. Voorpostel et al. (2012).

  8. Other possible covariates of the variable risk acceptance, the big five personality traits, are presented in “Appendix B.”

  9. The exact wording is: “If there was an election for the National Council tomorrow, for which party would you vote?”

  10. I also ran difference in means tests for the BDP and the GL separately. I can reject the null hypothesis according to which risk acceptance is the same for individuals opting for the BDP (GL) and individuals opting for other parties, and this with 90 (95) percent confidence.

  11. See http://forscenter.ch/en/our-surveys/selects/. I use the 2011 survey, as the location of the two new parties has not been asked before 2011. There are only two parties for which I use the 2007 survey: the FDP and the PLS. Indeed, these two parties merged in 2011, so we do not have distinct locations for them in the 2011 survey. One could wonder why the future merged party is not defined as a new party organization in this analysis. The reason is that these parties are still two distinct alternatives in the 2009 SHP survey, where the question on risk attitudes has been asked. One could also wonder if the location of the established parties haven’t changed much between 2007 and 2011. The correlation between the locations of the main established parties in 2007 and 2011 equals 0.999.

  12. It could be argued that the effect of risk acceptance is smaller if the distance is large, or inversely that the distance has less effect on the likelihood of voting for a new party if risk acceptance is low. However, the effect of the independent variables should exhibit diminishing returns. In other words, when distance to BPD (GL) is too large, we do not expect risk acceptance to have any effect on the likelihood of voting for the BDP (GL). And when risk acceptance is very low, we do not expect the proximity to BDP or GL to increase the chances to vote for one of these new parties. For this reason, I do not include an interaction term between risk acceptance and distance.

  13. I do not use any weights in the regressions. As this is a panel survey, there is sample attrition over time. However, there is no clear consensus as to whether weights should be used in multivariate analysis (see for example, Gelman 2007; Winship and Radbill 1994). Moreover, given that less than 60% of the sample is used here, due to missing values, there is no guarantee that the weights are still relevant. Indeed, observations that may be overrepresented in the full sample are not necessarily overrepresented in the subset of the sample used in the regression. Consequently, there is no guarantee that the use of weights will increase the representativeness of the results. Finally, I control for age and gender, and these variables are used to estimate the weights.

  14. the SHP survey uses two questions for each trait, the questions being based on Rammstedt (2007).

  15. Questions in Kam (2012) are based on Gosling et al. (2003) (TIPI).

  16. For the evolution of the positions of the main Swiss political parties between 1971 and 2003, see Hug and Schulz (2007).

  17. See http://forscenter.ch/en/our-surveys/selects/

  18. I treated these parties as two distinct parties as in the SHP data of 2009 these two parties are still seen as distinct.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ted Brader and Robert Franzese, and the two reviewers for their valuable feedback.

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    Danielle Martin

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Appendices

Appendices

Appendix A: Comparison of hypothetical vote choice in the 2009 SHP and in the 2011 National Election Results

In order to verify that the hypothetical vote choice is not too far from a real vote choice, we can compare the distribution of this variable with the distribution of election results. Figure 5 displays the distribution of the hypothetical vote choice in the 2009 SHP. Figure 6 displays the strength of the main parties in the 2011 election of the national lower house. The distributions are quite similar, the main difference being that the strength of the SVP seems bigger in Fig. 6. Social desirability bias can explain why the support for SVP is underestimated in the 2009 survey. Indeed, respondents are less likely to say that they will vote for the SVP than to actually vote for the SVP. To verify this, I also looked at the share of hypothetical vote choice in the 2007 SHP (among all respondents entitled to vote), and this share (21.6%) is also lower than the vote share of the SVP in the 2007 national elections (28.9%). Besides this difference, the two distributions are very similar and consequently, I assume that the vote choice measure in the SHP is not different than a reported vote choice in an election survey.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Hypothetical Vote Choice SHP 2009. The categories are the main political parties (BDP Conservative Democratic Party of Switzerland, CVP Christian Democratic Party, FDP Free Democratic Party, GL Green Liberals, GPS Greens, LPS Liberals, SP Socialist Party, SVP the Swiss People’s Party). The category “other” contains all other parties, excluding missing answers. Number of observations: 3977

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Fig. 6
figure 6

Partisan Strength in the 2011 National Election Results. The categories are the main political parties (BDP Conservative Democratic Party of Switzerland, CVP Christian Democratic Party, FDP Free Democratic Party, GL Green Liberals, GPS Greens, SP Socialist Party, SVP the Swiss People’s Party). The category “other” contains all other parties, excluding missing answers. The LPS is not present as this party merged with the FDP just before the elections

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Appendix B: Additional covariates of risk attitudes

Other possible covariates of the variable risk acceptance are the big five personality traits. Table 3 presents correlation coefficients between risk acceptance and the big fives.Footnote 14 The coefficients have the same sign as in Kam’s (2012) analysis, except for agreeableness and neuroticism. This might come from the fact that the big five measures are not based on the same questions.Footnote 15 The fact that Kam’s (2012) measure of risk is more oriented toward the propensity to like new experiences, rule breaking, and sensation seeking may also play a role. Indeed, Slovic et al. (1996) find that there are two dimensions underlying the concept of risk: “understood risk” (uncertainty) and “dread risk” (related to fear), and although the self-placement measure is broad enough to encompass both, Kam’s measure is more oriented toward the second dimension.

Table 3 Risk acceptance and the “big five” personality traits
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Appendix C: Additional information about the Swiss Case and the 2011 elections

Table 4 lists the number of candidates in each canton for the BDP and the GL in the 2011 elections of the lower house. In more than half of the cantons, the parties have candidates. Figure 7 shows the locations of the parties on a 0 (left) to 10 (right) scale, as estimated by the voters.Footnote 16 The data come from the Swiss Election Studies of 2011Footnote 17 except for the LPS and the FDP for which I used the Swiss Election Studies of 2007, as these two parties decided to merge before the 2011 elections.Footnote 18

Table 4 Number of candidates in the 2011 Elections
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Fig. 7
figure 7

Ideological locations of the parties

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Appendix D: Models for all parties

Table 5 Model 1 all alternatives
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Table 6 Model 2 all alternatives
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Table 7 Model 3 all alternatives
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Martin, D. Risk attitudes and the propensity to vote for a new party in multi-party systems. Acta Polit 57, 1–20 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00165-5

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