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Exploring the effect of personalized voting on affective polarization: Prototypical leadership and campaign effects

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Abstract

Recent studies have shown that political information directly associated with a real-world leader tends to generate more (affective) polarization compared to similar information tied to a more impersonal source, such as a political party. The phenomenon is explained by the catalyzing role of leaders in the public’s inclination to maximize distinctiveness with outgroups. Leaders are used as stereotypical yardsticks based on their structural position and external visibility in (negative) campaigns. We link the preceding findings from the source cue literature to the preferential voting literature because a vote for a candidate or the party as a whole also is a source cue proxy. Concretely, we test whether voters casting a preference vote for an electoral leader are more affectively polarized than party voters by relying on the Belgian RepResent panel survey for the last parliamentary elections of 2019. This context provides an adequate electoral setting and adequate indicators to measure affective polarization and to distinguish (centralized) preference voters and party voters. Our findings show that (centralized) preference voters are indeed more affectively polarized and this can primarily be explained by a short(er)-term negative campaigning mechanism.

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Data availability

RepResent data are available upon request. See https://represent-project.be/data/.

Notes

  1. The fact that Wagner measures the affect toward the parties themselves rather than the affect toward the party supporters can be posed as one of the critiques to his affective polarization measure.

  2. We identified party chairs as electoral leaders based on their participation in the final Flemish television debate of the electoral campaign, consistent with prior research on preference voting in Belgium (Wauters et al. 2018). However, three party chairs (representing Groen, N-VA, and Open VLD) participated in the Flemish elections on the same day, but not in the federal elections. To address this, we coded their presence in respective districts as potential electoral leaders for federal elections, acknowledging it was a concurrent but distinct election. Notably, within these districts, other prominent figures, such as Kristof Calvo (faction leader in the Federal Parliament), Jan Jambon (vice Federal Prime Minister), and Maggie De Block (Federal Minister of Social Affairs and Health), could also be considered federal electoral leaders.

  3. Yet the dependent variable is somewhat zero-inflated, but a regression with a Box-Cox transformation of the dependent variable as a robustness check provides similar findings as a linear regression.

  4. We see that the 95% confidence intervals around the marginal effects of preference votes in districts with electoral leader and of list votes in districts without electoral leader also do not overlap among those that intensively followed the campaign. At first sight, this finding seems to contradict H5. However, this is less problematic if we follow Wauters et al. (2018) who suggested that a list vote in a district without an electoral leader might function as a kind of proxy vote for the electoral leader. After all, voters in such districts cannot vote for the electoral leader, even if they explicitly want to. Hence, the fact that the marginal effect of a list vote in a district without electoral leader is significantly stronger for those that intensively followed the campaign is in line with the aforementioned proxy logic.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of workshops organized at the State of the Federation 2021 and the Politicologenetmaal 2021, two anonymous reviewers, and the students of a seminar we organized on this theme at the University of Antwerp for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Peter Thijssen & Rozemarijn van Dijk

  2. Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Patrick van Erkel

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  1. Peter Thijssen
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  2. Rozemarijn van Dijk
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  3. Patrick van Erkel
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Correspondence to Peter Thijssen.

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Appendices

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Models 3 and 4 with controls
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See Tables 6, 7

Table 6 Models 5 and Model 6
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Table 7 Descriptive statistics of control variables
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Alternative AP measures

See Tables 8, 9

Table 8 Models explaining affective polarization with alternative LRD weighted affective polarization measure
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Table 9 Models explaining affective polarization with alternative LRD weighted affective polarization measure
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Table 10 Linear regression affective polarization with box-cox transformation
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Thijssen, P., van Dijk, R. & van Erkel, P. Exploring the effect of personalized voting on affective polarization: Prototypical leadership and campaign effects. Acta Polit (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-023-00319-1

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