Spatial Preferences and Voter Choices in the Dutch Electorate

Abstract

Voters' preferences for political parties and their choices can be modeled as a set of equations with three endogenous variables: (1) the perceived distance between the voter's ideological position and that of a party; (2) the utility that the voter assigns to a party; and (3) behavior—whether or not a voter votes for a given party. Spatial models of party competition imply that (1) the perceived ideological distance between a voter and a party is a function of the perceived spatial distances between the voter's most preferred point on each electorally relevant issue and the party's position—the greater these distances, the greater the perceived ideological distance; (2) the utility assigned to each party is a function of this ideological distance, as well as the issue distances; and (3) the higher the assigned utility, the higher the probability that a voter votes for a given party, but the greater the ideological and issue distances, the lower this probability. These hypotheses are operationalized and tested with individual-level data from the 1970-1973 Dutch Election Study.

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