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Replication Data for: Do citizens use sociodemographic characteristics as cues to infer candidate issue positions?

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Do citizens use sociodemographic characteristics as cues to infer candidate issue positions?
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YLNSOK
 
Creator Däubler, Thomas
Quoß, Franziska
Rudolph, Lukas
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description In open-list PR systems, choosing candidates based on issue proximity can improve policy congruence. However, in practice, voters may not know enough about individual candidates to do so. Hence, we examine whether individual positions are inferred from cues provided on ballots, namely age and residence. Studying the Swiss parliamentary elections of 2019, we focus on environmental policy, both the most salient issue and featuring considerable intra-party heterogeneity of positions. We combine comprehensive candidate data with a representative voter survey and conduct a survey-embedded experiment (N=10,758). We find that citizens have indeed little knowledge of candidate positions. However, ballot cues predict policy differences among candidates within parties only to a limited extent, and the experiment does not suggest that voters use ballot information to predict positions directly. Instead, as suggested by additional analyses, citizens may perceive candidates who resemble their own sociodemographic profile as having positions closer to their own.
 
Subject Social Sciences
heuristics
cues
open-list PR
political knowledge
environmental policy
survey experiment
 
Language English
 
Contributor Rudolph, Lukas
 
Relation Quoß, Franziska, Lukas Rudolph, Sarah Gomm, Stefan Wehrli and Thomas Bernauer. 2021. Swiss Environmental Panel Study 2018-2020, Wave 1-6, Cumulative Data [Dataset]. ETH Zurich - Institute of Science, Technology and Policy. Distributed by FORS, Lausanne, 2021. doi:10.23662/FORS-DS-1220-2.

Smartvote (2019). “Daten der Online-Wahlhilfe smartvote.ch zu den Eidg. Wahlen" URL: www.smartvote.ch