Oddbjørn Knutsen and Staffan Kumlin

Value orientations and party choice in five countries: A comparative longitudinal study of the impact of values and the location of party voters. Oslo: Department of Political Science. Research Report No. 3/2003. 143 p.

Abstract

This report examines the impact of four central value orientations on party choice over time by using cumulative files based on election surveys from five countries with long traditions of electoral surveys.[1] These countries are Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

We identify four central value dimensions that we use for analysing the relationship between value orientations and party choice: (1) Religious versus secular values or moral values; (2) Economic left-right; (3) Libertarian/authoritarian; (4) Ecology versus growth orientations. The two former orientations are the central 'old politics' orientations while the two latter are labelled 'new politics' orientations.

The research problems are: Has the strength of the impact of the various value orientations increased or decreased over time? What is the relative impact of the various value orientations within each country and are there differences in the impact of the same value orientations between countries? How do voters for the various parties locate themselves on the various value orientations, and does this change over time? In the multivariate analyses we examine the total impact of all value orientations on party choice in order to examine whether value orientations in general have increased their importance for voters' electoral choices. We also analyse the relative impact of what we label 'old politics' and 'new politics' value orientations. Central hypotheses in the literature about the transformation of conflict lines state that social structure has become less important for explaining party choice and that value orientations have become relative more important. We therefore analyse the relative impact of social structure, represented by social class and religion, and value orientations. Finally, we examine how perceived polarisation in the party system influences the impact of values on party choice. Do voters' perceptions of ideological differences between the parties influence the strength of the impact of values on party choice?

We find a curvilinear pattern for the impact of the economic left-right orientations over time: The correlations with party choice increase until the 1980s, and then decline during the late 1980s and 1990s. The declining impact of economic left-right orientations from the 1980s to the late 1990s and early 2000s is substantial in all countries.

It is mainly a more centrist tendency among voters for the parties on the left that contributes to the decline in the correlation. A centrist tendency among the main rightist parties is also found, among the Conservative Party's voters in Britain, and among the non-socialist parties in the Netherlands and in Sweden. In Norway the centrist tendency of Progress Party voters is a major component of the declining correlation.

The impact of moral/religious values is largest in the Netherlands, followed by Norway and then Sweden. The impact is considerably smaller and barely significant in Britain. We find a decline in the impact of moral/religious values in Britain, Norway and Sweden, whereas the strength of the correlation is stable at a high level in the Netherlands.

The combined impact of the old politics value orientations follows a curvilinear pattern in accordance with the pattern for each of the two orientations. This is most pronounced in the Netherlands and Norway, but it is also found in Denmark and Sweden. The strongest tendency for old politics orientations to decline from the 1990s is found in Britain, followed by Norway, but it is evident also in the other three countries.

The new politics orientations have certainly increased their impact on party choice in the long term. Our analysis shows that their impact has increased from the 1970s to the 1980s. We are not able to trace the development for both sets of new politics orientations from the 1970s for most of the countries, but the evidence we have been able to put forth clearly shows an increase. However, there is no universal linear trend demonstrating that these orientations increase their impact on party choice from the 1980s. In the Netherlands, the impact peaks in 1986, in Sweden in 1991, and in Norway the impact is largest in the 1980s, and declines in the 1990s. Only in Denmark is there a clear and almost linear increase of the new politics orientations.

The old politics orientations are still more important, but new politics orientations tend to increase their impact relative to the old. In a long-term perspective, we find a clear relative increase of new politics orientations, but there is no linear increase.

In the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, the new politics orientations sometimes explain almost half as much as the old politics orientations. The relative impact of new politics orientations increases dramatically in Denmark, placing the relative impact of new politics orientations in Denmark at a much higher level than in the other countries. The relative impact of new politics orientations in Britain is comparatively lowest, but it increases.

Value orientations have a large impact on party choice. Based on the averages from the surveys from the period 1980-2001, the Nagelkerke's R2 are 0.52 in Norway and Sweden, 0.48 in the Netherlands, 0.41 in Denmark, and 0.25 in Britain.The overall impact of value orientations (the total value model) seems to have increased from the 1960s to the 1980s in most countries.

The inclusion of the traditional social structural variables shows that value orientations have a large causal impact compared to the main social cleavages. Only in the Netherlands does social structure have larger causal impact on party choice than value orientations, while in Britain the impact of the two types of conflict variables are about the same. In both countries the relative impact is fairly stable over time. In the three Scandinavian countries, value orientations have a larger impact than social structure, and the ratio of the explanatory power of the two types of conflict variables increases significantly over time, indicating that value orientations become relatively more important.

Furthermore, most of the impact of value orientations remains, even after structural variables are controlled for. This indicates that most of the bivariate impact of values is not spurious.

Our findings indicate however that in order to reach a more complete understanding of the variation in value effects, one has to take into account the rather volatile and unpredictable political contexts into consideration. In particular, one needs to consider the extent to which the major political actors manage to make voters notice internal ideological differences. This contextual factor appears to regulate the impact of values, whereby the causal mechanisms include the extent to which citizens learn to make use of ideological labels and concepts, the extent to which they receive ideological cues in order to choose on the basis of values, as well as the affective strength with which values are endorsed. Our results suggest that the apparent decrease in perceived party polarisation in the 1990s has helped reduce the extent to which especially economic left-right values matter for party choice.Based on our findings the political context created by elite actors in the parties and the media seems to have large short-term and non-linear temporal influences on the salience of political values.

[1]A shorter version of this report will appear as a chapter in Jacques Thomassen (ed.): The European Voter (preliminary title).