Artikel
Do parties perceive their voter potentials correctly? Reconsidering the spatial logic of electoral competition
Political parties strive for maximizing their vote shares. One way to achieve this goal is to attract voters from competitors. A precondition for strategies aiming at attracting these voters is that parties perceive their voter potentials among their rivals' electorates correctly. Yet, hardly anything is known about such perceptions. To fill this gap, we develop analogue measures of a party's perceived and its actual voter potential for each competitor in a party system. Combining elite and mass surveys conducted in Germany, we show that perceived and actual voter potentials depend on spatial considerations but also that not all parties are able to correctly evaluate their potentials. These deviations can be traced back to differences in the perceived placement of political actors between elites and citizens. This supports the spatial logic of party competition but it also points to potential pitfalls for strategic behavior of political parties.
- Language
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Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
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Journal: Electoral Studies ; ISSN: 1873-6890 ; Volume: 65 ; Year: 2020 ; Pages: -- ; Amsterdam: Elsevier
- Classification
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Wirtschaft
- Subject
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spatial models
party competition
voter potentials
parties' perceptions
- Event
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Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
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Lichteblau, Josephine
Giebler, Heiko
Wagner, Aiko
- Event
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Veröffentlichung
- (who)
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Elsevier
ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
- (where)
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Amsterdam
- (when)
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2020
- DOI
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doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102126
- Handle
- Last update
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10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Artikel
Associated
- Lichteblau, Josephine
- Giebler, Heiko
- Wagner, Aiko
- Elsevier
- ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
Time of origin
- 2020
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