Quality of the Vote Choice. Accountability and Congruence in Electoral Democracies.

Electoral volatility is an increasingly important component of electoral behaviour. From a normative point of view, voting entails at least two components. On the one hand, voters need to express their political preference through their vote. Therefore, they need to cast a vote that corresponds with their point of view (proximity voting). On the other hand, for the political system to be responsive, voters need to hold the government accountable for its policies and thus reward or punish the governing parties according to their performance (performance voting). This project therefore investigates to what extent there is a relationship between opinions on issues and performance evaluations, and volatile voting. Furthermore, we take into account heterogeneity and examine two possible moderators of proximity and performance voting: political sophistication and party identification. Sophisticated voters are expected to be more consistent in their change in opinion and policy evaluation on the one, and switch in vote on the other hand. Partisans, on the contrary, see the world through a partisan ‘lens’, thus weakening the effects of a switch in opinions and evaluation on the switch in vote. These expectations are tested using the Belgian Election Panel (2009-2014) Study. Furthermore, the findings are validated by means of a comparative research design. Finally, survey experiments are conducted during the 2019 electoral campaign to address the limitations of observational studies.