Voters and Voting in Context: Multiple Contexts and the Heterogeneous German Electorate
Harald Schoen, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Bernhard Weßels, and Christof Wolf
Abstract
This book investigates the role of context in affecting political opinion formation and voting behavior. Building on a model of contextual effects on individual-level voter behavior, the chapters of this volume explore contextual effects in Germany in the early twenty-first century. The contributions draw on manifold combinations of individual and contextual information gathered in the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) framework and employ advanced methods. In substantive terms, they investigate the impact of campaign communication on political learning, the effects of media coverage o ... More
This book investigates the role of context in affecting political opinion formation and voting behavior. Building on a model of contextual effects on individual-level voter behavior, the chapters of this volume explore contextual effects in Germany in the early twenty-first century. The contributions draw on manifold combinations of individual and contextual information gathered in the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) framework and employ advanced methods. In substantive terms, they investigate the impact of campaign communication on political learning, the effects of media coverage on the perceived importance of political problems, and the role of electoral competition on candidate strategies and perceptions. Other contributions deal with the role of social and economic contexts as well as parties’ policy stances in affecting electoral turnout. The chapters on vote choice explore the impact of social cues on candidate voting, effects of electoral arenas on vote functions, the role of media coverage on ideological voting, and effects of campaign communication on the timing of electoral decision-making. The volume demonstrates the key role of the processes of communication and politicization in bringing about contextual effects. Context thus plays a nuanced role in voting behavior. The contingency of contextual effects suggests that they should become an important topic in research on political behavior and democratic politics.
Keywords:
context,
contextual effects,
voting behavior,
Germany,
multilevel data,
communication,
German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES),
political information processing
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198792130 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198792130.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Harald Schoen, editor
Professor of Political Science, University of Mannheim
Sigrid Roßteutscher, editor
Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, editor
Professor of Political Science, University of Mannheim
Bernhard Weßels, editor
Senior Fellow, WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, and Professor of Political Science, Humboldt-University Berlin
Christof Wolf, author
President of GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences , and Professor of Sociology, University of Mannheim
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