Mads Thau

Social groups often differ in vote choice, but differences vary significantly between elections. Recent work argues that political parties shape group differences by the policies they propose. I posit that differences also depend on how parties use group-based appeals. This proposition is tested with a unique data set on group-based appeals, policy-based appeals, and voter preferences in Britain from 1964 to 2015. Focusing on social class as one prominent group membership, I show how class differences in vote choice respond to policy-based as well as group-based class appeals: the gap between voters from opposing classes widens or narrows depending on how much the Labour Party emphasizes “old” symbolic ties to workers and “new” ties to businesses. These effects are robust and compare to the policy effects highlighted in previous work. Overall, this implies a revised view on how political parties influence the social divisions of electoral politics.

Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals work and find that while they increase perceptions of representation among working class voters, they have a more limited effect on perceptions of candidates’ ideological position. Our results help explain how class affects voter decision-making and contribute to broader discussions about the role of political elites in activating social cleavages.

Public decision-makers increasingly rely on satisfaction surveys to inform budget and policy decisions. Yet, our knowledge of whether, and under what conditions, this input from public service users provides valid performance information remains incomplete. Using a preregistered splitballot experiment among government grant recipients in Denmark, this article shows that the ordering of survey questions can bias satisfaction measures even for highly experienced and professional respondents. We find that asking about overall satisfaction before any specific service ratings lowers overall user satisfaction, compared to the reverse order, while the correlations between specific ratings and overall satisfaction are relatively stable. Also, the question order effect outweighs that of a large-scale embezzlement scandal, which unexpectedly hit the investigated government agency during the data collection. Our results support rising concerns that subjective performance indicators are susceptible to bias. We discuss how practitioners should approach satisfaction surveys to account for the risk of question order bias.

In Denmark, as in other Western European countries, the working class does not vote for social democratic parties to the same extent as before. Yet, what role did the social democratic parties themselves play in the demobilization of class politics? Building on core ideas from public opinion literature, this article differs from the focus on party policy positions in previous work and, instead, focuses on the group-based appeals of the Social Democratic Party in Denmark. Based on a quantitative content analysis of party programs between 1961 and 2004, I find that, at the general level, class-related appeals have been replaced by appeals targeting non-economic groups. At the specific level, the class-related appeals that remain have increasingly been targeting businesses at the expense of traditional left-wing groups such as wage earners, tenants and pensioners. These findings support a widespread hypothesis that party strategy was crucial in the decline of class politics, but also suggests that future work on class mobilization should adopt a group-centered perspective.

I Danmark og andre vesteuropæiske lande stemmer arbejderklassen ikke på socialdemokratiske partier i samme omfang som tidligere. Men hvilken rolle har partierne selv spillet i klassepolitikkens demobilisering? Med udgangspunkt i teori om politisk holdningsdannelse afviger artiklen fra litteraturens fokus på policy positioner og undersøger i stedet Socialdemokratiets gruppebaserede appeller. En kvantitativ indholdsanalyse af arbejdsprogrammer og principprogrammer mellem 1961 og 2004 viser, at klassebaserede appeller generelt er blevet erstattet af appeller rettet mod ikke-økonomiske grupper. Hvad angår specifikke grupper, retter appellerne sig i stigende grad mod virksomheder på bekostning af traditionelle kernevælgere som lønmodtagere, lejere og pensionister. Det understøtter en udbredt påstand om, at partistrategi er afgørende i klassepolitikkens udvikling, men antyder også at forskningen fremadrettet bør anlægge gruppeperspektiv.

A mainstay of representative democracies is that political parties appeal for votes in competition over office. In this dissertation, I advance a new theory of party electoral strategy, which takes its point of departure in the longstanding idea that voters are group-oriented. I argue that since voters evaluate parties based on which groups they are thought to represent, vote-seeking parties use group-based appeals to change or sustain their group images so that the public sees what they want. This contrasts with the dominant perspective in the literature, which builds on the idea that voters are policy-motivated, and argues that parties use policy-based appeals to adjust policy images in ways that fit what the electorate wants. I use unique data from a content analysis of British election manifestos from 1964 to 2015 to show that group-based appeals are increasingly used, that they are used in accordance with electoral incentives, and that they are not proxies for other party strategic variables like policy positions and issue emphasis. I also show that group-based appeals can help parties gain votes, and that they can shape the social basis of electoral choice. In both cases they do so independently of the policy-based appeals that previous work has focused on. We seem to be dealing with a distinct way that parties appeal to voters. One that matters to party electoral success and individual vote choice on its own. The findings have major implications for our understanding of democratic politics and raises a number of questions that future research should address. Regardless of the answers to these questions, however, this dissertation shows that group-based appeals represent one way that political parties appeal for votes that is too substantial to ignore. The dissertation consists of this summary report and three self-contained articles.