In this project the aim is to research in detail the relative impact of party id, ideology and leaders as explanatory factors in voting behaviour in Portugal.
Objectivos:
The amount of research on electoral behaviour in Portugal has gained considerable momentum. There has been a lot of information and findings in the previous years. This project aims at taking a closer look at two specific issues. The first is the relative importance of party identification and ideology as explanatory factors of vote choice. The second is the role and nature of leader effects in Portuguese vote choice.
State of the art:
This project contributes to the gathering current of research on the dynamics of party identification and ideological identification in western democracies. For the frequently studied French case, it has been established that ideological identification generally outweighs party identification in shaping the French voter's choice. We use essentially the same methodological framework - causal analysis with panel data - but apply it to Portugal. This case is relevant for a number of reasons. First, Portugal is representative of third wave democracies where parties tend to be less institutionalized. Second, Portuguese electoral institutions share characteristics with those in France. Third, past research on the Portuguese case indicates a role for both party and ideology in voting behavior, but the panel data necessary to help determine which is more important were unavailable until 2005. Fourth, the Portuguese case enables us to test the variables' relative importance in two different institutional contexts, namely the 2005 legislative and the 2006 the presidential elections. We estimate a multi-equation model of the vote, using two-stage least squares and ordered logit, as well as binomial and multinomial logit techniques. The results indicate that ideological identification has moe of an impact than party identification on the Portuguese voter's choice, both at the legislative and the presidential level
