The Clarity of Policy Alternatives, Left-Right and the European Parliament Vote in 2004.

The importance of the left-right divide for party choice is well established, both for legislative and European Parliament (EP) elections. However, the conditions under which left-right self-placement becomes more or less important in explaining the vote in both legislative and EP elections are clearly understudied. The article uses the 2004 EP elections as a laboratory to understand if there are indeed systematic differences between political systems' characteristics that might explain variation in terms of the strength of the relationship between left-right self-placement and the vote. Using the survey data from the European Election Study 2004 (twenty-one EU member states), the paper has two goals. First, to examine whether citizens' left-right self-placement has a different impact on the vote in different types of democratic regime, defined in terms of the contrast between consolidating and long-established democracies. Secondly, to examine whether this contrast resists the introduction of controls for three other factors hypothesized to make a difference in the extent to which left-right orientations have a greater influence on the vote: the permissiveness of electoral system; the clarity of policy alternatives provided by the party system; and the particular type of party alignments along both the left-right and anti-/pro-integration scales that tend to characterize each country. Our findings corroborate that (the 2004 EP) elections do seem to be about choosing parties in terms of left-right orientations to a considerable extent. Furthermore, we found that the usefulness of left-right orientations as cues to the vote seems to be contingent upon a major contextual factor: greater levels of clarity of the policy alternatives provided by the party system render citizens' left-right self-placement more consequential for their EP vote. Finally, we found that left-right orientations may not be equally useful in consolidating and in the remaining established democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]