What counts for citizens’ programmatic choices? A conjoint experiment on ideology, policy trade-offs and group representation

Electoral programs aggregate policy proposals targeting diversified social groups. How do voters trade-off between these targeted policy proposals in their prospective evaluation of manifestos? We develop and test three hypotheses, i.e. whether citizens judge programs primarily in view of the proposals targeting the groups (1) they belong to, (2) that are majoritarily perceived as deserving or (3) through the lens of ideological representations of groups. We designed a conjoint experiment in which respondents had to choose between hypothetical sets of party manifestos addressing different social groups. The presented manifestos are based on real-world electoral pledges taken from the German 2021 legislative and the French 2022 presidential electoral campaign. Our analyses reveal that voters’ program choice varies depending on which groups are targeted in a beneficial or detrimental way, reflecting for instance the finding that senior citizens are largely perceived as “deserving” while immigrants are not (2). However, our study also reveals considerable heterogeneity in program choice, less in terms of respondents’ group membership (1) than depending on ideology (3).