When Policies Become Irrelevant: The Effect of Polarized Partisan Attitudes on Vote Switching

Behavioral consequences of political polarization have only recently started to attract scholarly attention, especially in comparative research. This study examines how affective polarization mediates the effects of voters’ policy considerations on their decision to remain loyal to their parties. With the rapidly growing polarization in many established democracies in the last decades, we argue that policy debates have increasingly become a matter of ‘us vs. them’, which has decreased the mass public’s responsiveness to party policies. Employing the CSES data, individual-level empirical analyses demonstrate that, when making their vote decisions, affectively more polarized voters tend to weigh their policy preferences less than do those with less polarized attitudes. Our findings thus provide a more nuanced theoretical account of voting behavior in general and electoral volatility in particular. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings from the perspectives of economic, ideological, and issue voting, democratic representation, and accountability.