Fragmented Identities, Contradictory Choices and Voting

Societies have grown more complex, and individuals’ political identities have become more and more fragmented. Increasingly, voters do not share the values and positions of parties in their entirety - they agree with some positions but contradict and disagree with others. Social theory has emphasized for a long time the rise of the “fragmented subject” (Reckwitz 2010). These developments might seriously remould the preconditions of political representation, as growing parts of the population feel only partly represented by political parties. However, while CEE societies have been contrasted with Western representative democracies in terms of the comparatively lower stability of voters’ attachment to political parties, the growing fragmentation of the political identities of their followers might affect different political parties to a greatly differing degree. In this article, we look at Slovakia as a case and make use of the data from the Volebný Kompas voting advice application (VAA) for the 2023 snap Slovak Parliamentary Elections to ask a) how voters of different parties are congruent in their value and item choices compared to their parties. Furthermore, we use a follow-up survey with the VAA respondents to see b) how and on what basis, in the case of contracting or diverging value preferences, voters determined their choices at the voting booth, and c) the downstream effects of party choice on issue salience perceptions and issue positions after the elections. With this article, we seek to contribute to the literature on political representation in CEE and shed light on the representative linkages between different parties and party families and their supporters. Lastly, we seek to reach a better understanding of how voters’ political identities develop through voting and how party systems might address them.