Confrontation, cooperation, and perceived ideology: experimental research on voters’ perceived positions and political competition

Abstract

Accurate perceptions of parties’ political positions are necessary for accountability and representation. Politicians signal their political positions to voters through policy messages; however, policy messages alone often do not work as intended. Furthermore, since politicians use various ideological labels, voters may have a complicated understanding of political positions across multiple dimensions. Thus, discrepancies can arise between ‘objective’ and ‘perceived’ positions. We hypothesized that voters use the tone of politicians’ questions (polite or impolite) and cooperation with other parties to infer a party’s political position. To test this hypothesis, this study conducted a conjoint experiment in Japan while also disentangling voters’ conceptions of left–right, liberal–conservative, and progressive–conservative scales. We found that voters form perceptions of politicians’ political positions based on their confrontational and cooperative behaviour.