Issues and Party Preferences in Hungary

Abstract

The article compares proximity and Rabinowitz/Macdonald directional models of issue voting according to their ability to predict preferences for the six Hungarian parliamentary parties. It was assumed that in a relatively new democracy directional models should perform better, since voters would have more difficulty recognizing the exact positions of parties on different issue dimensions. Furthermore, it was assumed that political sophistication would influence the observed relationships. The analysis is based on a Hungarian national random sample, and an additional survey of members of the Hungarian parliament. The data include voters’ and representatives’ expressed preferences concerning eight specific policy issues, as well as their positions on the left-right dimension. Although voters’ issue preferences appear as relatively weak predictors of vote choice, the directional model generally outperformed the proximity model, the difference being greater in the less politically sophisticated group. In addition, the vote is better explained by positions on the left-right scale than on specific issues.