Issue Voting and Party Systems in Central and Eastern Europe

Since the 1970s, partly in reaction to the somewhat bleak assessment by the Columbia school and Campbell et al. (1960) of the individual citizen’s political competence, a whole generation of specialists in political behavior has tried to show that ordinary people can make good use of their vote. Their studies suggest that citizens intelligently interpret programmatic differences between parties and candidates after all, and vote on the basis of their concerns with serious, substantive political questions. Key (1966: 2) had concisely anticipated the earlier verdict on the dearth of issue voting in the electorate: “Even the most discriminating popular judgment can reflect only ambiguity, uncertainty, or even foolishness if those are the qualities of the input into the echo chamber.”