Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice

What is the nature of mass opinion on public policies? And what role do voters’ positions on policy issues play in their political choices? These two questions lie at the heart of fundamental debates about whether democratic elections can induce policymakers to be responsive to citizens’ policy preferences. To date, research on voters in established democracies has been dominated by two general opposing perspectives on these questions. An ‘ideological voter’ account suggests that voters’ opinions across different policies are sufficiently ideologically organised so that political choice largely reduces to comparing ideological positions on a small number of dimensions. This simplifies democratic policy responsiveness. Meanwhile, an `innocent voter’ account suggests that citizens tend not to develop the meaningful and stable policy opinions which could form the basis for their political choices. Democratic policy responsiveness is thus unrealistic.

We argue for the importance of a third, ‘idiosyncratic voter’ account. This says that voters develop meaningful and stable policy opinions on varying subsets of issues, but the combinations of policy opinions they form on these issues tend to be idiosyncratic rather than ideologically consistent. Our argument draws upon new data from a large panel survey experiment conducted in Britain in 2018-19. We show that both the ‘ideological voter’ and ‘innocent voter’ accounts explain important aspects of mass policy opinion and the degree of impact it has on voters’ political choices. Nonetheless, idiosyncratic policy opinion is widespread on many issues and significantly shapes the political choices that voters make. As such, idiosyncratic policy opinion serves alongside ideological policy opinion as an additional starting point for democratic policy responsiveness. This perspective provides better microfoundations for understanding the macropolitical competition we observe, as the prevalence of idiosyncratic opinions makes political dynamics highly multidimensional and prone to disruption from shocks to the salience of particular issues.