This article contributes to the literature on political heuristics by reporting two survey experiments conducted in Spain in 2014–2015 on party and ideology cues regarding preferences on a range of European Union and domestic issues in European and general elections. The findings reveal that party cues increase voters’ competence to take positions on European Union issues more than ideological ones. Cues increase competence in a similar fashion regardless of the nature of the topic, although the effect of cues that parties provide on European Union issues seems to be stronger than that of cues on domestic policies. Party cueing effects are also consistent across different electoral arenas (national vs. European), and for all types of parties regardless of their age or positions toward the European Union integration process.

Although federal arrangements adopt a multiplicity of forms across and within federations, this article suggests that some models of power division are better than others at enhancing clarity of responsibility and electoral accountability. This conclusion is the result of exploring responsibility attribution and economic voting in a state where decentralisation arrangements vary across regions: the Spanish State of Autonomies. Using electoral surveys and aggregated economic data for the 1982–2012 period, the empirical analysis shows that regional economic voting is most pronounced in regions where decentralisation design concentrated authority and resources at one level of government, whereas it is inexistent in regions where devolution followed a more intertwined model of power distribution. The implication of the empirical findings is that the specific design of intergovernmental arrangements is crucial to make electoral accountability work in federations.

A substantive portion of the electorate declares in pre-electoral surveys that they are undecided. However, little has been done in trying to understand who these voters are and how they finally decide their vote. In this article, we try to advance the literature by disentangling the circumstances under which voters are more likely to be undecided. While the traditional approach to the study of electoral indecision has been to characterize which individual traits make voters more likely to be undecided, this article provides consistent evidence showing that key elements of the political context may also affect electoral indecision. Using long-term harmonized data from Spanish pre-electoral surveys over 30 years, we find that voting indecision is influenced by two different types of contextual factors. First, there are some political contexts that reduce voters’ cognitive costs when deciding their vote, i.e. the level of electoral competitiveness and the number of parties competing in the elections. Second, there are other political contexts that increase voters’ social or expressive costs, i.e. the level of government popularity, since costs of expressing preference for the party in government increases when its public image is undermined.

This article analyses the influence of ballot structure over satisfaction with democracy. In line with previous literature, we hypothesize that some ballot structures – such as preferential ballots – generate more satisfaction with democracy than closed ones. Yet, we expect these differences to be especially relevant among the more knowledgeable electorate, since any open ballot structure requires more sophisticated voters. Using CSES surveys, our results do not show a clear and simple relation between ballot openness and satisfaction with democracy as some previous research seems to suggest. Our findings rather suggest a more limited effect. Preferential ballots and open lists are the only ballot structures that generate more satisfaction, when compared to most of the remaining ballot structures. Yet, this relation is restricted only among the more knowledgeable electorate. The liberty of choice that ballot structure offers only concerns a reduced portion of the electorate, namely the more politically sophisticated one.

In this article, we examine which political issues are considered most important by the Spanish electorate. Although a variety of potentially relevant issues are available, voters are forced to summarise them in just one vote. Thus, they need to prioritise some issues over others. This article analyses which issues end up being the most important for the Spanish electorate when they decide their vote, and why some issues become more influential than others. Our hypothesis is that voters give more weight to issues that polarise the parties. The hypothesis is tested at the individual and at the aggregate level.

Most models in political science and political economy assume that benefiting from public spending increases the likelihood of voting for the government. However, we do not have much empirical evidence on the conditions under which recipients of public spending reward governments for their public transfers. This article studies the electoral implications of welfare spending cuts in the early years of the Reagan Presidency, when public spending changes were particularly pronounced. Using 1982 NES data, this paper demonstrates that voters who lost public benefits punished Reagan but this only occurred when they identified with the Democratic Party. By contrast, benefit recipients not affected by government cuts were more likely to support Reagan, but again this was only significant among voters identifying with the party of government. This paper thus finds that governments cannot automatically “buy” votes by using welfare spending, the influence of which is instead cushioned by party identification.

According to the literature, governments have strong incentives to use the public budget tactically in order to either obtain the electoral support of new voters or strengthen the loyalty of their traditional supporters. Yet vote-seeking strategies only become rational when voters follow their self-interest and reward governments when their constituency benefits from public transfers. The literature has focused on the governments’ incentives, largely ignoring the importance of knowing whether the electorate is responsive to public investments. This study tests empirically whether incumbents strategically use public investments to gather more electoral support; and whether voters take these investments into account at the polls. These two questions are pursued simultaneously by using as a case study the expansion of the underground network in Madrid, Spain. Only a little evidence is found to support the idea that regional governments constructed new metro stations in neighbourhoods where they had more to gain electorally. Also, the inauguration timing strictly followed the electoral cycle, something that indicates a strategic calculus on the part of the incumbent. However, the models are also consistent with the idea that the government’s investments were primarily driven by motives of efficiency. Indeed, although governments are tempted to follow vote-seeking strategies, they are also aware that they cannot deviate too much from an efficiency-based allocation of public resources. From the perspective of the voters, robust evidence has been found to show that regional voters rewarded this policy at the neighbourhood level. Neighbourhoods that received new metro stations voted in higher numbers for the incumbent than those quarters without new investments. All in all, these findings may have some implications for normative democratic theory.

Although non-ideological voters make up a considerable share of the electorate, the literature has systematically overlooked their voting behaviour. Using Spanish electoral data from the 1979-2008 electoral period, we seek to identify the alternative cues ?in the absence of ideology? these voters may use when casting their ballot. We do not find that evaluations of the incumbent?s performance have a greater influence on non-ideological voters, as the retrospective voting literature suggests. Nor do we find that other shortcuts such as candidate evaluations or party identification are used more by this group when they vote. Instead, our results indicate that non-ideological voters have exchanged the traditional ideological shortcut for simple proincumbent voting as a decision rule.