The Importance of Perception and Populism: Explaining voters' choices using the proximity model of voting

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Political Science (MSc)

Grent, David (2022)

The Importance of Perception and Populism: Explaining voters' choices using the proximity model of voting

Master thesis | Political Science (MSc)

This paper analyzes the interaction between policy distance and issue salience using the proximity model of voting. It uses a quantitative analysis of items from the Dutch Parliamentary Electoral Survey (2021) and POPPA (2018) to research whether the more salience is attached to economic, socio-cultural, and political issues by voters, the more important the chosen dimension will be for their vote. The examination provides data on voters’ and party positions on these three dimensions, and the binary logistic regression finds that the effect is strongest for the socio-cultural issues, but also somewhat significant for political issues, which confirms the importance of populism in contemporary Western European democracy.

populism

perception

proximity model of voting