Do citizens use their vote to hold political representatives accountable for their voting behaviour in office? This question has been at the heart of much academic research. Ansolabehere and Jones ...Show moreDo citizens use their vote to hold political representatives accountable for their voting behaviour in office? This question has been at the heart of much academic research. Ansolabehere and Jones (2010) and Tausanovitch and Warshaw (2017) found that the political positions of members of the United States House of Representatives did indeed influence voting behaviour in congressional elections. This leaves us questioning whether these results will also hold in different electoral settings. To answer this question, this thesis will look into the relationship between the roll-call voting behaviour of United States senators in congress and the electoral behaviour of voters in the 2018 U.S. Senate Elections. It finds that higher agreement between senators and voters on a set of roll call votes taken in congress is correlated with higher odds of those voters casting their vote for the incumbent.Show less
Ideology and its origins are heavily studied and debated. Some claim socioeconomic status or the standing of a person in society is crucial and others say its influence on ideology is negligible....Show moreIdeology and its origins are heavily studied and debated. Some claim socioeconomic status or the standing of a person in society is crucial and others say its influence on ideology is negligible. This thesis overviews the debate about ideology and the impact socioeconomic status (SES) has on it. The argument is made that socioeconomic status is influential in the formation of left-right ideology and that higher socioeconomic status leads one to be more right-wing and vice versa. SES is measured by looking at educational attainment, income level and employment. The argument is evaluated in the Belgian case using data of the 2018 European Social Survey. Belgium was selected as it exemplifies the relationship between socioeconomic status and left-right ideology, with the citizens from each region, namely Flanders and Wallonia, having different average SES and diverging ideological views. The findings demonstrate that socioeconomic status impacts left-right ideology and that the weight of SES as a determinant of it should not be ignored. However, the results also indicate that religiosity and gender are important for SES to have its hypothesized impact and even with the inclusion of the control variables, the association between SES and left-right ideology was not as significant as expected.Show less
