The Clarity of Policy Alternatives, Left–Right and the European Parliament Vote in 2004

The importance of the left–right divide for party choice is well established, both for legislative and European Parliament (EP) elections. However, the conditions under which left–right self‐placement becomes more or less important in explaining the vote in both legislative and EP elections are clearly understudied. The article uses the 2004 EP elections as a laboratory to understand if there are indeed systematic differences between political systems’ characteristics that might explain variation in terms of the strength of the relationship between left–right self‐placement and the vote. Using the survey data from the European Election Study 2004 (twenty‐one EU member states), the paper has two goals. First, to examine whether citizens’ left–right self‐placement has a different impact on the vote in different types of democratic regime, defined in terms of the contrast between consolidating and long‐established democracies. Secondly, to examine whether this contrast resists the introduction of controls for three other factors hypothesized to make a difference in the extent to which left–right orientations have a greater influence on the vote: the permissiveness of electoral system; the clarity of policy alternatives provided by the party system; and the particular type of party alignments along both the left–right and anti‐/pro‐integration scales that tend to characterize each country. Our findings corroborate that (the 2004 EP) elections do seem to be about choosing parties in terms of left–right orientations to a considerable extent. Furthermore, we found that the usefulness of left–right orientations as cues to the vote seems to be contingent upon a major contextual factor: greater levels of clarity of the policy alternatives provided by the party system render citizens’ left–right self‐placement more consequential for their EP vote. Finally, we found that left–right orientations may not be equally useful in consolidating and in the remaining established democracies.