Party–voter linkages

The concept of party–voter linkage aims to identify how accountability and responsiveness between politicians and citizens come about. It denotes interlocking patterns of voter and party behavior, reflecting how these actors see each other and what they base their interactions on. This entry presents the main conceptualizations and subtypes of party–voter linkage developed in the literature, describes theoretical arguments and empirical findings with respect to the determinants of linkage patterns, and draws out how different types of linkage are evocative of—and might even be sustained by—different patterns of political communication. The analytical cachet of the linkage concept is that it allows comparing (political communication among) polities in very different developmental circumstances and studying the (role of political communication in the) co-evolution of voting behavior and party competition.