A survey-based political typology: Evidence from Finland
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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en
Pages
75
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Abstract
Rapidly changing political trends create a need for easily interpretable information on voters and voter preferences to better address the electorate groups. Previous research has shown that belonging to a political party may not draw a whole picture of the electorate’s preferences, but that polarization is also likely to persist within the parties themselves. One of the investigation methods in the existing literature has been the creation of political typologies, i.e., establishing groups of people based on aligned political stances to analyse the electorate groups regardless of traditional party division. To further investigate the topic the existing research is expanded onto the Finnish political landscape. This study constructs a survey-based political typology of the Finnish electorate using multivariate data analysis by using a national political survey of 1004 respondents as a proxy for the Finnish electorate. The research objective is split into two main phases: first, it identifies and examines respondent groups based on their political views; second, it analyses how these groups relate to the respondents’ demographic features. The distinguished electorate groups are then statistically analysed and qualitatively synthesised. The results uncover two statistically stable clusters of respondents – the Neutrals and the Stancetakers. The Stancetakers indicate stronger political stances whereas the Neutrals namely remain close to neutrality. Belonging to each of the clusters is successfully linked to respondents’ party preferences and age. The findings indicate that supporters of the Finns Party and the National Coalition Party are 71,30% and 73,50% less likely to belong to the Stancetakers cluster, respectively. The supporters of the Left Alliance party, on the other hand, are found to be 259,10% more likely to belong to the Stancetakers cluster. In addition, with each year of age, the likelihood of belonging to the Stancetakers decreases by 1,30%.Description
Supervisor
Vilkkumaa, EevaThesis advisor
Vilkkumaa, EevaMalo, Pekka