Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Political Science
Advisor
Till Weber
Committee Members
Keena Lipsitz
Susan Woodward
David Johnson
Elias Dinas
Subject Categories
Comparative Politics
Keywords
Perceptions, Political Parties, Legacies, Left-Right, Protests, Extremism
Abstract
This dissertation studies why citizens, when presented with the same political information, perceive different ideological realities. Across four empirical chapters, I show that voter perceptions of political parties are not passive reflections of objective platforms but are actively constructed through systematic heuristics operating at four levels. First, at the micro level, I show that ideological extremism itself functions as a perceptual filter: extreme voters, contrary to the predictions of rationalization theories, perceive opposing parties as substantially more extreme than moderate voters do. Using cross-national survey data covering more than 1.3 million respondent-party perceptions, I show that this ``extremism effect'' is robust across countries, time periods, and ideological dimensions. Second, at the dynamic level, I leverage a quasi-natural experiment based on the 2011 15-M anti-austerity protests in Spain to show that mass mobilization can rapidly shape how citizens perceive incumbent parties on the left-right dimension, opening perceived empty spaces that new political actors may later occupy. Third, to understand how partisans rationalize their attachments, I use multi-wave panels from the United Kingdom and Spain to demonstrate that loyal partisans accept ideological dissonance from their own party but rationalize the movements and emergence of rival parties. Fourth, at the macro-structural level, I combine a new dataset on party origins with large-N survey data to show that authoritarian legacies serve as an asymmetric heuristic: voters perceive left-wing successor parties as more extreme than their objective platforms, while right-wing successor parties are largely unaffected.
Recommended Citation
Padilla, Javier, "The Perceptual Gap: How Voters See the Ideological World" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6774
