Uniting supply and demand

Abstract Chapter 4 investigates whether market cosmopolitan voters abide by the widely-held ‘spatial’ assumption that voters tend to favour ideologically similar parties. To do so, I analyse the effect of voter-party distance on the propensity to vote for a given party, and whether this effect differs for market cosmopolitans. The results indicate that these voters indeed diverge significantly from a spatial logic of voting behaviour. As a result, social liberal parties win far fewer voters than one would expect if all voters favoured the most ideologically proximate party. I then assess whether this is the result of voters prioritizing either the economic or cultural dimension over the other, but find the effect of voter-party distance on each dimension to be weaker for market cosmopolitans. The chapter concludes with a description of social liberals as ‘great underachievers’, failing to win substantial electoral support despite favourable ideological positioning.