Christoffer H. Dausgaard

PhD Candidate in Political Science

University of Copenhagen

I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.

I study the behavior and psychology of voters focusing on the role of group identities and retrospective voting. How do voters evaluate government performance when policies affect people differently? How do voters’ group identities guide their interpretations of policy and incumbent performance? To examine these questions, I draw on a combination of experiments, text-as-data methods, and causal inference designs for observational data.

My first paper, conditionally accepted in the American Journal of Political Science, argues that voters engage in group-based retrospective voting, holding incumbents accountable for the economic performance of their social groups. In my second paper, revised and resubmitted to the Journal of Politics, I and my co-author, Frederik Hjorth, examine how voters’ perceptions of group-party linkages are shaped by rhetorical group appeals using a fine-tuned language model to classify party elite communication over three decades.

Beyond my dissertation research, I work on related topics in political behavior. In one paper, co-authored with Frederik Hjorth and Martin Vinæs, we study the effects of mainstream party accommodation of the radical right. In another, co-authored with Daniel Cruz, we study how Latin American legislators’ support for democracy is shaped by their own party’s access to power. Finally, in a paper co-authored with Greg Eady, we study how damaging information about politicians can increase partisans’ overall political cynicism rather than fostering accountability.

Besides work, I spend most of my time endlessly listening to podcasts on Danish and American politics, playing music with friends, embarking on large baking projects, and social and cultural activities in Copenhagen, where I live with my partner, Signe.

Current Research

Group Appeals and the Running Tally of Party Reputations

Party reputations are an essential feature of party competition. Earlier scholarship identifies parties’ connections to social groups as an important constituent component of party reputations, and tends to see party reputations as stable in the short run. We challenge this view, arguing that group appeals, i.e. valenced references to social groups, can in fact lead to short-run changes in party-group linkages. Using an automated approach, we measure group appeals in party speech in Britain over 3 decades and link it to survey data. We find that citizens keep ‘running tallies’ of group appeals and frequently update perceptions of their group linkages in response to group appeals by party elites.

Christoffer H. Dausgaard, Frederik Hjorth

When the Personal Is Political: Do Voters Link Pocketbook Changes to Policy?

Retrospective voting is one of the most important mechanisms for democratic control. However, it hinges on voters’ ability to attribute economic changes to government decisions. Existing scholarship disagrees as to whether retrospection is ‘blind’, but has focused mostly on voters’ responses to politically ‘irrelevant events’ like tornadoes and shark attacks. Such events, I argue, may not say much about voters’ ability to attribute responsibility for the bulk of their everyday economic experience. To examine this question, I use a microsimulation model on survey panel data to decompose voters’ pocketbook changes into a policy-induced and a non-political component. By linking this to various survey measures, I track how these pocketbook components relate to economic evaluations and vote intention over time.

Christoffer H. Dausgaard

Who (Else) Benefits? Group-Based Responses to Targeted Policies

Why do voters reward governments for targeted benefits? The obvious explanation is pocketbook motivations, i.e. the tendency to hold incumbents accountable for personal welfare changes. But in most cases, this behavior is equally consistent with a group-based response, i.e. voters rewarding the government for targeting their in-group. I test and find support for this alternative explanation in three survey experiments in Denmark and the US, suggesting that the effect is highly heterogeneous depending on group identity strength.

Christoffer H. Dausgaard

You and Whose Economy? Rediscovering Group-Based Retrospection

How do voters judge incumbents for unequal economic developments? In this paper, I argue that voters engage in group-based retrospection, i.e. hold the government accountable for economic conditions of their in-groups, especially compared to national growth. I find support for the psychological mechanism in three experiments in Denmark and the US across a wide range of social in-groups.

Christoffer H. Dausgaard

Voters' sympathies with social groups. An overlooked factor behind party choice

In this chapter, we examine voters’ sympathies with seven key groups - the young and the elderly; the working class and the upper middle class; urban and non-urban dwellers; and Muslims - and how these sympathies are related to party choice. We find that voters’ attitudes towards the groups affect their party choice, such that parties associated with a given group receive more votes among those who sympathise with the group. This points to group sympathies as a neglected explanation in electoral research, which has long focused on objective group memberships. Despite the diminished importance of group memberships, our analyses show that social groups still play an important role in Danish voter behaviour.

Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard, Rune Stubager