These authors have tried to say that the different explanatory theories of the vote can be more or less explanatory in the sense of having more or less importance of explanatory power depending on the phases in which one is in a process of alignment and misalignment. On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. the earlier Columbia studies, the Michigan election studies were based upon national survey samples. The limitations are the explanation of partisan identification, which is that the model has been criticized because it explains or does not explain too much about where partisan identification comes from except to say that it is the result of primary socialization. All of these factors and their relationships have to be taken into account, but at the centre is always the partisan attachment. It is a third explanation given by Przeworski and Sprague in their theory of partisan competition, also known as the theory of mobilization of the electorate. There are different strategies that are studied in the literature. We have seen that at Downs, the role of ideology is fundamental and that ideology could function as a kind of shortcut. In Personality traits and party identification over time published in 2014 by Bakker, Hopmann and Persson, the authors attempt to explain partisan identification. All parties that are in the same direction of the voter maximize the individual utility of that voter. We talk about the electoral market in the media or the electoral supply. Lazarsfeld was the first to study voting behaviour empirically with survey data, based on individual data, thus differentiating himself from early studies at the aggregate level of electoral geography. The degree of political sophistication, political knowledge, interest in politics varies from voter to voter. In this case, there may be other factors that can contribute to the voter choice; and all parties that are on the other side of the neutral point minimize the voter's utility, so the voter will not vote for that party all other things being equal. There are different strategies that are put in place by voters in a conscious or unconscious way to reduce these information costs, which are all the costs associated with the fact that in order to be able to evaluate the utility income given by one party rather than another, one has to go and see, listen, hear and understand what these parties are saying. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. This is more related to the retrospective vote. It is the state of the economy that will decide who will win the election or not. In the literature, spatial theories of voting are often seen as one of the main developments of the last thirty years which has been precisely the development of directional models since the proximity model dates back to the 1950s. Grofman's idea is to say that the voter discounts what the candidates say (discounting) based on the difference between current policy and what the party says it will do or promise. These two proximity models are opposed to two other models that are called directional models with Matthews' simple directional model but especially Rabinowitz's directional model with intensity. There is also a literature on whether certain parties have certain issues, which voters believe are the parties that are better able to deal with a certain issue. A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. There are other models that try to relate the multiplicity of issues to an underlying ideological space, i.e., instead of looking at specific issues, everything is brought back to a left-right dimension as a shortcut, for example, and there are other theories that consider the degree of ambiguity and clarity of the candidates' positions. These are voters who proceed by systematic voting. So all these elements help to explain the vote and must be taken into account in order to explain the vote. Although the models rely on the same data they make radically different predictions about the political future. It can be defined as lasting feelings of attachment that individuals develop towards a certain party. Finally, the results of this test are discussed and conclusions drawn. Lazarsfeld's book created this research paradigm. This diagram shows the process of misalignment with changes in the generational structure and changes in the social structure that create political misalignment. 0000000016 00000 n offers a behavior analysis of voting behavior. in what is commonly known as the Columbia school of thought, posited that contextual factors influence the development . As part of spatial theories of the vote, some theories consider the characteristics of candidates. Is partisan identification one-dimensional? party loyalties are freed from their social base and thus these party identifications are formed and crystallized. 0000005382 00000 n Hinich and Munger say the opposite, saying that on the basis of their idea of the left-right positioning of the parties, they somehow deduce what will be or what is the position of these parties on the different issues. There are also external factors that also need to be considered, such as the actions of the government, for example, voters are influenced by what the government has done. Voters who want their ballot mailed to an address that is not their address on record will be required to submit their request in writing. By finding something else, he shaped a dominant theory explaining the vote. A set of theories has given some answers. This has created a research paradigm which is perhaps the dominant paradigm today. does partisan identification work outside the United States? In Switzerland, the idea of an issue is particularly important because there is direct democracy, which is something that by definition is based on issues. We worked with a sample of 516 Argentinean adults, aged 18 to 75. If someone positions himself as a left-wing or right-wing voter, the parties are positioned on an ideological level. Voters vote for the candidate or party closest to their own position which is the proximity model. As for the intensity model, they manage to perceive something more, that is to say, not only a direction but an intensity through which a political party defends certain positions and goes in certain political directions. Within the ambit of such a more realistic, limited-rational model of human behavior, mitigation outcomes from . Three Models of Voting Behavior. The psycho-sociological model is intended as a development that wants to respond to this criticism. What is interesting is that they try to relate this to personality traits such as being open, conscientious, extroverted, pleasant and neurotic. Sometimes, indeed often, people combine the first two models incorporating the psycho-sociological model on the basis that the Michigan model is just an extension of the Columbia model that helps explain some things that the Columbia model cannot explain. Radical approach regards class-based (structural) model as outdated and insufficient to explain . Fiorina's theory of retrospective voting is very simple. Finally, some studies show that high levels of education lead to weaker attachments to parties. The organization is in crisis and no longer reflects our own needs. Proximity means the closeness of the voter's interests to the political proposals that are made with the parties. The distance must be assessed on the basis of what the current policy is. This electoral volatility, especially in a period of political misalignment, is becoming more and more important and is increasingly overshadowed by this type of explanation. . This theory is not about the formation of political preferences, they start from the idea that there are voters with certain political preferences and then these voters will look at what the offer is and will choose according to that offer. According to them, it is necessary to combine different types of explanations and in particular, in the electoral choice, the components related to proximity, leadership, and also the rather "intensity" leadership, all of which play a significant role in the positioning of candidates and parties. A corollary to this theory is that voters react more to the government than to the opposition because performance is evaluated and a certain state of the economy, for example, can be attributed to the performance of a government. There is little room for context even though there are more recent developments that try to put the voter's freedom of choice in context. One of the answers within spatial theories is based on this criticism that voters are not these cognitively strong beings as the original Downs theory presupposes. What is partisan identification? Finally, in a phase of misalignment, this would be the economic model, since there is a loss of these partisan loyalties, so these voters become more and more reactive to political events and therefore may be more rational in their decision-making process. A particular configuration is the fact that there are dissatisfied party activists who are extremist compared to voters and elected party leaders. It also proposes a reconceptualization of the concept of partisanship in order to integrate all relevant contributions of the . is premised on the assumption that elections connect the will of the people to the actions of government. Economic theories of voting explain both voter turnout (1) and electoral choice (2). Three notions must be distinguished: a phase of political alignment (1), which is when there is a strengthening of partisan loyalties, i.e. The Logics of Electoral Politics. This is called retrospective voting, which means that we are not looking at what the parties said in their platforms, but rather at what the parties did before. Voters try to maximize the usefulness of the vote, that is, they try to vote for the party that makes them more satisfied. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. Nevertheless, some of these spatial theories depart from this initial formulation. That is called the point of indifference. More specifically, the costs that the voter has to take into account according to the different parties and candidates must be evaluated, which is the partisan differential, i.e. Voters will vote for a party but that party is not necessarily the one with which they identify. There have been several phases of misalignment. 43 0 obj <> endobj Various explanations have been offered over the roughly 70-year history of voting behavior research, but two explanations in particular have garnered the most attention and generated the most debate in the literature on voting behavior. They try to elaborate a bit and find out empirically how this happens. The psycho-sociological model has its roots in Campell's work entitled The American Voter publi en 1960. endstream endobj 44 0 obj <> endobj 45 0 obj <> endobj 46 0 obj <>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text]>> endobj 47 0 obj <> endobj 48 0 obj <> endobj 49 0 obj <> endobj 50 0 obj <> endobj 51 0 obj <>stream A first criticism that has been made is that the simple proximity model gives us a misrepresentation of the psychology of voting. There are different types of costs that this model considers and that need to be taken into account and in particular two types of costs which are the costs of going to vote (1) but above all, there are the costs of information (2) which are the costs of obtaining this information since in this model which postulates to choose a party on the basis of an evaluation of the different propositions of information which is available, given these basic postulates, the transparency of information and therefore the costs of information are crucial. This jargon comes from this type of explanation. - What we're going to do in this video is start to think about voting behavior, and in particular, we're going to start classifying motivations for why someone votes for a particular candidate, and I'm going to introduce some terms that will impress your political science friends, but you'll see that they map two things that . Direction ("Who votes for whom?") On the other hand, preferences for candidates in power are best explained by the proximity model and the simple directional model. They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. The sociological model at the theoretical level emphasizes something important that rationalist and economic theories have largely overlooked, namely, the importance of the role of social context, i.e., voters are all in social contexts and therefore not only family context but also a whole host of other social contexts. There is no real electoral choice in this type of explanation, but it is based on our insertion in a social context. So there are four main ways. carried out by scholars at Columbia. This refers to the Michigan model, the psycho-sociological model. It is in this sense that the party identification model provides an answer to this criticism that the sociological model does not highlight the mechanisms that make a certain social inking influence a certain electoral choice. For some, this model overestimates the capabilities that voters have. We must also take into account other socializing agents that can socialize us and make us develop a form of partisan identification. Ideal point models assume that lawmakers and bills are represented as points in a latent space. the further a party moves in the same direction as the voter, the more likely it is to be chosen by that voter. In the retrospective model, some researchers have proposed an alternative way of viewing partisan identification as being determined by the position voters take on issues. On the other hand, women tend to have less stable partisan identification, they change more often too. The first answer is that basically, they vote according to their position, according to their social characteristics or according to their socialization, which refers to the sociological model. Cross-pressure theory entered political science via the analysis of voting behavior at Columbia University (Lazarsfeld et al. The idea is to create a party that forges ideologies and partisan identities. Parties do not try to maximize the vote, but create images of society, forge identities, mobilize commitments for the future. This is related to its variation in space and time. 1.2 Psychology and behavior 9 1.3 Voting behavior and action 13 1.4 Strategies of explanation 14 1.5 Research questions and outline 16 2 The empirical analysis of voting action 19 2.1 Introduction 21 2.2 The Wrzburg school 21 2.3 Lazarsfeld and the empirical analysis of action 23 2.4 The Columbia approach to voting action 26 The voters have to make that assessment and then decide which one brings more income and which one we will vote for. It is also possible to add that the weight of partisan identification varies from one voter to another. The reference work is The People's Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. Psychology and Voting Behavior In the same years that behaviorism (of various forms) came to dominate the In other words, there is the idea of utility maximization which is a key concept in rational choice theory, so the voter wants to maximize his utility and his utility is calculated according to the ratio between the cost and the benefit that can be obtained from the action, in this case going to vote (1) and going to vote for that party rather than this one (2). The first question is how to assess the position of the different parties and candidates, since we start from the idea of projecting voters' political preferences and party projections onto a map. The anomaly is that there is a majority of the electorate around the centre, but there are parties at the extremes that can even capture a large part of the preferences of the electorate. What explains historical variation in voter turnout? From the point of view of parties and candidates, the economic model and in particular the model that was proposed by Downs in 1957 and which predicts a convergence of a party position towards the centre. First, they summarize the literature that has been interested in explaining why voters vary or differ in the stability or strength of their partisan identification. At the basis of the reflection of directional models, and in particular of directional models with intensity, there is what is called symbolic politics. There is a direct link between social position and voting. In this representation, there are factors related to the cleavages, but also other factors that relate to the economic, political or social structure of a country being factors that are far removed from the electoral choice but that still exert an important effect in an indirect way the effect they have on other variables afterwards. The same can be said of the directional model with intensity. Comparative Political Studies, 27(2), 155189. The individual is subjectivity at the centre of the analysis. The second criterion is subjectivity, which is that voters calculate the costs and benefits of voting subjectively, so they make an assessment of the costs and benefits. 0000006260 00000 n For some, these are theories that offer reflections on the proper functioning of democracy, on presuppositions, the role of information or the role of citizens for the proper functioning of democracy and the role of parties. In other words, the homing tendency that is the explanation that the model postulates is much less true outside the United States. If you experience any difficulty accessing any part of this website, please call (386) 758-1026 or email kbanner@votecolumbiafl.gov for further assistance. In short, it is an explanatory model that emphasizes the role of political attitudes. However, he conceives the origin and function of partisan identification in a different way from what we have seen before. The concept and this theory was developed in the United States by political scientists and sociologists and initially applied to the American political system with an attachment to the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. This is called prospective voting because voters will listen to what the parties have to say and evaluate on the basis of that, that is, looking ahead. McElroy's connection to Vancouver didn't end there. Studies have shown that, for example, outside the United States, a much larger proportion of voters who change their vote also change their partisan identification. The initial formulation of the model is based on the Downs theory in An Economic Theory of Democracy publi en 1957. There has been the whole emergence of the rational actor, which is the vote in relation to issues, which is not something that comes simply from our affective identification with a party, but there is a whole reflection that the voter makes in terms of cost-benefit calculations. it is easier to change parties from one election to the next; a phase of realignment (3), which consists of creating new partisan loyalties. He wanted to see the role of the media in particular and also the role of opinion leaders and therefore, the influences that certain people can have in the electoral choice. Partisan attachment is at the centre of the graph influencing opinions on certain issues being discussed or the attitudes of certain candidates. Spatial theories of voting are nothing other than what we have seen so far with regard to the economic model of voting. Political scientists have defined several models of voter behavior in an attempt to explain the different motivations of voters: Rational choice theory describes someone voting in their best interest, supporting the candidate whose platform will give them the most favorable outcomes. According to Merril and Grofman, one cannot determine whether one pure model is superior to another because there are methodological and data limitations. This is an alternative way which is another answer to the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates. There are other variants or models that try to accommodate this complexity. This study presents an automated and accurate . It rejects the notion that voting behavior is largely determined by class affiliation or class socialization. Four questions can be asked in relation to this measure: For the first question, there are several studies on the fact that partisan identification is multi-dimensional and not just one-dimensional. Today, in the literature, we talk about the economic vote in a narrower and slightly different sense, namely that the electoral choice is strongly determined by the economic situation and by the policies that the government puts in place in particular to deal with situations of economic difficulty. There are a whole bunch of individual characteristics related to the fact that one is more of a systematic voter of something else. We are going to talk about the economic model. 0000002253 00000 n The curve instead of the simple proximity model, or obviously the maximization from the parties' point of view of electoral support, lies in the precise proximity between voters' preferences and the parties' political programs on certain issues, in this case this remains true but with a lag that is determined by discounting from a given status quo. There is a whole branch of the electoral literature that emphasizes government action as an essential factor in explaining the vote, and there is a contrast between a prospective vote, which is voting according to what the parties say they will do during the election campaign, and a retrospective vote, which is voting in relation to what has been done, particularly by the government, which has attributed the successes or failures of a policy. The further a party moves in the other direction, the less likely the voter will choose it because the utility function gradually decreases. Later, their analysis saw that party identification and attachment was the most common factor. This is the idea of collective action, since our own contribution to an election or vote changes with the number of other citizens who vote. In the spatial theories of the vote, we see the strategic link between a party's supply and a demand from voters or electors. One possible strategy to reduce costs is to base oneself on ideology. Political conditions as well as the influence of the media play an important role, all the more so nowadays as more and more political campaigns and the role of the media overlap. . This idea of an issue was not invented by the proponents of the economic model of voting but was already present in the psycho-sociological model. Another possible strategy is to rely on the judgment of others such as opinion leaders. 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