$2.75. On the other hand, women tend to have less stable partisan identification, they change more often too. The distance must be assessed on the basis of what the current policy is. 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. Finally, they can vote for the candidate who is most likely in the voters' perception to change things in a way or in a way that leaves them the most satisfied. Rationalist theories and spatial models of the vote have had the very beneficial relationship of putting precisely the free choice of voters at the centre of analyses. 0000011193 00000 n
A particular configuration is the fact that there are dissatisfied party activists who are extremist compared to voters and elected party leaders. A distinction is often made between two types of voters and votes between the: There are these two types and a whole literature on the different types of euristics that can be set up. 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. The second explanation refers to the directional model, i.e. This paper examines two models used in survey research to explain voting behavior and finds that both models may be more or less correct. That is called the point of indifference. La dernire modification de cette page a t faite le 11 novembre 2020 00:26. An important factor is the role of political campaigns in influencing the vote. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. According to Fiorina, retrospective voting is that citizens' preferences depend not only on how close they are to the political position of a party or candidate, but also on their retrospective assessment of the performance of the ruling party or candidate. Voters who rely on strong partisan identification do not need to go and do systematic voting or take one of the shortcuts. There has also been the emergence of empirical criticisms which have shown that the role of partisan identification has tended to decrease sharply and therefore an increase in the role of the issues and in particular the role of the cognitive evaluation that the actors make in relation to certain issues. There was a whole series of critics who said that if it's something rational, there's a problem with the way democracy works. Voters are more interested in political results than in political programmes, and the choice is also made from this perspective. 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. The government is blamed for the poor state of the economy. Hirschman contrasts the "exit" strategy with the "voice" strategy, which is based on what he calls "loyalty", which is that one can choose not to leave but to make the organization change, to restore the balance between one's own aspirations and what the organization can offer. Moreover, there are analogies that are made even explicitly with the idea of the market. The directional model also provides some answers to this criticism. Of course, there have been attempts to assess the explanatory power of directional models, but according to these researchers, these spatial models were designed to be purely theoretical in order to highlight on a purely theoretical level what motivations voters may have for their electoral choice. 3105. Since the idea is to calculate the costs and benefits of voting for one party rather than the other, therefore, each party brings us some utility income. In this perspective, voting is essentially a question of attachment, identity and loyalty to a party, whereas in the rationalist approach it is mainly a question of interest, cognition and rational reading of one's own needs and the adequacy of different political offers to one's needs. The psycho-sociological model says that it is because this inking allows identification with a party which in turn influences political attitudes and therefore predispositions with regard to a given object, with regard to the candidate or the party, and this is what ultimately influences the vote. The presupposition is that voter preferences are not exogenous but are endogenous - they change within the framework of an electoral process. Numbers abound, since we have seen that, in the end, both models systematically have a significant effect. Property qualifications. The psycho-sociological model initiated the national election studies and created a research paradigm that remains one of the two dominant research paradigms today and ultimately contributed to the creation of electoral psychology. offers a behavior analysis of voting behavior. The 'funnel of causality' provided a convenient framework within which to pursue both a comprehensive program of electoral accounting and a more selective strategy of explanation. 0000000636 00000 n
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. The initial formulation of the model is based on the Downs theory in An Economic Theory of Democracy publi en 1957. JSTOR. Voters vote for the candidate or party closest to their own position which is the proximity model. There is an opposite reasoning. %PDF-1.3
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Directional model with intensity: Rabinowitz, Four possible answers to the question of how voters decide to vote, Unified Voting Model: Merrill and Grofman, Responses to criticisms of the proximity model, Partisan Competition Theory: Przeworski and Sprague, Relationship between voting explanatory models and realignment cycle. Much of the work in electoral behaviour draws on this thinking. This is the basic motivation for the development of these directional models. We are looking at the interaction. On the basis of this analysis a behavioral model is constructed, which is then tested on data from a Dutch election survey. 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. They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. It is interesting to know that Lazarsfeld, when he began his studies with survey data, especially in an electoral district in New York State, was looking for something other than the role of social factors. Within the ambit of such a more realistic, limited-rational model of human behavior, mitigation outcomes from . 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. These are models that should make us attentive to the different motivations that voters may or may not have to make in making an electoral choice. In this model, there is a region of acceptability of positional extremism which is a region outside of which the intensity of the positions or the direction shown by a party cannot go because if it goes beyond that region, the voter will no longer choose that party. The idea is that you stay loyal and you do "voice", that is, act to make things change. The idea of the directional model, and this applies to both the simple directional model and the intensity directional model, is that voters basically cannot clearly perceive the different positions of political parties or candidates on a specific issue. and voters who choose to use euristic shortcuts to solve the information problem. The basic assumptions of the economic model of the vote are threefold: selfishness, which is the fact that voters act according to their individual interests and not according to their sense of belonging to a group or their attachment to a party. Later, their analysis saw that party identification and attachment was the most common factor. xxxiii, 178. On the other hand, to explain the electoral choice, we must take into account factors that are very far from the vote theoretically, but we must also take into account the fact that there are factors that are no longer close to the electoral choice during a vote or an election. 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. There are a whole bunch of individual characteristics related to the fact that one is more of a systematic voter of something else. We often talk about economic theory of the vote in the broadest sense in order to designate a rationalist theory based on rational choice theory and spatial theories of the vote. This identification is seen as contributing to an individual's self-image. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Candidate choices are made towards parties or candidates who are going in the same direction as the voter, this being understood as the voters' political preferences on a given issue. (Second edition.) Inking and the role of socialization cause individuals to form a certain partisan identification that produces certain types of political attitudes. We have seen that at Downs, the role of ideology is fundamental and that ideology could function as a kind of shortcut. One must assess the value of one's own participation and also assess the number of other citizens who will vote. Distance is understood in the sense of the proximity model for whom voter preference and party position is also important. This is the idea that gave rise to the development of directional models, which is that, according to Downs and those who have followed him, because there is transparency of information, voters can very well see what the political platforms of the parties or candidates are. The idea is that it is in circles of interpersonal relations even if more modern theories of opinion leaders look at actors outside the personal circle. In the study of electoral behaviour, there is a simple distinction between what is called prospective voting and retrospective voting. startxref
According to Merril and Grofman, one cannot determine whether one pure model is superior to another because there are methodological and data limitations. It can be defined as lasting feelings of attachment that individuals develop towards a certain party. Three elements should be noted. There are certain types of factors that influence other types of factors and that in turn influence other types of factors and that ultimately help explain the idea of the causal funnel of electoral choice. 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. 5. From the perspective of the issue vote, there are four main ways to explain how and why voters are going to vote a certain way and why parties are going to position themselves. There are three actors at play in this theory: there are voters, candidates, and an intermediate group represented by activists who are in fact voters who become activists going to exercise "voice". All parties that are in the same direction of the voter maximize the individual utility of that voter. In order to explain this anomaly, another explanation beside the curvilinear explanation beside the directional theories of the vote, a third possibility to explain this would be to say that there are some parties that abandon the idea of maximizing the vote or electoral support in order to mobilize this electorate and for this we have to go to extremes. On the other hand, the focus is on the political goals of the voters, whereas the psychological model puts a little more emphasis on the social use of the vote. There are other cleavages that cut across Republicans and Democrats that should be taken into account to explain the pattern. Fiorina reverses the question, in fact, partisan identification can result from something else and it also produces electoral choices. Although the models rely on the same data they make radically different predictions about the political future. This is central to spatial theories of voting, that is, voters vote or will vote for the candidate or party that is closest to their own positions. When you vote, you are taking your personal time and effort to advance the collective good, without any guarantee of personal rewardthe very heart of what it means to be altruistic. Cross-pressure theory entered political science via the analysis of voting behavior at Columbia University (Lazarsfeld et al. So all these elements help to explain the vote and must be taken into account in order to explain the vote. There are two variations. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational choice theory , stressing the continuity and theoretical complementarity between them. HUr0c:*+ $ifrh
b98ih+I?v1q7q>. In other words, social, spatial or group membership largely determines individual political actions. Lazarsfeld was interested in this and simply, empirically, he found that these other factors had less explanatory weight than the factors related to political predisposition and therefore to this social inking. Comparative Political Studies, 27(2), 155189. This table shows that for quite some time now there has been a strong decline in partisan identification. The psycho-sociological model also developed a measure called the partisan identification index, since this model wanted to be an empirical model with behaviourism and the idea of studying individual behaviours empirically with the development of national election studies and survey data to try to measure the partisan identification index. the earlier Columbia studies, the Michigan election studies were based upon national survey samples. Several studies show that the impact of partisan identification varies greatly from one context to another. This model relies heavily on the ability of voters to assess and calculate their own interests and all the costs associated with the action of going to the polls. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. Iversena proposed a way of classifying the different explanatory theories of voting that allow to add a very important element that has been neglected until now. Linked to this, it is important to look at individual data empirically as well. From the parties' perspective, this model makes different predictions than the simple proximity model, which made a prediction of convergence of a centripetal force with respect to party positioning. the translation of personal preference into a voluntary action designed to influence public policy 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. it takes a political position that evokes the idea of symbolic politics in a more salient way. 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. With regard to the question of how partisan identification develops, the psycho-sociological model emphasizes the role of the family and thus of primary socialization, but several critics have shown that secondary socialization also plays a role. If we take into account Przeworski and Sprague's idea that preferences are exogenous and not endogenous, it is possible to create a typology as Iversen did. 0000006260 00000 n
The scientific study of voting behavior is marked by three major research schools: the sociological model, often identified as School of Columbia, with the main reference in Applied Bureau of Social Research of Columbia University, whose work begins with the publication of the book The Peoples Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944) and 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. We are not ignoring the psychological model, which focuses on the identification people have with parties without looking at the parties. The law of curvilinear disparity takes up this distinction. 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. Some parties have short-term strategies for maximizing voting and others have long-term strategies for social mobilization. The psycho-sociological model, also known as the Michigan model, can be represented graphically or schematically. 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. It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. The scientific study of voting behavior is marked by three major research schools: the sociological model, often identified as School of Columbia, with the main reference in Applied Bureau of Social Research of Columbia University, whose work begins with the publication of the book The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944) 59 0 obj
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It is a very detailed literature today. On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. 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 Economic theories of voting explain both voter turnout (1) and electoral choice (2). Voters try to maximize their individual utility. In other words, there is a social type variable, a cultural type variable and a spatial type variable. 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