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. A second possible answer is that they will vote for the candidate who belongs to the party with which they identify. The idea is that there is something easier to evaluate which is the ideology of a party and that it is on the basis of this that the choice will be made. There is a particular requirement, which is that this way of explaining the voting behaviour of the electoral choice is very demanding in terms of the knowledge that voters may have about different positions, especially in a context where there are several parties and where the context of the political system and in particular the electoral system must be taken into account, because it may be easier for voters to know their positions when there are two parties, two candidates, than when there are, as in the Swiss context, many parties running. 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. In this approach, it is possible to say that the voter accepts the arguments of a certain party because he or she feels close to a party and not the opposite which would be what the economic model of the vote postulates, that is to say that we listen to what the party has to say and we will choose that party because we are convinced by what that party says. The psychological and socio-economic model are strongly opposed, offering two explanations that are difficult to reconcile, even though there have been efforts to try to combine them. - 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 . On the other hand, women tend to have less stable partisan identification, they change more often too. A set of theories has given some answers. The book's focus was sociological, mainly considering socio-demographic predictors, interpersonal influence, cross-pressures, and the effects of social groups, as well as analyzing voter activation, reinforcement, and conversion across the election year. In short, it is an explanatory model that emphasizes the role of political attitudes. 1948, Berelson et . There are two slightly different connotations. It is also possible to add that the weight of partisan identification varies from one voter to another. 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. There are different strategies that are studied in the literature. 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. There have been several phases of misalignment. In a phase of alignment, this would be the psycho-sociological model, i.e. This model predicts a convergence of party program positions around two distinct positions, there are two types of convergence. Models of Voting Behavior Models of Voting Behavior Dr. Bradley Best Asst. Radical approach regards class-based (structural) model as outdated and insufficient to explain . For Przeworski and Sprague, there may be another logic that is not one of maximizing the electorate in the short term but one of mobilizing the electorate in the medium and long term. We speak of cognitive preference between one's political preferences and the positions of the parties. There are also intermediate variables that relate to loyalties to a certain group or sense of belonging. The role of the media and campaigns simplifies information by summarizing it. The idea is to create a party that forges ideologies and partisan identities. 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 fit of a measurement model that differentiates between the various degrees of suicidal severity was verified. A rather subjective and almost sentimental citizen is placed at the centre of the analysis. 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. 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. 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. 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. The ideological space can be defined as a left-right ideological space but can also be defined more precisely in relation to certain issues. The advantage of the intensity directional model is that it goes in a more intense direction, i.e. There is an idea of interdependence between political supply and demand, between parties and voters, which is completely removed from other types of explanations. It is possible to create a typology that distinguishes between four approaches crossing two important and crucial elements: "is voting spatial? 0000011193 00000 n
There is also the economic vote, which is the role of the economy. Partisan attachment is at the centre of the graph influencing opinions on certain issues being discussed or the attitudes of certain candidates. It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. The theoretical account of voting behavior drew heavily upon the metaphor of a 'funnel of causality'. It is a paradigm that does not only explain from the macro-political point of view an electoral choice, but there is the other side of the coin which is to explain the choice that the parties make. What is interesting is that they try to relate this to personality traits such as being open, conscientious, extroverted, pleasant and neurotic. The initial formulation of the model is based on the Downs theory in An Economic Theory of Democracy publi en 1957. There is a kind of heterogeneity of voters. trailer
[14] They try to answer the question of how partisan identification is developing and how partisan identification has weakened because they look at the stability over time of partisan identification. Fiorina proposed the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates: how can voters know what the position of different parties is during an election campaign? However, this is empirically incorrect. The Logics of Electoral Politics. The Lazarsfeld model would link membership and voting. The influence of friends refers to opinion leaders and circles of friends. In their view, ideology is a means of predicting political positions on a significant number of issues and also a basis for credible and consistent engagement by the party or candidate that follows it. That is what is called the proximity vote, that is, having a preference over a policy. With regard to the limits, methodological individualism has often been evoked, saying that it is an exclusively micro-sociological perspective that neglects the effect of social structure. Three Models of Voting Behavior. 135150. If certain conditions are present, such as good democratic functioning within the party, activists will have the opportunity to exercise "voice" and influence positions. For example, a strongly conservative voter who votes Democratic may vote Republican because he or she feels more in tune with the party. Is partisan identification one-dimensional? An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. 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. This model of voting behavior sees the voter as thinking individual who is able to take a view on political issues and votes accordingly. Information is central to spatial theories, whereas in the psycho-sociological model, information is much less important. Property qualifications. the difference in the cost-benefit ratio that different parties give. Video transcript. 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. For Lazarsfeld, "a person thinks politically as he or she is socially". 43 17
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. Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. Some have criticized this model saying that it puts forward the one-dimensional image of the human being and politics, that is, that it is purely rational, hypercognitive in a way without taking into account sociological but also psychological elements. how does partisan identification develop? What is partisan identification? It is the state of the economy that will decide who will win the election or not. Here we see the key factors, namely electoral choice and, at the centre, the identification variable for a party, which depends on two types of factors, namely primary socialization and group membership. 0000000929 00000 n
The idea is that each voter can be represented by a point in a hypothetical space and this space can be a space with N dimensions and each dimension represents an election campaign issue, so that this point reflects his or her ideal set of policies, i.e. Moreover, there are analogies that are made even explicitly with the idea of the market. The system in the United States is bipartisan and the question asked was "Do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat or otherwise? New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. According to Fiorina, identification with a party is not necessarily the result of a long phase of socialization, but it is also the result of evaluations of a certain party, it is the fact of voting for that party that makes it possible to develop a partisan identification. In both The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) and Voting (Berelson et al., 1954), the authors For Iversen, distance is also important. One must assess the value of one's own participation and also assess the number of other citizens who will vote. 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. What interests us is that the idea of issue voting is fundamental to spatial theories of voting. While in the United States, several studies have shown that partisan identification is an important explanatory power on electoral choice, in other contexts this is less true. Other researchers have tried to propose combined models that combine different explanations. <]>>
There may be one that is at the centre, but there are also others that are discussed. These are some of the criticisms and limitations often made by proponents of other approaches. 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. 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. Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. startxref
in what is commonly known as the Columbia school of thought, posited that contextual factors influence the development . The image that an individual has of himself in this perspective is also the result of this identification. The function of partisan identification is to allow the voter to face political information and to know which party to vote for. The economic model makes predictions and tries to explain both the participation but also, and above all, the direction of the vote, which is the electoral choice. Contenu disponible en Franais Contenido disponible en espaol Contenuto disponibile in italiano, The distinction between the three main explanatory models of voting is often found. It is an answer that remains faithful to the postulates of Downs' theory and the proximity model. We are not ignoring the psychological model, which focuses on the identification people have with parties without looking at the parties. In other words, in this retrospective assessment, the economic situation of the country plays a crucial role. The second explanation refers to the directional model, i.e. Nevertheless, both models may be more or less correct. Downs already put ideology at the centre of his explanation. This model explains for Downs why we abstain. 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. We leave behind the idea of spatial theories that preferences are exogenous, that they are pre-existing and almost fixed. He wanted to look for one thing and found something else. 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. Parties do not try to maximize the vote, but create images of society, forge identities, mobilize commitments for the future. The extent to which the usefulness of voters' choices varies from candidate to candidate, but also from voter to voter. Understanding voters' behavior can explain how and why decisions were made either by public decision-makers, which has been a central concern for political scientists, [1] or by the electorate. So, voters evaluate the positions of the parties and from these positions, this party is a left-wing party and this party is a right-wing party. McClung Lee, A. There has been a lot of criticism that has allowed the idea of issue voting to develop in a rationalist context and models. The reference work is The People's Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. Fiorina's theory of retrospective voting is very simple. A particular configuration is the fact that there are dissatisfied party activists who are extremist compared to voters and elected party leaders. 0000000016 00000 n
This is linked to a decrease in class voting and a loss of traditional cleavages. This is related to its variation in space and time. This is an alternative way which is another answer to the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates. 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. 0000008661 00000 n
A unified theory of voting: directional and proximity spatial models. 0000002253 00000 n
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