This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational. 0000000866 00000 n Partisan identification becomes stronger over time. Most voters have a sense of allegiance to a party that is inherited through the family. What we are interested in is on the demand side, how can we explain voters' electoral choice. Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. social determinism There are also studies that show that the more educated change less often from one party to another. These explanations are known as the Columbia Model and the Michigan Model, and describing these two . Prospective voting is the one that has been postulated by Downs and by all other researchers who work in proximity models but also in two-way models. Regarding the causal ambiguity, there are also critics who say that this approach is very strongly correlational in the sense that it looks for correlations between certain social variables and electoral choices, but the approach does not explain why this variable approach really has a role and therefore what are the causal mechanisms that lead from insertion, positions, social predispositions to electoral choice. In other words, they are voters who are not prepared to pay all these costs and therefore want to reduce or improve the cost-benefit ratio which is the basis of this electoral choice by reducing the costs and the benefit will remain unchanged. Voting is an act of altruism. Thus, voters find it easier to assess performance than declared plans during an election campaign. 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. Ideology is a means of predicting and inferring political positions during an election campaign. HUr0c:*+ $ifrh b98ih+I?v1q7q>. This approach has often been criticized as a static approach since socio-economic or even socio-demographic characteristics do not change in the short term and yet the vote increasingly changes in the short term, what is called in electoral volatility, i.e. There are several theories emphasizing different factors which may shape citizens' voting behavior. The idea is that the extremist attitudes of those former voters who become party activists push strategic positioning in a direction that takes them away from their constituents. Finally, there is an instrumental approach to information and voting. In the sociological and psycho-sociological model, there was no place for ideology, that's another thing that counts, on the other hand, in economic theories, spatial theories and Downs' theory of the economic vote, ideology is important. "i.e., if it is proximity, it is 'yes', otherwise it is 'no' and therefore directional; 'are the preferences of the actors exogenous? 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. The theoretical account of voting behavior drew heavily upon the metaphor of a 'funnel of causality'. There are three possible answers: May's Law of Curvilinear Disparity is an answer that tries to stay within the logic of the proximity model and to account for this empirical anomaly, but with the idea that it is distance and proximity that count. it takes a political position that evokes the idea of symbolic politics in a more salient way. A representative democracy. 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. 0000000636 00000 n - 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 . For Lazarsfeld, we think politically how we are socially, there is not really the idea of electoral choice. Much of the work in electoral behaviour draws on this thinking. 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. Others have criticized this analogy between the economic market and the political market as being a bit simplistic, saying that, basically, the consequences of buying a consumer product have a certain number of consequences, but they are much more limited compared to what buying a vote can have in terms of choosing a party. When we talk about the Downs model, we also talk about the proximity model, which is the idea of a rational economic mode based on utility maximization. These spatial theories start from the assumption that there is a voter or voters who have political preferences with respect to certain issues, but completely discard the explanation of how these preferences are formed. 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. They may rely less on their partisan loyalties, so their vote may be explained less by their social base and more by their choice among an offer that is the economic model. In the Michigan model, the idea of stakes was already present but was somewhat underdeveloped, and this perspective on the role of stakes in the psychosocial model lent itself to both theoretical and empirical criticism from proponents of rationalist models. 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. This model of voting behavior sees the voter as thinking individual who is able to take a view on political issues and votes accordingly. There is the idea of the interaction between a political demand and a political offer proposed by the different candidates during an election or a vote. These theories are called spatial theories of the vote because they are projected. 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. The voters have to make that assessment and then decide which one brings more income and which one we will vote for. It is necessary to distinguish between two types of voters and to make a distinction between a literature that has become increasingly important in recent years on opinion formation in an election or voting context. 5. 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. There is in fact the idea that the choices and preferences of voters in the centre will cause the parties, since they are aiming in this model, to try to maximize their electoral support. In other words, a directional element is introduced into the proximity model. It is possible to create a typology that distinguishes between four approaches crossing two important and crucial elements: "is voting spatial? 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 have been attempts to address this anomaly. The explanatory factors and aspects highlighted by these different models are always taken into account. On the basis of this analysis a behavioral model is constructed, which is then tested on data from a Dutch election survey. It can be defined as lasting feelings of attachment that individuals develop towards a certain party. does partisan identification work outside the United States? Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. 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. The idea is that this table is the Downs-Hirschman model that would have been made in order to summarize the different responses to the anomaly we have been talking about. Parties do not try to maximize the vote, but create images of society, forge identities, mobilize commitments for the future. 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. Among these bridges, one of the first bridges between the psycho-sociological voting theory and the rationalist theories was made by Fiorina because he considers partisan identification to be an important element in explaining electoral choice. 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. So there are four main ways. party loyalties are freed from their social base and thus these party identifications are formed and crystallized. 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. The degree of political sophistication, political knowledge, interest in politics varies from voter to voter. Several studies have shown that the very fact of voting for a party contributes to the development of a certain identification for that party. 0 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. 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. The role of the media and campaigns simplifies information by summarizing it. What is interesting is that they try to relate this to personality traits such as being open, conscientious, extroverted, pleasant and neurotic. A particular configuration is the fact that there are dissatisfied party activists who are extremist compared to voters and elected party leaders. Three elements should be noted. 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. The image that an individual has of himself in this perspective is also the result of this identification. 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. The fit of a measurement model that differentiates between the various degrees of suicidal severity was verified. It also proposes a reconceptualization of the concept of partisanship in order to integrate all relevant contributions of the . 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. A second possible answer is that they will vote for the candidate who belongs to the party with which they identify. 0000007835 00000 n If voters, who prefer more extreme options, no longer find these options within the party they voted for, then they will look elsewhere and vote for another party. Four questions around partisan identification. It is an explanation that is completely outside the logic of proximity and the spatial logic of voting. 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. The voters choose the candidate whose positions will match their preferences. In directional models with intensity, there are models that try to show how the salience of different issues changes from one group to another, from one social group to another, or from one candidate and one party to another. 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. 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. His conclusion is that the vote is explained both by elements of leadership, partly by an element of proximity and distance, but also, for some parties, it must also be taken into account that there are parties that act according to a mobilization of the electorate according to the approach of Przeworski and Sprague. Fiorina reverses the question, in fact, partisan identification can result from something else and it also produces electoral choices. He wanted to look for one thing and found something else. There are other variants or models that try to accommodate this complexity. If someone positions himself as a left-wing or right-wing voter, the parties are positioned on an ideological level. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. We are looking at the interaction. 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. Voters are more interested in political results than in political programmes, and the choice is also made from this perspective. It is possible to determine direction based on the "neutral point" which is the point in the middle, or it is also possible to determine direction from the "status quo". The reference work is The Peoples Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. Three Models of Voting Behavior. Bakker, B. N., Hopmann, D. N., & Persson, M. (2014). 135150. It is also possible to add that the weight of partisan identification varies from one voter to another. One possible strategy to reduce costs is to base oneself on ideology. Inking and the role of socialization cause individuals to form a certain partisan identification that produces certain types of political attitudes. how does partisan identification develop? So there is an overestimation in this model with respect to capacity. This is called the proximity model. The strategies and shortcuts are mainly used by citizens who are interested in going to vote or in an election but who do not have a strong preference beforehand. Suicide is a global public health problem. In other words, the voters' political preferences on different issues, in other words, in this type of theorizing, they know very well what they want, and what is more, these positions are very fixed and present when the voter is going to have to vote. On the other hand, this is true for the directional model; they manage to perceive a policy direction. For most theories, and in particular Matthews' Simple Directional Model theory, the neutral point determines direction. It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. In the spatial theories of the vote, we see the strategic link between a party's supply and a demand from voters or electors. An important factor is the role of political campaigns in influencing the vote. 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. those who inquire: they are willing to pay these costs. 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. changes in voting behaviour from one election to the next. It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. Voters try to maximize their individual utility. 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. What is partisan identification? The main explanatory factors have been sought in socio-economic status and socio-demographic variables such as "age," "gender," and "education. maximum proximity, as the party, his or her utility increases, and when the voter moves away from the party, his or her utility decreases. 0000009473 00000 n The idea is that voters are not really able to really evaluate in a forward-looking way the different positions of the parties. The government is blamed for the poor state of the economy. 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. The psycho-sociological model has its roots in Campell's work entitled The American Voter publi en 1960. The answer to this second question will allow us to differentiate between proximity models and directional models because these two subsets of the spatial theories of voting give diametrically opposite answers to this question. Voters calculate the cost of voting. 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. How to assess the position of different parties and candidates. As far as the psycho-sociological model is concerned, it has the merit of challenging the classical theory of democracy which puts the role on the rational actor. The cause-and-effect relationship is reversed, according to some who argue that this is a problem at the empirical level when we want to study the effect of partisan identification on electoral choice because there is a problem of endogeneity; we no longer know what explains what. We worked with a sample of 516 Argentinean adults, aged 18 to 75. On the basis of this, we can know. The third criterion is rationality, which is that based on the theory of rational choice, voters mobilize the limited means at their disposal to achieve their goals, so they will choose the alternative among the political offer that costs them the least and brings them the greatest possible benefit. We end up with a configuration where there is an electorate that is at the centre, there are party activists who are exercising the "voice" and who have access to the extreme, and there are party leaderships that are in between. This is related to its variation in space and time. 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. 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. Ideology is to be understood as a way of simplifying our world in relation to the problem of information. and voters who choose to use euristic shortcuts to solve the information problem. There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. In other words, they propose something quite ecumenical that combines directional and proximity models. The Logics of Electoral Politics. Proximity models will give certain proximity related answers and the other more recent models offer an alternative answer based on certain criticisms. 0000010337 00000 n Voting requires voters to know the candidates' positions on issues, but when there are several candidates or several parties, it is not very easy for some voters in particular. Reinforcement over time since adult voters increasingly rely on this partisan identification to vote and to face the problems of information, namely partisan identification seen as a way of solving a problem that all voters have, which is how to form an idea and deal with the abundance and complexity of the information that comes to us from, for example, the media, political campaigns or others in relation to the political offer. 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. The idea of intensity can also be seen as the idea that there are certain issues, that there are certain political positions that put forward symbols and some of these symbols evoke making these two issues more visible to voters but in the sense of making voters say that this particular party is going in that direction and with a high intensity. The second explanation refers to the directional model, i.e. 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. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. 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. The organization is in crisis and no longer reflects our own needs. They try to elaborate a bit and find out empirically how this happens. the maximum utility is reached at the line level. Lazarsfeld's book created this research paradigm. There is a small bridge that is made between these two theories with Fiorina on the one hand and the Michigan model of another party that puts the concept of partisan identification at the centre and that conceives of this concept in a very different way, especially with regard to its origin. 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. Professor Political Science Buena Vista University Two basic concerns: Turnout ("Who votes?") Key questions: What are the characteristics and attitudes of voters vs. nonvoters? In other words, the homing tendency that is the explanation that the model postulates is much less true outside the United States. This model of directional proximity with intensity illustrates what is called symbolic politics which is related to the problem of information. There has been a lot of criticism that has allowed the idea of issue voting to develop in a rationalist context and models.

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