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". A set of theories has given some answers. On the other hand, this is true for the directional model; they manage to perceive a policy direction. On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. 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. It is easier to look at what someone has done than to evaluate the promises they made. 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. 0000000016 00000 n 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. 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. 3105. The image that an individual has of himself in this perspective is also the result of this identification. it is an element of direction and not an element of distance or proximity that counts. Basic Idea What you are vote choice ; Key foundational studies ; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet (1944) The Peoples Choice Berelson, Lazarsfeld, McPhee (1954) Voting 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. trailer 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. 43 0 obj <> endobj Elections and voters: a comparative introduction. 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. That is called the point of indifference. Due to the internet of behaviors (IoBe) information, user-specific recommendations can be customized in various fields such as trade, health, economy, law, and entertainment. and voters who choose to use euristic shortcuts to solve the information problem. 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. For many, voting is a civic duty. The relationship between partisan identification and voting is that the model postulates that partisan identification is the explanatory variable and that voting for the electoral choice is the explained variable. We want to know how and why a voter will vote for a certain party. 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. The theoretical account of voting behavior drew heavily upon the metaphor of a 'funnel of causality'. In the study of electoral behaviour, there is a simple distinction between what is called prospective voting and retrospective voting. It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. a new model of legislative behavior that captures when and how lawmakers vote differently than expected. Linked to this, it is important to look at individual data empirically as well. 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. On the basis of this, we can know. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. Suicide is a global public health problem. The utility function of this model is modified compared to the simple model, i.e. Numbers abound, since we have seen that, in the end, both models systematically have a significant effect. Lazarsfeld's book created this research paradigm. The directional model also provides some answers to this criticism. Therefore, they cannot really situate where the different parties stand. Has the partisan identification weakened? Proximity means the closeness of the voter's interests to the political proposals that are made with the parties. Distance must be taken into account and the idea of mobilizing the electorate must be taken into account. Voters assess the utility income of parties and candidates. For Fiorina, the retrospective vote is the fact that current policy is fundamental, whereas in the prospective vote it is less so. The importance of symbolic politics is especially capitalized on by the intensity directional models. The presupposition is that voter preferences are not exogenous but are endogenous - they change within the framework of an electoral process. emotional ties between voters and parties; a phase of political misalignment (2), which may be the one we are currently in in Europe since the economic crisis, which is a weakening of partisan loyalties resulting in increased electoral volatility, i.e. 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. 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. In other words, if we know the partisan identification of voters, we can make a prediction about what the normal vote will be, which is a vote that is not or should not be influenced by other situational factors in a given electorate. La dernire modification de cette page a t faite le 11 novembre 2020 00:26. Finally, there is an instrumental approach to information and voting. 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) Most voters have a sense of allegiance to a party that is inherited through the family. 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. 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. 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. 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. Thus, they were well suited not only to develop and test theories of voting behavior, but also to provide an historical record of the considerations shaping the outcomes of specific national elections. However, this is empirically incorrect. Often, in the literature, the sociological and psycho-sociological model fall into the same category, with a kind of binary distinction between the theories that emphasize social, belonging and identification on the one hand, and then the rationalist and economic theories of the vote, which are the economic theories of the vote that focus instead on the role of political issues, choices and cost-benefit calculations. A representative democracy. 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. In general, they are politically more sophisticated and better educated; those who rely on the opinion of the media and opinion leaders; that of the law of curvilinear disparity proposed by May; the directional model of Rabinowitz and Matthews; Przeworski and Sprague's mobilization of the electorate. It is a very detailed literature today. For Lazarsfeld, "a person thinks politically as he or she is socially". There are several responses to criticisms of the proximity model. It is a theory that is made in the interaction between supply and demand, that is, between parties offering something and voters asking for something. Ideal point models assume that lawmakers and bills are represented as points in a latent space. is premised on the assumption that elections connect the will of the people to the actions of government. Voting is an instrument that serves us to achieve an objective. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. 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. Ideology can also be in relation to another dimension, for example between egalitarian and libertarian ideology. McElroy's connection to Vancouver didn't end there. 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. Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. In the Downs-Hirschman model, the vote is spatial in the sense of proximity and preferences are exogenous; on the other hand, in the directional theories of Rabinovirz and Macdonal in particular, we remain in the idea of the exogeneity of preferences but the vote is not spatial in the sense of proximity. For Fiorina the voter does not do that, he will rather look at what has happened, he will also look at the state of affairs in a country, hence the importance of the economic vote in the narrower sense of the word. 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. _____ were the first widespread barriers to the franchise to be eliminated. the earlier Columbia studies, the Michigan election studies were based upon national survey samples. 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. Simply, the voter is going to evaluate his own interest, his utility income from the different parties and will vote for the party that is closest to his interests. 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, 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. 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. 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. The vote is seen here as an instrument, that is to say, there is the idea of an instrumental vote and not an expressive one. Three Models of Voting Behavior. Downs already put ideology at the centre of his explanation. That is what is called the proximity vote, that is, having a preference over a policy. Thus, voters will vote for candidates who are in the direction (1) and who are going in that direction in the most intense way (2), that is, who propose policies going in that direction in the strongest and most intense way. 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. 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. 135150. There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. These explanations are known as the Columbia Model and the Michigan Model, and describing these two . Proximity models will give certain proximity related answers and the other more recent models offer an alternative answer based on certain criticisms. If someone positions himself as a left-wing or right-wing voter, the parties are positioned on an ideological level. Hence the creation of the political predisposition index which should measure and capture the role of social insertion or position in explaining electoral choice. McClung Lee, A. - 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 . (June 2012) Networks in electoral behavior, as a part of political science, refers to the relevance of networks in forming citizens' voting behavior at parliamentary, presidential or local elections. For the sociological model we have talked about the index of political predisposition with the variables of socioeconomic, religious and spatial status. Even more plausibly, election campaigns are built around several issues. In the literature, we often talk about the economic theory of voting. In this model, importance is given to primary socialization. So there are four main ways. The distance must be assessed on the basis of what the current policy is. These are possible answers more to justify and account for this anomaly. 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. To summarize these approaches, there are four possible answers to the question of how voters decide to vote. 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. the further a party moves in the same direction as the voter, the more likely it is to be chosen by that voter. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987. We need to find identification measures adapted to the European context, which the researchers have done. %%EOF the difference in the cost-benefit ratio that different parties give. In this approach, these voters keep their partisan identification and again in the medium or long term, they will go back on the electoral choice that is identified with the partisan identification, also called the homing tendency, which is a tendency to go back on the party with which one identifies. There is also the economic vote, which is the role of the economy. The reference work is The People's Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. This is something that remains difficult in theory, we don't know how much the voter will discount. 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. The choice of candidates is made both according to direction but also according to the intensity of positions on a given issue. There is a kind of heterogeneity of voters. Voters are more interested in political results than in political programmes, and the choice is also made from this perspective. The choice can be made according to different criteria, but they start from the assumption that there are these voters who arrive in an electoral process that refers to the idea of the hexogeneity of voters' preferences. What we are interested in is on the demand side, how can we explain voters' electoral choice. 0000004336 00000 n [10], The third model is called the economic model of the vote or the Rochester School of Economics, developed by Downs in the book An Economic Theory of Democracy published in 1957.[11]. Voters who rely on strong partisan identification do not need to go and do systematic voting or take one of the shortcuts. Certain developments in the theory of the psycho-sociological model have in fact provided answers to these criticisms. A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. p. 31). 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. A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. The idea that one identifies oneself, that one has an attitude, an attachment to a party was certainly true some forty years ago and has become less and less true and also the explanatory power of this variable is less important today even if there are significant effects. He wanted to look for one thing and found something else. What are the criteria for determining the individual usefulness of voters? 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 term "group" can mean different things, which can be an ethnic group or a social class. 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. If we accept this premise, how will we position ourselves? The concept and measurement of partisan identification as conceived by these researchers as applying to the bipartite system and therefore needs to be adapted to fit the multiparty and European system. There are other cleavages that cut across Republicans and Democrats that should be taken into account to explain the pattern. This identification is seen as contributing to an individual's self-image. Thus, the interpretation of differences in voting behaviour from one group to another is to be sought in the position of the group in society and in the way its relations with parties have developed. On the other hand, ideologically extreme voters try to influence party policies through party activism (voice). Apart from the combined models, it can be thought that different models may explain differently according to historical moments and phases of a process of political alignment and misalignment just as models may better explain certain types of candidates or according to the profile and type of voters. 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. There is no real electoral choice in this type of explanation, but it is based on our insertion in a social context. Voting is an act of altruism. A unified theory of voting: directional and proximity spatial models. the translation of personal preference into a voluntary action designed to influence public policy We worked with a sample of 516 Argentinean adults, aged 18 to 75. It is a model that is very close to data and practice and lends itself very easily to empirical testing through measures of partisan identification and different measures of socio-demographic factors among others. JSTOR. For Iversen, distance is also important. However, we see that this is not always true and that there are parties that propose more extreme policies that receive considerable electoral support. The role of the centrality of partisan identification has been criticized, especially today, because partisan identification plays a role that is still important but much less important than it used to be and may be much less important than some researchers within this paradigm have postulated. We must also, and above all, look at the links between types of factors. We speak of cognitive preference between one's political preferences and the positions of the parties. 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