There has also been the criticism of abstention as the result of rational calculation. Today, there is an attempt to combine the different explanations trying to take into account, both sociological determinants but also the emotional and affective component as well as the component related to choice and calculation. Most voters have a sense of allegiance to a party that is inherited through the family. 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. There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. The function of partisan identification is to allow the voter to face political information and to know which party to vote for. the further a party moves in the same direction as the voter, the more likely it is to be chosen by that voter. There is a direct link between social position and voting. We must also, and above all, look at the links between types of factors. On this basis, four types of voters can be identified in a simplified manner: It is possible to start from the assumption that the characteristics of these different voters are very different. 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. 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. 0000011193 00000 n The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. The concept of electoral choice does not belong to the sociological model but rather to rationalist theories. 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. What determines direction? There are other cleavages that cut across Republicans and Democrats that should be taken into account to explain the pattern. The Peoples Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. Information is central to spatial theories, whereas in the psycho-sociological model, information is much less important. A lawmaker's (stochastic) voting behavior is characterized by the relationship between her position in this space and the bill's position [1 . 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. 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. 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. There is a kind of heterogeneity of voters. 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 may be a vote that is different from partisan identification, but in the medium to long term, partisan identification should strengthen. 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). Voters calculate the cost of voting. The political position of each candidate is represented in the same space, it is the interaction between supply and demand and the voter will choose the party or candidate that is closest to the voter. 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. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F., BERNARD BERELSON, and HAZEL GAUDET. This table shows that for quite some time now there has been a strong decline in partisan identification. There are two important issues in relation to the spatial theory of voting. 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. Voters have knowledge of the ideological positions of parties or candidates on one or more ideological dimensions and they use this knowledge to assess the political positions of these parties or candidates on specific issues. What is partisan identification? 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. 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. 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. There are several reasons that the authors of these directional models cite to explain this choice of direction with intensity rather than a choice of proximity as proposed by Downs. Nevertheless, some of these spatial theories depart from this initial formulation. McClung Lee, A. Ideology is a means of predicting and inferring political positions during an election campaign. 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. In both The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) and Voting (Berelson et al., 1954), the authors Voters who vote against the party with which they identify keep their partisan identification. 0000009473 00000 n For Fiorina, the retrospective vote is the fact that current policy is fundamental, whereas in the prospective vote it is less so. There is an opposite reasoning. models of voting behavior -the columbia school (1940s) -the Michigan school (1950s) the columbia school -1940s -social determinism -voter brand loyalty (party id) -selective perception/projection -minimal campaign effect -cross-pressures -high interest+low partisanship are rare minimal campaign effect . (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. In other words, they propose something quite ecumenical that combines directional and proximity models. 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. Value orientations refer to materialism as well as post-materialism, among other things, cleavages but no longer from a value perspective. 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. 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. The importance of symbolic politics is especially capitalized on by the intensity directional models. The psycho-sociological model is intended as a development that wants to respond to this criticism. 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. The sociological model is somewhat the model that wants to emphasize this aspect. 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. 3105. These criticisms and limitations are related to the original model. Nowadays, the internet is the most used communication environment, and therefore it becomes very important to try to determine the behavior of users regarding internet use. The same can be said of the directional model with intensity. Print. does partisan identification work outside the United States? 0000000016 00000 n The idea is to create a party that forges ideologies and partisan identities. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Suicide is a global public health problem. For Iversen, distance is also important. Three notions must be distinguished: a phase of political alignment (1), which is when there is a strengthening of partisan loyalties, i.e. 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. We talk about the electoral market in the media or the electoral supply. 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. Even more plausibly, election campaigns are built around several issues. This model predicts a convergence of party program positions around two distinct positions, there are two types of convergence. It is also often referred to as a point of indifference because there are places where the voter cannot decide. [8][9], The second very important model is the psycho-sociological model, also known as the partisan identification model or Michigan School model, developed by Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes in Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, among others in The American Voter published in 1960. 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. 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. The directional model also provides some answers to this criticism. Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. The original measurement was very simple being based on two questions which are a scale with a question about leadership. "The answer is "yes", as postulated by spatial theories, or "no", as stated by Przeworski and Sprague, for example. Fiorina proposed an alternative way to explain why voters vote for one party rather than another, or a different answer to how the position of different candidate parties can be assessed. 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. 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. Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. They find that partisan identification becomes more stable with age, so the older you get, the more partisan identification you have, so it's much easier to change when you're young. Moreover, retrospective voting can also be seen as a shortcut. Also called the Columbia model (after the university from whence came the researchers), the sociological model of voting behavior was constructed with the intention of studying the effect of media on voting choice. It is by this configuration that May tries to explain this anomaly which is due to the fact that there is a group of voters who become activists within the party and who succeed in shifting the party's positioning towards the extremes. The presupposition is that voter preferences are not exogenous but are endogenous - they change within the framework of an electoral process. There is a whole literature on opinion formation, quite consensually, that says that citizens have a limited capacity to process information. Partisan identification becomes stronger over time. To summarize these approaches, there are four possible answers to the question of how voters decide to vote. However, this is empirically incorrect. There is the important opposition between an economic vote based on a choice, which is the idea that the voter makes a real choice based on a cost-benefit calculation, a choice that is rational in the end according to Weber's typology, while the psycho-sociological vote is rather based on a concept of loyalty that often makes the opposition between choice and loyalty. party loyalties are freed from their social base and thus these party identifications are formed and crystallized. it takes a political position that evokes the idea of symbolic politics in a more salient way. As far as the proximity model with discounting is concerned, there is a concern when we are going to apply it empirically: we need to be able to determine what the degree of discounting is, how much the voter is going to discount. Three Models of Voting Behavior. It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. In other words, party activists tend to be more extreme in their political attitudes than voters or party leaders. The theory of partisan competition was completely eliminated by the other types of explanations. When the voter is in the same position, i.e. 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. 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. It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. We are not ignoring the psychological model, which focuses on the identification people have with parties without looking at the parties. IVERSEN, T. (1994). The Neighborhood Model. The influence of friends refers to opinion leaders and circles of friends. The basic idea is the representation of a point that is an ideal point for each voter in a hypothetical space. This is the basic motivation for the development of these directional models. This is linked to a decrease in class voting and a loss of traditional cleavages. 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. 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. Numerous studies have found that voting behavior and political acts can be "contagious . 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. In the psychological approach, the information problem is circumvented by the idea of the development of partisan identification, which is an emotional shortcut that voters operate. 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 voters choose the candidate whose positions will match their preferences. 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? On the other hand, ideologically extreme voters try to influence party policies through party activism (voice). 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. In the spatial theories of the vote, we see the strategic link between a party's supply and a demand from voters or electors. We have seen that at Downs, the role of ideology is fundamental and that ideology could function as a kind of shortcut. is premised on the assumption that elections connect the will of the people to the actions of government. 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. 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. Hirschman wanted to explain what happens in organizations when they enter a situation of crisis or decline. Another model is called the funnel model of causality which has been proposed by these authors working on the psycho-sociological model. [1] 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. The reference work is The People's Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. It is easier to look at what someone has done than to evaluate the promises they made. the maximum utility is reached at the line level. That is what is called the proximity vote, that is, having a preference over a policy. 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. 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.
Hawaii Surfboard Shapers,
Where Does Shaquille O'neal Live In Texas,
Articles C