It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. Thus, voters find it easier to assess performance than declared plans during an election campaign. 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. Prospective voting is based on election promises and retrospective voting is based on past performance. 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. There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. The Neighborhood Model. At the aggregate level, the distribution of partisan identification in the electorate makes it possible to calculate the normal vote. Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. 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. Ecological regression represents one extreme: the presumption that voting behavior changes systematically across groups but only changes randomly, if at all, within groups. in what is commonly known as the Columbia school of thought, posited that contextual factors influence the development . 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) 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. Many researchers have criticised the Downs proximity model in particular. Positioning on a left-right scale is related to this type of theory. 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. The idea is to create a party that forges ideologies and partisan identities. We are looking at the interaction. 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. How does partisan identification develop? So, we are going to the extremes precisely because we are trying to mobilize an electorate. Voters who rely on strong partisan identification do not need to go and do systematic voting or take one of the shortcuts. It is possible to create a typology that distinguishes between four approaches crossing two important and crucial elements: "is voting spatial? 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. In this theory, we vote for specific issues that may be more or less concrete, more or less general, and which form the basis for explaining electoral behaviour. Some people talk about membership voting for the first two theories and cognitive voting for the economic model of voting. 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. 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 translation of personal preference into a voluntary action designed to influence public policy Various explanations have been offered over the roughly 70-year history of voting behavior research, but two explanations in particular have garnered the most attention and generated the most debate in the literature on voting behavior. 1948, Berelson et . The original measurement was very simple being based on two questions which are a scale with a question about leadership. Psychological Models of American Voting Behavior* DAVID KNOKE, Indiana University ABSTRACT A path model of the presidential vote involving social variables, party identification, issue orientations, . This economic theory of the vote, this rationalist theory, has a great advantage over the other models, which is that it does not only focus on voters, that is to say, it does not only focus on political demand, but it also looks at supply and especially at the interaction between supply and demand. These theories are called spatial theories of the vote because they are projected. The presupposition for spatial theories of voting has already been mentioned, namely the stake vote. Psychology and Voting Behavior In the same years that behaviorism (of various forms) came to dominate the Some parties have short-term strategies for maximizing voting and others have long-term strategies for social mobilization. They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. The political consciousness of individuals is based on social experiences and has little weight outside these experiences. 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 psycho-sociological model is intended as a development that wants to respond to this criticism. 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. While Downs said that there are parties that take positions on issues, the voter has difficulty with this inferring a position on a left-right axis. 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. Then a second question was supposed to measure the strength of that identification with the question "do you consider yourself a Republican, strong, weak or leaning towards the Democratic Party? 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 Lazarsfeld model would link membership and voting. So there is this empirical anomaly where there is a theory that presupposes and tries to explain the electoral choices but also the positions of the parties in a logic of proximity to the centre of the political spectrum, but on the other hand there is the empirical observation that is the opposite and that sees parties and voters located elsewhere. 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. 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 utility function of the simple proximity model appears, i.e. 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. This model has given rise to the spatial theories of voting which are the dominant theories. 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. Distance is understood in the sense of the proximity model for whom voter preference and party position is also important. In this way, parties can offer relatively extreme political platforms that are not optimal in the short term, but that generate higher levels of support in the medium and long term. It is multidimensional also in the bipartisan context of the United States because there are cleavages that cut across parties. There is a small degree of complexity because one can distinguish between attitudes towards the candidate or the party, attitudes towards the policies implemented by the different parties and attitudes about the benefits that one's own group may receive from voting for one party rather than another. This identification is seen as contributing to an individual's self-image. It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. The same can be said of the directional model with intensity. 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. The goal of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the measurement of suicide severity based on the Columbia suicide severity rating scale. The anomaly is that there is a majority of the electorate around the centre, but there are parties at the extremes that can even capture a large part of the preferences of the electorate. Voting is an act of altruism. 0000000866 00000 n For example, there is Lazarsfeld's theory with the idea that opinion leaders can be seen as people to whom we attribute a strong trust and maybe even an esteem in relation to the political judgment they may have and therefore, by discussing with these people, it is possible to form an electoral choice and therefore there is no need to go and pay these costs of gathering information. This diagram shows the process of misalignment with changes in the generational structure and changes in the social structure that create political misalignment. 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. 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. The problem of information is crucial in the spatial theories of voting and who would need an answer to fully understand these different theories. It is no longer a question of explaining "why" people participate but "how", that is, in terms of voter turnout, what choice is made and what can explain an electoral choice. There are other variants or models that try to accommodate this complexity. 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 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. For example, a strongly conservative voter who votes Democratic may vote Republican because he or she feels more in tune with the party. 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 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. First, they summarize the literature that has been interested in explaining why voters vary or differ in the stability or strength of their partisan identification. 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. 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. The role of the media and campaigns simplifies information by summarizing it. Political parties can make choices that are not choices to maximize the electorate, unlike spatial theories, where parties seek to maximize their short-term electoral support in an election. [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. The voters have to make that assessment and then decide which one brings more income and which one we will vote for. 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. 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. 43 17 A rather subjective and almost sentimental citizen is placed at the centre of the analysis. 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. 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'. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational. Lazarsfeld's book created this research paradigm. 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. The Logics of Electoral Politics. Pages pour les contributeurs dconnects en savoir plus. 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. This is especially important when applying this type of reasoning empirically. A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. 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. 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. From that point on, there has been the development of a whole body of literature on political psychology. %%EOF 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". This model of directional proximity with intensity illustrates what is called symbolic politics which is related to the problem of information. The choice of candidates is made both according to direction but also according to the intensity of positions on a given issue. There are also intermediate variables that relate to loyalties to a certain group or sense of belonging. xxxiii, 178. 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. 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. For most theories, and in particular Matthews' Simple Directional Model theory, the neutral point determines direction. IVERSEN, T. (1994). These criticisms and limitations are related to the original model. By Web: Vote-By-Mail Web Request. Although the models rely on the same data they make radically different predictions about the political future. They are voters who make the effort to inform themselves, to look at the proposals of the different parties and try to evaluate the different political offers. This approach emphasizes a central variable which is that of partisan identification, which is a particular political attitude towards a party. 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. In other words, they propose something quite ecumenical that combines directional and proximity models. The intensity directional model adds an element that is related to the intensity with which candidates and political parties defend certain positions. If we look at it a little more broadly, partisan identification can be seen as a kind of shortcut. The Michigan model was based on the idea of socialization and partisan identification as a long-term attachment to a party that is the result of primary socialization in particular, and therefore as insertion into a given social context. 0000006260 00000 n Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. The advantage of the intensity directional model is that it goes in a more intense direction, i.e. Voters will vote for a party but that party is not necessarily the one with which they identify. 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 idea is that a party is ready to lose an election in order to give itself the means to win it later by giving itself time to form an electorate. 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. Discounting is saying that the voter does not fully believe what the parties say. The theories that are supposed to explain the electoral choice also explain at the same time the electoral participation in particular with the sociological model. 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. This model explains for Downs why we abstain. endstream endobj 44 0 obj <> endobj 45 0 obj <> endobj 46 0 obj <>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text]>> endobj 47 0 obj <> endobj 48 0 obj <> endobj 49 0 obj <> endobj 50 0 obj <> endobj 51 0 obj <>stream The ideological space can be defined as a left-right ideological space but can also be defined more precisely in relation to certain issues. It was this model that proposed that abstention can be the result of a purely rational calculation. If we take into account Przeworski and Sprague's idea that there can be a mobilization of the electorate in a logic of endogenous preference and non-maximization of the utility of voters. 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. The image that an individual has of himself in this perspective is also the result of this identification. According to Merril and Grofman, one cannot determine whether one pure model is superior to another because there are methodological and data limitations. Elections and voters: a comparative introduction. As this is the first model that wanted to study empirically and test hypotheses on the basis of survey data, it was necessary to develop conceptual tools, in particular the political predisposition index, which focuses on three types of social affiliations that are fundamental in this perspective to explain electoral choices, namely social status, religion and place of residence. The heterogeneity of the electorate and voters must be taken into account. The initial formation of this model was very deterministic in wanting to focus on the role of social inclusion while neglecting other aspects, even though today there is increasingly a kind of ecumenical attempt to have an explanation that takes into account different aspects. The idea was that there were two possible responses that are put in place by members of that organization: one of "exit", to withdraw, to go to another organization. as a party's position moves away from our political preferences. A distinction can be made between the simple proximity model, which is the Downs model, and the proximity model with Grofman discounting. The strategic choices made by parties can also be explained by this model since, since this model postulates an interdependence between supply and demand, we address the demand but we can also address the supply. the maximum utility is reached at the line level. 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. 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. maximum proximity, as the party, his or her utility increases, and when the voter moves away from the party, his or her utility decreases. The Columbia County Supervisor of Elections strives to provide reasonable accomodations to help people with disabilities have an equal opportunity to participate on our website. Voters vote for the candidate or party closest to their own position which is the proximity model. 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. 0000000016 00000 n 0000005382 00000 n Merrill, Samuel, and Bernard Grofman. 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. The explanatory factors and aspects highlighted by these different models are always taken into account. These are voters who proceed by systematic voting. The second explanation refers to the directional model, i.e. _____ were the first widespread barriers to the franchise to be eliminated. As part of spatial theories of the vote, some theories consider the characteristics of candidates. Proximity can be calculated on the basis of the programmes and actual positions declared by the parties or on the basis of a discount factor, a perception factor or a difference factor according to the discount model. Feels more columbia model of voting behavior tune with the party need to go and do voting. Economic model of directional proximity with intensity theoretical account of voting behavior drew heavily upon metaphor. Particular political attitude towards a party but that party is not necessarily the one with which they identify themselves! 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