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. 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. The psycho-sociological model says that it is because this inking allows identification with a party which in turn influences political attitudes and therefore predispositions with regard to a given object, with regard to the candidate or the party, and this is what ultimately influences the vote. 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. 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. These are some of the criticisms and limitations often made by proponents of other approaches. The system in the United States is bipartisan and the question asked was "Do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat or otherwise? It is also often referred to as a point of indifference because there are places where the voter cannot decide. In essence, those studies provided the core concepts and models used in contemporary voting research. The Logics of Electoral Politics. 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. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. 0000001124 00000 n The explanatory factors and aspects highlighted by these different models are always taken into account. How to assess the position of different parties and candidates. xxxiii, 178. 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. 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. Political Behaviour: Historical and methodological benchmarks, The structural foundations of political behaviour, The cultural basis of political behaviour, PEOPLE'S CHOICE: how the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign, https://doi.org/10.1177/000271624926100137, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414094027002001, https://baripedia.org/index.php?title=Theoretical_models_of_voting_behaviour&oldid=49464, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). 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. 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. The second criterion is subjectivity, which is that voters calculate the costs and benefits of voting subjectively, so they make an assessment of the costs and benefits. In other words, when we are interested in trying to explain the vote, we must already know what type of voter we are talking about. These theories are the retrospective voting theories and the theories of ideological space. The psychological and socio-economic model are strongly opposed, offering two explanations that are difficult to reconcile, even though there have been efforts to try to combine them. Elections and voters: a comparative introduction. (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. (Second edition.) On the other hand, this is true for the directional model; they manage to perceive a policy direction. "i.e., if it is proximity, it is 'yes', otherwise it is 'no' and therefore directional; 'are the preferences of the actors exogenous? Downs, Anthony. 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. We must assess the costs of going to the polls, of gathering the information needed to make a decision, but also the value of one's own participation, since the model is also supposed to explain voter turnout. This model explains for Downs why we abstain. 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. 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. Basic Idea What you are vote choice ; Key foundational studies ; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet (1944) The Peoples Choice Berelson, Lazarsfeld, McPhee (1954) Voting It is an answer that remains faithful to the postulates of Downs' theory and the proximity model. The economic model has put the rational and free citizen back at the centre of attention and reflection, whereas if we push the sociological model a bit to the extreme, it puts in second place this freedom and this free will that voters can make since the psycho-sociological model tells us that voting is determined by social position, it is not really an electoral choice that we make in the end but it is simply the result of our social insertion or our attachment to a party. startxref Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987. Models of Voting Behavior Models of Voting Behavior Dr. Bradley Best Asst. The individual is subjectivity at the centre of the analysis. 65, no. These are voters who proceed by systematic voting. 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. The presupposition is that voter preferences are not exogenous but are endogenous - they change within the framework of an electoral process. 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. McClung Lee, A. Some have another way of talking about convergences and showing how the theories explaining the vote can be reconciled with the process of political misalignment. One must assess the value of one's own participation and also assess the number of other citizens who will vote. Voting for a candidate from one party in one race and for the other party's candidate in another race is known as. Bakker, B. N., Hopmann, D. N., & Persson, M. (2014). This paper examines two models used in survey research to explain voting behavior and finds that both models may be more or less correct. This means that we are not necessarily going to listen to all the specific arguments of the different parties. They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. 5. Ideology is to be understood as a way of simplifying our world in relation to the problem of information. The spatial theory of the vote postulates that the electoral choice is made in the maximization of individual utility. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. 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. 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. Prospective voting says that the evaluation is based on what the parties and candidates are going to say. It was this model that proposed that abstention can be the result of a purely rational calculation. Has the partisan identification weakened? Other researchers have tried to propose combined models that combine different explanations. In Personality traits and party identification over time published in 2014 by Bakker, Hopmann and Persson, the authors attempt to explain partisan identification. Linked to this, it is important to look at individual data empirically as well. 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. There are also external factors that also need to be considered, such as the actions of the government, for example, voters are influenced by what the government has done. 0 On the other hand, ideologically extreme voters try to influence party policies through party activism (voice). So, we are going to the extremes precisely because we are trying to mobilize an electorate. It is a paradigm that does not only explain from the macro-political point of view an electoral choice, but there is the other side of the coin which is to explain the choice that the parties make. 0000000636 00000 n There is little room for context even though there are more recent developments that try to put the voter's freedom of choice in context. So, voters evaluate the positions of the parties and from these positions, this party is a left-wing party and this party is a right-wing party. There are also intermediate variables that relate to loyalties to a certain group or sense of belonging. the translation of personal preference into a voluntary action designed to influence public policy Symbols evoke emotions. Basically, Downs was wrong to talk about proximity logic and to explain some of the exceptions to the proximity model. The government is blamed for the poor state of the economy. 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. Print. The concept of electoral choice does not belong to the sociological model but rather to rationalist theories. Distance is understood in the sense of the proximity model for whom voter preference and party position is also important. The theoretical criticism consists in saying that in this psychosocial approach or in this vision that the psychosocial model has of the role of political issues, the evaluation of these issues is determined by political attitudes and partisan identification. Radical approach regards class-based (structural) model as outdated and insufficient to explain . 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. We have to be careful, because when we talk about political psychology, we include that, but we also include the role of cognitions and rationality. 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. Often, in Anglo-Saxon literature, this model is referred to as the party identification model. Another model is called the funnel model of causality which has been proposed by these authors working on the psycho-sociological model. 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. This has created a research paradigm which is perhaps the dominant paradigm today. 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. A first criticism that has been made is that the simple proximity model gives us a misrepresentation of the psychology of voting. One can draw a kind of parallel with a loss of importance of the strength of partisan identification and also of the explanatory power of partisan identification. The same can be said of the directional model with intensity. This is the idea that gave rise to the development of directional models, which is that, according to Downs and those who have followed him, because there is transparency of information, voters can very well see what the political platforms of the parties or candidates are. Been proposed by these authors working on the other hand, this is true for the poor state the! 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