A second possible answer is that they will vote for the candidate who belongs to the party with which they identify. 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. A first criticism that has been made is that the simple proximity model gives us a misrepresentation of the psychology of voting. 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. Therefore, they cannot really situate where the different parties stand. But more generally, when there is a campaign, the issues are discussed. It also proposes a reconceptualization of the concept of partisanship in order to integrate all relevant contributions of the . it is an element of direction and not an element of distance or proximity that counts. The idea of prospective voting is very demanding. Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. This is especially important when applying this type of reasoning empirically. 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. Moreover, retrospective voting can also be seen as a shortcut. These are some of the criticisms and limitations often made by proponents of other approaches. There are a whole host of typologies in relation to issues, and we distinguish different types of issues such as position issues and issues that are more or less emotional. By finding something else, he shaped a dominant theory explaining the vote. 0000003292 00000 n For Iversen, distance is also important. The voters choose the candidate whose positions will match their preferences. to 1/n,and thus the expected utility of voting is proportional to N/n, which is approximately independent of the size of the electorate.3 In the basic rational-choice model of voting and political participation (see Blais 2000 for an overview and many references), the relative util-ity of voting, for a particular eligible voter, is: U = pB . We can talk about two major theories or two major models or even three models. We want to know how and why a voter will vote for a certain party. This is the proximity model. Comparative Political Studies, 27(2), 155189. the maximum utility is reached at the line level. Inking and the role of socialization cause individuals to form a certain partisan identification that produces certain types of political attitudes. The idea is that you stay loyal and you do "voice", that is, act to make things change. 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. Distance must be taken into account and the idea of mobilizing the electorate must be taken into account. This model explains for Downs why we abstain. 0000000866 00000 n This creates a concern for circularity of reasoning. 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. 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. Prospective voting says that the evaluation is based on what the parties and candidates are going to say. It is also often referred to as a point of indifference because there are places where the voter cannot decide. (1949). 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. startxref Moreover, there are analogies that are made even explicitly with the idea of the market. This jargon comes from this type of explanation. 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. What is partisan identification? Hirschman contrasts the "exit" strategy with the "voice" strategy, which is based on what he calls "loyalty", which is that one can choose not to leave but to make the organization change, to restore the balance between one's own aspirations and what the organization can offer. (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. it is easier to change parties from one election to the next; a phase of realignment (3), which consists of creating new partisan loyalties. We talk about the electoral market in the media or the electoral supply. There is a whole literature on opinion formation, quite consensually, that says that citizens have a limited capacity to process information. Theoretically, it is possible to have as many dimensions as there are issues being discussed in an election campaign. There are also intermediate variables that relate to loyalties to a certain group or sense of belonging. 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. Prospective voting says that voters will listen to what candidates and parties have to say. 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. It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. 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. %PDF-1.3 % What voters perceive are directional signals, that is, voters perceive that some parties are going in one direction and other parties are going in another direction on certain issues. In prospective voting, Grofman said that the position of current policy is also important because the prospective assessment that one can make as a voter of the parties' political platforms also depends on current policy. The concept of electoral choice does not belong to the sociological model but rather to rationalist theories. Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. 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. 0000007835 00000 n In this perspective, voting is essentially a question of attachment, identity and loyalty to a party, whereas in the rationalist approach it is mainly a question of interest, cognition and rational reading of one's own needs and the adequacy of different political offers to one's needs. There may be a vote that is different from partisan identification, but in the medium to long term, partisan identification should strengthen. We must also take into account other socializing agents that can socialize us and make us develop a form of partisan identification. The same can be said of the directional model with intensity. how does partisan identification develop? Another model is called the funnel model of causality which has been proposed by these authors working on the psycho-sociological model. This paper examines two models used in survey research to explain voting behavior and finds that both models may be more or less correct. The initial research saw three major factors to voting behaviour: Personal identification with one of the political parties, concern with issues of national government policy and personal attraction to the presidential candidates. 0000000929 00000 n the earlier Columbia studies, the Michigan election studies were based upon national survey samples. If we accept this premise, how will we position ourselves? Finally, there is an instrumental approach to information and voting. 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. xxxiii, 178. Has the partisan identification weakened? Merrill and Grofman have proposed unified models that want to get out of this hyper-simplification with respect to spatial theories where one either makes a choice of possibilities or a choice of direction but evacuates any other element such as partisan identification, socialization, social inclusion, economic conditions as well as the role of opinion leaders as seen in the funnel model of Michigan theory. 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. 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. 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. 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 can also be in relation to another dimension, for example between egalitarian and libertarian ideology. These theories are the retrospective voting theories and the theories of ideological space. Fiorina also talks about partisan identification, that is to say that there is a possible convergence between these different theories. 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. 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. 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? La dernire modification de cette page a t faite le 11 novembre 2020 00:26. Fiorina's theory of retrospective voting is very simple. The main explanatory factors have been sought in socio-economic status and socio-demographic variables such as "age," "gender," and "education. 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. These criticisms and limitations are related to the original model. Symbols evoke emotions. 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. The intensity directional model adds an element that is related to the intensity with which candidates and political parties defend certain positions. The sociological model obviously has a number of limitations like any voting model or any set of social science theories. 102 Lake City, FL 32055 OR 17579 SW State Road 47 Fort White, FL 32038. More specifically, the costs that the voter has to take into account according to the different parties and candidates must be evaluated, which is the partisan differential, i.e. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. In both The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) and Voting (Berelson et al., 1954), the authors How does partisan identification develop? 59 0 obj <>stream 1948, Berelson et . If that is true, then if there are two parties that are equally close to our preferences, then we cannot decide. A third criticism of the simple proximity model is the idea of the median voter, which is the idea that all voters group around the centre, so parties, based on this observation, will maximize their electoral support at the centre, and therefore if they are rational, parties will tend to be located more at the centre. The advantage of the intensity directional model is that it goes in a more intense direction, i.e. The ideological space can be defined as a left-right ideological space but can also be defined more precisely in relation to certain issues. Downs already put ideology at the centre of his explanation. Video transcript. 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. These are voters who proceed by systematic voting. p. 31). On that basis, voters calculate the utility income of the different parties and then they look at and evaluate the partisan differential. 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. 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. That is why there are many empirical analyses that are based on this model. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. From the point of view of parties and candidates, the economic model and in particular the model that was proposed by Downs in 1957 and which predicts a convergence of a party position towards the centre. This identification with a party is inherited from the family emphasizing the role of primary socialization, it is reinforced over time including a reinforcement that is given by the very fact of voting for that party. 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. We often talk about economic theory of the vote in the broadest sense in order to designate a rationalist theory based on rational choice theory and spatial theories of the vote. 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". 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. Hirschman wanted to explain what happens in organizations when they enter a situation of crisis or decline. 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. The reference work is The People's Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. A rather subjective and almost sentimental citizen is placed at the centre of the analysis. There are other theories that highlight the impact of economic conditions and how voters compare different election results in their electoral choices, which refers to economic voting in the strict sense of the term. The economic model of the vote puts the notion of electoral choice back at the centre. Value orientations refer to materialism as well as post-materialism, among other things, cleavages but no longer from a value perspective. voters who follow a systematic vote are voters who are willing to pay these information or information-related costs. Pp. Political scientists have defined several models of voter behavior in an attempt to explain the different motivations of voters: Rational choice theory describes someone voting in their best interest, supporting the candidate whose platform will give them the most favorable outcomes. Voters will vote for a party but that party is not necessarily the one with which they identify. The basic idea is the representation of a point that is an ideal point for each voter in a hypothetical space. Suicide is a global public health problem. Direction ("Who votes for whom?") We must also, and above all, look at the links between types of factors. 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. This is the idea of collective action, since our own contribution to an election or vote changes with the number of other citizens who vote. 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. So all these elements help to explain the vote and must be taken into account in order to explain the vote. 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 government is blamed for the poor state of the economy. On the other hand, the intensity directional model better explains the electoral choices of candidates who are not currently in power. Cross-pressure theory entered political science via the analysis of voting behavior at Columbia University (Lazarsfeld et al. 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. [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. 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. This is a very common and shared notion. What are the criteria for determining the individual usefulness of voters? There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. 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. xref A representative democracy. McElroy's connection to Vancouver didn't end there. Psychology and Voting Behavior In the same years that behaviorism (of various forms) came to dominate the In Personality traits and party identification over time published in 2014 by Bakker, Hopmann and Persson, the authors attempt to explain partisan identification. On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. 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. 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. 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. These theories are called spatial theories of the vote because they are projected. This theory presupposed that the voter recognizes his or her own interest, assesses alternative candidates, and on the basis of this assessment, will choose for the candidate or party that will be most favourably assessed in the sense of best serving his or her own political interests and interests. This has created a research paradigm which is perhaps the dominant paradigm today. A lawmaker's (stochastic) voting behavior is characterized by the relationship between her position in this space and the bill's position [1 . What we see here in relation to the sociological model and that these variables highlighted by the sociological model such as socialization, inking or social position play a role but only indirectly. On the basis of this, we can know. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. In the spatial theories of the vote, we see the strategic link between a party's supply and a demand from voters or electors. Voting is an instrument that serves us to achieve an objective. Thus, voters find it easier to assess performance than declared plans during an election campaign. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987. Prospective voting is based on election promises and retrospective voting is based on past performance. 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. 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