It is a variant of the simple proximity model which remains in the idea of proximity but which adds an element which makes it possible to explain certain voting behaviours which would not be explainable by other models. There have been attempts to address this anomaly. 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. Today, this may be less true, but until a certain point, there were relatively few empirical analyses based on the economic model of the vote. Several studies have shown that the very fact of voting for a party contributes to the development of a certain identification for that party. The intensity directional model adds an element that is related to the intensity with which candidates and political parties defend certain positions. 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. By Web: Vote-By-Mail Web Request. Three elements should be noted. 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 presupposition is that voter preferences are not exogenous but are endogenous - they change within the framework of an electoral process. There has been the whole emergence of the rational actor, which is the vote in relation to issues, which is not something that comes simply from our affective identification with a party, but there is a whole reflection that the voter makes in terms of cost-benefit calculations. We see the kinship of this model with the sociological model explaining that often they are put together. There has also been the criticism of abstention as the result of rational calculation. 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. 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. 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. 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. 0000007835 00000 n The concept of electoral choice does not belong to the sociological model but rather to rationalist theories. 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. There are several responses to criticisms of the proximity model. 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 Peoples Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944) and [1] McClung Lee, A. 65, no. The directional model also provides some answers to this criticism. In summary, it can be said that in the economic model of voting, the political preferences of voters on different issues, are clearly perceived by the voters themselves which is the idea that the voter must assess his own interest, he must clearly perceive what are the political preferences of voters. . 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. 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. 0000000636 00000 n 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. 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. There is a whole branch of the electoral literature that emphasizes government action as an essential factor in explaining the vote, and there is a contrast between a prospective vote, which is voting according to what the parties say they will do during the election campaign, and a retrospective vote, which is voting in relation to what has been done, particularly by the government, which has attributed the successes or failures of a policy. 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 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. 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. That is called the point of indifference. 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. One of the merits, which can be found in Lazarsfeld's book entitled The People's Choice published in 1944 is that this model marks a turning point in the study of political behaviour. Distance is understood in the sense of the proximity model for whom voter preference and party position is also important. 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. 0000005382 00000 n This theory is not about the formation of political preferences, they start from the idea that there are voters with certain political preferences and then these voters will look at what the offer is and will choose according to that offer. 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. Psychology and Voting Behavior In the same years that behaviorism (of various forms) came to dominate the There has been a lot of criticism that has allowed the idea of issue voting to develop in a rationalist context and models. What we are interested in is on the demand side, how can we explain voters' electoral choice. 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. This model predicts a convergence of party program positions around two distinct positions, there are two types of convergence. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational. We want to know how and why a voter will vote for a certain party. The idea is that the extremist attitudes of those former voters who become party activists push strategic positioning in a direction that takes them away from their constituents. It is a theory that makes it possible to explain both the voting behaviour of voters and the organisational behaviour of political parties. 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 order to explain this anomaly, another explanation beside the curvilinear explanation beside the directional theories of the vote, a third possibility to explain this would be to say that there are some parties that abandon the idea of maximizing the vote or electoral support in order to mobilize this electorate and for this we have to go to extremes. Voting for a party and continuing to vote for such a party repeatedly makes it possible to develop an identification with that party which, in a way, then reinforces the electoral choice. 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. The degree of political sophistication, political knowledge, interest in politics varies from voter to voter. The theoretical account of voting behavior drew heavily upon the metaphor of a 'funnel of causality'. Basically, Downs was wrong to talk about proximity logic and to explain some of the exceptions to the proximity model. 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. 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. There is an opposite reasoning. This approach has often been criticized as a static approach since socio-economic or even socio-demographic characteristics do not change in the short term and yet the vote increasingly changes in the short term, what is called in electoral volatility, i.e. According to Downs, based on the prospective assessment that voters make of the position that voters have and their position on various issues, voters arrive at and operate this shortcut by situating and bringing parties back to an ideological dimension that may be a left-right dimension but may also be another one. 0000004336 00000 n We must also, and above all, look at the links between types of factors. 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. The government is blamed for the poor state of the economy. So all these elements help to explain the vote and must be taken into account in order to explain the vote. 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). 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. does partisan identification work outside the United States? It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. These theories are called spatial theories of the vote because they are projected. These authors have tried to say that the different explanatory theories of the vote can be more or less explanatory in the sense of having more or less importance of explanatory power depending on the phases in which one is in a process of alignment and misalignment. 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. These theories are the retrospective voting theories and the theories of ideological space. 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. European Journal of Political Research, 54(2), 197215. It is also often referred to as a point of indifference because there are places where the voter cannot decide. Suicide is a global public health problem. How was that measured? In the sociological and psycho-sociological model, there was no place for ideology, that's another thing that counts, on the other hand, in economic theories, spatial theories and Downs' theory of the economic vote, ideology is important. We project voters' preferences and political positions, that is, the positions that parties have on certain issues and for the preferences that voters have on certain issues. Voting is an act of altruism. Personality traits and party identification over time. 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, . There are other models that try to relate the multiplicity of issues to an underlying ideological space, i.e., instead of looking at specific issues, everything is brought back to a left-right dimension as a shortcut, for example, and there are other theories that consider the degree of ambiguity and clarity of the candidates' positions. They try to elaborate a bit and find out empirically how this happens. If that is true, then if there are two parties that are equally close to our preferences, then we cannot decide. Many researchers have criticised the Downs proximity model in particular. 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 maximum utility is reached at the line level. There is an idea of interdependence between political supply and demand, between parties and voters, which is completely removed from other types of explanations. 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. Voters who vote against the party with which they identify keep their partisan identification. 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. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there has been a strong development of directional models. Downs, Anthony. 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 theories that are supposed to explain the electoral choice also explain at the same time the electoral participation in particular with the sociological model. Some parties have short-term strategies for maximizing voting and others have long-term strategies for social mobilization. In the study of electoral behaviour, there is a simple distinction between what is called prospective voting and retrospective voting. In a phase of alignment, this would be the psycho-sociological model, 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. In short, it is an explanatory model that emphasizes the role of political attitudes. The voters choose the candidate whose positions will match their preferences. Even if there is still a significant effect of identification, there are other explanations and aspects to look for, particularly in terms of the issue vote and the assessments that different voters make of the issue vote. In other words, they propose something quite ecumenical that combines directional and proximity models. This ensures congruence and proximity between the party and the electorate. Inking and the role of socialization cause individuals to form a certain partisan identification that produces certain types of political attitudes. The psycho-sociological model can be seen in the light of an explanatory contribution to the idea that social inking is a determining factor in explaining the vote, or at least on a theoretical level. 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. 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. Other researchers have tried to propose combined models that combine different explanations. 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 have been several phases of misalignment. carried out by scholars at Columbia. If we do not accept the idea that actors will vote according to their assessment of certain issues, to be more precise, according to their assessment of the position that the various parties have on certain issues, if we do not understand that, we cannot understand the spatial theories of voting either. On the other hand, this is true for the directional model; they manage to perceive a policy direction. the earlier Columbia studies, the Michigan election studies were based upon national survey samples. 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. These are voters who proceed by systematic voting. Lazarsfeld's book created this research paradigm. The answer to this second question will allow us to differentiate between proximity models and directional models because these two subsets of the spatial theories of voting give diametrically opposite answers to this question. 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. xref Ideal point models assume that lawmakers and bills are represented as points in a latent space. a new model of legislative behavior that captures when and how lawmakers vote differently than expected. 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. Moreover, retrospective voting can also be seen as a shortcut. For Lazarsfeld, "a person thinks politically as he or she is socially". 0000009473 00000 n The main explanatory factors have been sought in socio-economic status and socio-demographic variables such as "age," "gender," and "education. This is a very common and shared notion. 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. 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. "i.e., if it is proximity, it is 'yes', otherwise it is 'no' and therefore directional; 'are the preferences of the actors exogenous? 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. It is also possible to add that the weight of partisan identification varies from one voter to another. On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. The individual is subjectivity at the centre of the analysis. Ideology is to be understood as a way of simplifying our world in relation to the problem of information. There may be one that is at the centre, but there are also others that are discussed. An important factor is the role of political campaigns in influencing the vote. 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. 0000008661 00000 n 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. 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. Is partisan identification one-dimensional? It is a third explanation given by Przeworski and Sprague in their theory of partisan competition, also known as the theory of mobilization of the electorate. McElroy's connection to Vancouver didn't end there. 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. It is easier to look at what someone has done than to evaluate the promises they made. In other words, there is a social type variable, a cultural type variable and a spatial type variable. If we look at it a little more broadly, partisan identification can be seen as a kind of shortcut. 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. Harrop, Martin, and William L. Miller. 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. 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. Its weak explanatory power has been criticized, and these are much more recent criticisms in the sense that we saw when we talked about class voting in particular, which from then on saw the emergence of a whole series of critics who said that all these variables of social position and anchoring in social contexts may have been explanatory of participation and voting at the time these theories emerged in the 1950s, but this may be much less true today in a phase or period of political misalignment. Often referred to as a point of indifference because there are several responses to criticisms of vote... 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