There has been a lot of criticism that has allowed the idea of issue voting to develop in a rationalist context and models. As the authors of The American Voter put 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 is the proximity 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. 3105. 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 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) Four landmark studies connected with the presidential elections of 1940, 1948, 1952, and 1956 mark the establishment of scholarly survey-based research on voting behavior (Rossi 1959). In other words, this identification is part of the self-image one can have of oneself. If you experience any difficulty accessing any part of this website, please call (386) 758-1026 or email kbanner@votecolumbiafl.gov for further assistance. 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. 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. Property qualifications. Downs, Anthony. 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. In other words, they propose something quite ecumenical that combines directional and proximity models. The Lazarsfeld model would link membership and voting. So all these elements help to explain the vote and must be taken into account in order to explain the vote. This ensures congruence and proximity between the party and the electorate. it takes a political position that evokes the idea of symbolic politics in a more salient way. 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. One must take into account the heterogeneity of the electorate and how different voters may have different motivations for choosing which party or candidate to vote for. It is also often referred to as a point of indifference because there are places where the voter cannot decide. 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. 0000003292 00000 n 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. There may be a vote that is different from partisan identification, but in the medium to long term, partisan identification should strengthen. This model of directional proximity with intensity illustrates what is called symbolic politics which is related to the problem of information. How was that measured? By finding something else, he shaped a dominant theory explaining the vote. For many, voting is a civic duty. The premise of prospective voting is too demanding for most voters. social determinism Directional model with intensity: Rabinowitz, Four possible answers to the question of how voters decide to vote, Unified Voting Model: Merrill and Grofman, Responses to criticisms of the proximity model, Partisan Competition Theory: Przeworski and Sprague, Relationship between voting explanatory models and realignment cycle. In other words, party activists tend to be more extreme in their political attitudes than voters or party leaders. Prospective voting says that the evaluation is based on what the parties and candidates are going to say. [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. 0000002253 00000 n Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. It is the idea of when does one or the other of these different theories provide a better explanation according to periods of political alignment or 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. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational. 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. 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. Harrop, Martin, and William L. Miller. The term "group" can mean different things, which can be an ethnic group or a social class. 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. Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. It is in this sense that the party identification model provides an answer to this criticism that the sociological model does not highlight the mechanisms that make a certain social inking influence a certain electoral choice. 135150. 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. 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. 0000001124 00000 n Ideology can also be in relation to another dimension, for example between egalitarian and libertarian ideology. p. 31). 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. Merrill, Samuel, and Bernard Grofman. 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. It is multidimensional also in the bipartisan context of the United States because there are cleavages that cut across parties. 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. 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. 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. For Lazarsfeld, we think politically how we are socially, there is not really the idea of electoral choice. Several studies show that the impact of partisan identification varies greatly from one context to another. However, we see that this is not always true and that there are parties that propose more extreme policies that receive considerable electoral support. What determines direction? These authors proposed to say that there would be a relationship between the explanatory models of the vote and the cycle of alignment, realignment, misalignment in the sense that the sociological model would be better able to explain the vote in phases of political realignment. Sociological Model (Columbia Model) Social-Psychological Model (Michigan Model) Economic / Rational Choice Model (Rochester Model) 5 Sociological Model. This refers to the Michigan model, the psycho-sociological model. In both The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) and Voting (Berelson et al., 1954), the authors The degree of political sophistication, political knowledge, interest in politics varies from voter to voter. 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. 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. Discounting is saying that the voter does not fully believe what the parties say. Professor Political Science Buena Vista University Two basic concerns: Turnout ("Who votes?") Key questions: What are the characteristics and attitudes of voters vs. nonvoters? Numerous studies examine voting behavior based on the formal theoretical predictions of the spatial utility model. In Personality traits and party identification over time published in 2014 by Bakker, Hopmann and Persson, the authors attempt to explain partisan identification. 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. It is an explanation that is completely outside the logic of proximity and the spatial logic of voting. The idea of the directional model, and this applies to both the simple directional model and the intensity directional model, is that voters basically cannot clearly perceive the different positions of political parties or candidates on a specific issue. 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. In this model, importance is given to primary socialization. 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 external factors would be the factors that, in the basic theory of the psycho-sociological approach, it would seem that this is what can do but if we have a certain partisan attachment to vote for another party because we are influenced by one or other of these factors but, basically, we keep our partisan attachment and the next time when these factors change, we return to the normal vote corresponding to the partisan attachment. 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. Numbers abound, since we have seen that, in the end, both models systematically have a significant effect. The psycho-sociological model, also known as the Michigan model, can be represented graphically or schematically. Voters try to maximize their individual utility. For example, a strongly conservative voter who votes Democratic may vote Republican because he or she feels more in tune with the party. Since the idea is to calculate the costs and benefits of voting for one party rather than the other, therefore, each party brings us some utility income. This model relies heavily on the ability of voters to assess and calculate their own interests and all the costs associated with the action of going to the polls. A set of theories has given some answers. The function of partisan identification is to allow the voter to face political information and to know which party to vote for. 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. It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. 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. Cross-pressure theory entered political science via the analysis of voting behavior at Columbia University (Lazarsfeld et al. 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. Does partisan identification work outside the United States? Another strategy is the so-called "shortcut" that voters take within the rationalist framework of voting, since they are confronted with the problem of information and have to choose on the basis of this information. At the aggregate level, the distribution of partisan identification in the electorate makes it possible to calculate the normal vote. Today, when we see regression analyses of electoral choice, we will always find among the control variables social status variables, a religion variable and a variable related to place of residence. 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. An important factor is the role of political campaigns in influencing the vote. 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 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. Many researchers have criticised the Downs proximity model in particular. 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. Basic Idea What you are vote choice ; Key foundational studies ; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet (1944) The Peoples Choice Berelson, Lazarsfeld, McPhee (1954) Voting [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. What are the criteria for determining the individual usefulness of voters? As for the intensity model, they manage to perceive something more, that is to say, not only a direction but an intensity through which a political party defends certain positions and goes in certain political directions. 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. Some parties have short-term strategies for maximizing voting and others have long-term strategies for social mobilization. On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. offers a behavior analysis of voting behavior. Sometimes, indeed often, people combine the first two models incorporating the psycho-sociological model on the basis that the Michigan model is just an extension of the Columbia model that helps explain some things that the Columbia model cannot explain. The sociological model at the theoretical level emphasizes something important that rationalist and economic theories have largely overlooked, namely, the importance of the role of social context, i.e., voters are all in social contexts and therefore not only family context but also a whole host of other social contexts. In the Michigan model, the idea of stakes was already present but was somewhat underdeveloped, and this perspective on the role of stakes in the psychosocial model lent itself to both theoretical and empirical criticism from proponents of rationalist models. 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. 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? . Finally, there is an instrumental approach to information and voting. The presupposition for spatial theories of voting has already been mentioned, namely the stake vote. Lazarsfeld's book created this research paradigm. 0000000636 00000 n systematic voting, i.e. 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. Much of the work in electoral behaviour draws on this thinking. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. 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 a whole literature on opinion formation, quite consensually, that says that citizens have a limited capacity to process information. These are models that should make us attentive to the different motivations that voters may or may not have to make in making an electoral choice. Partisan identification becomes stronger over time. The same can be said of the directional model with intensity. 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 rather subjective and almost sentimental citizen is placed at the centre of the analysis. A symbol is evaluated on the basis of two parameters, namely direction (1), a symbol gives a certain direction in the policy and in addition a certain intensity (2) which is to what extent is one favourable or unfavourable to a certain policy. 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 system in the United States is bipartisan and the question asked was "Do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat or otherwise? The specified . Voting for a candidate from one party in one race and for the other party's candidate in another race is known as. For the sociological model we have talked about the index of political predisposition with the variables of socioeconomic, religious and spatial status. 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. 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. In Person: 971 W Duval St. Ste. Democratic may vote Republican because he or she feels more in tune with the party and to! 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