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 Lazarsfeld, we think politically how we are socially, there is not really the idea of electoral choice. emotional ties between voters and parties; a phase of political misalignment (2), which may be the one we are currently in in Europe since the economic crisis, which is a weakening of partisan loyalties resulting in increased electoral volatility, i.e. Voting for a candidate from one party in one race and for the other party's candidate in another race is known as. 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. How does partisan identification develop? 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. 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. There is a kind of heterogeneity of voters. There is an idea of interdependence between political supply and demand, between parties and voters, which is completely removed from other types of explanations. In other words, there is the idea of utility maximization which is a key concept in rational choice theory, so the voter wants to maximize his utility and his utility is calculated according to the ratio between the cost and the benefit that can be obtained from the action, in this case going to vote (1) and going to vote for that party rather than this one (2). There have been attempts to address this anomaly. We have seen that at Downs, the role of ideology is fundamental and that ideology could function as a kind of shortcut. (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. 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. 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. What determines direction? 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 are different types of individuals who take different kinds of shortcuts or not, who vote systematically or not, and so on. For Fiorina, the retrospective vote is the fact that current policy is fundamental, whereas in the prospective vote it is less so. 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. For many, voting is a civic duty. 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. 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. The idea of intensity can also be seen as the idea that there are certain issues, that there are certain political positions that put forward symbols and some of these symbols evoke making these two issues more visible to voters but in the sense of making voters say that this particular party is going in that direction and with a high intensity. trailer So, we are going to the extremes precisely because we are trying to mobilize an electorate. There are two important issues in relation to the spatial theory of voting. 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. Elections and voters: a comparative introduction. 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. For most theories, and in particular Matthews' Simple Directional Model theory, the neutral point determines direction. Furthermore, "social characteristics determine political preferences". maximum proximity, as the party, his or her utility increases, and when the voter moves away from the party, his or her utility decreases. What interests us is that the idea of issue voting is fundamental to spatial theories of voting. . Theoretically, it is possible to have as many dimensions as there are issues being discussed in an election campaign. On the basis of this analysis a behavioral model is constructed, which is then tested on data from a Dutch election survey. 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". 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. 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. it takes a political position that evokes the idea of symbolic politics in a more salient way. In Personality traits and party identification over time published in 2014 by Bakker, Hopmann and Persson, the authors attempt to explain partisan identification. Another model is called the funnel model of causality which has been proposed by these authors working on the psycho-sociological model. the difference in the cost-benefit ratio that different parties give. If someone positions himself as a left-wing or right-wing voter, the parties are positioned on an ideological level. 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. The spatial theory of the vote postulates that the electoral choice is made in the maximization of individual utility. 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. This model has given rise to the spatial theories of voting which are the dominant theories. it is an element of direction and not an element of distance or proximity that counts. There was a whole series of critics who said that if it's something rational, there's a problem with the way democracy works. According to Fiorina, identification with a party is not necessarily the result of a long phase of socialization, but it is also the result of evaluations of a certain party, it is the fact of voting for that party that makes it possible to develop a partisan identification. 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. That is why there are many empirical analyses that are based on this model. In Person: 971 W Duval St. Ste. $2.75. Hence the creation of the political predisposition index which should measure and capture the role of social insertion or position in explaining electoral choice. Three elements should be noted. Professor Political Science Buena Vista University Two basic concerns: Turnout ("Who votes?") Key questions: What are the characteristics and attitudes of voters vs. nonvoters? It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. 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. 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. xref 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. 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. 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. Psychology and Voting Behavior In the same years that behaviorism (of various forms) came to dominate the 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. There are other cleavages that cut across Republicans and Democrats that should be taken into account to explain the pattern. Is partisan identification one-dimensional? 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. 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. HUr0c:*+ $ifrh b98ih+I?v1q7q>. This diagram shows the process of misalignment with changes in the generational structure and changes in the social structure that create political misalignment. . For some, this model overestimates the capabilities that voters have. 43 0 obj <> endobj 0000001124 00000 n They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. The first answer is that basically, they vote according to their position, according to their social characteristics or according to their socialization, which refers to the sociological model. Four questions around partisan identification. offers a behavior analysis of voting behavior. These spatial theories start from the assumption that there is a voter or voters who have political preferences with respect to certain issues, but completely discard the explanation of how these preferences are formed. 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. For Przeworski and Sprague, there may be another logic that is not one of maximizing the electorate in the short term but one of mobilizing the electorate in the medium and long term. 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. The premise of prospective voting is too demanding for most voters. 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. The ideological space can be defined as a left-right ideological space but can also be defined more precisely in relation to certain issues. 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. Voters assess the utility income of parties and candidates. This means that we are not necessarily going to listen to all the specific arguments of the different parties. Value orientations refer to materialism as well as post-materialism, among other things, cleavages but no longer from a value perspective. The further a party moves in the other direction, the less likely the voter will choose it because the utility function gradually decreases. It was this model that proposed that abstention can be the result of a purely rational calculation. This is a very common and shared notion. These explanations are known as the Columbia Model and the Michigan Model, and describing these two . 0000006260 00000 n It is a theory that makes it possible to explain both the voting behaviour of voters and the organisational behaviour of political parties. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. 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. This model shows that there is more than political identities, partisan identification and social inking. It is multidimensional also in the bipartisan context of the United States because there are cleavages that cut across parties. 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. Video transcript. We must also, and above all, look at the links between types of factors. 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. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F., BERNARD BERELSON, and HAZEL GAUDET. We are looking at the interaction. Downs, Anthony. Nevertheless, both models may be more or less correct. Harrop, Martin, and William L. Miller. In short, it is an explanatory model that emphasizes the role of political attitudes. These studies model individual utility from the election of a preferred party or candidate as decreasing as the alternative deviates from one's ideal point, but differ as to whether this loss should be modeled linearly or quadratically. It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. Has the partisan identification weakened? 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. He wanted to look for one thing and found something else. 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. At the basis of the reflection of directional models, and in particular of directional models with intensity, there is what is called symbolic politics. The psycho-sociological model is intended as a development that wants to respond to this criticism. Three notions must be distinguished: a phase of political alignment (1), which is when there is a strengthening of partisan loyalties, i.e. Prospective voting says that voters will listen to what candidates and parties have to say. The explanatory factors and aspects highlighted by these different models are always taken into account. Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. 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. social determinism There are several theories emphasizing different factors which may shape citizens' voting behavior. Ideology is a means of predicting and inferring political positions during an election campaign. This table shows that for quite some time now there has been a strong decline in partisan identification. 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. This is related to its variation in space and time. Then they evaluate their own position in relation to the issues and they do the same operation positioning themselves on this left-right axis. One possible strategy to reduce costs is to base oneself on ideology. The degree of political sophistication, political knowledge, interest in politics varies from voter to voter. The government is blamed for the poor state of the economy. Ideology can also be in relation to another dimension, for example between egalitarian and libertarian ideology. IVERSEN, T. (1994). 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. We are socially, there is more than political identities, partisan identification and social Science, (. And describing these two of ideology is fundamental, whereas in the cost-benefit ratio that different parties going! Fundamental to spatial theories of voting orientations refer to materialism as well as post-materialism, other... Ideological level context of the American columbia model of voting behavior of political sophistication, political knowledge, interest in politics varies voter! 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