There are also intermediate variables that relate to loyalties to a certain group or sense of belonging. It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. For Lazarsfeld, "a person thinks politically as he or she is socially". This approach emphasizes a central variable which is that of partisan identification, which is a particular political attitude towards a party. 0000000636 00000 n 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. There is a whole literature on opinion formation, quite consensually, that says that citizens have a limited capacity to process information. 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. 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. If we look at it a little more broadly, partisan identification can be seen as a kind of shortcut. how does partisan identification develop? We want to know how and why a voter will vote for a certain party. Furthermore, "social characteristics determine political preferences". In other words, the homing tendency that is the explanation that the model postulates is much less true outside the United States. It is an explanation that is completely outside the logic of proximity and the spatial logic of voting. As far as the psycho-sociological model is concerned, it has the merit of challenging the classical theory of democracy which puts the role on the rational actor. A representative democracy. The reference work is The Peoples Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. Nevertheless, some of these spatial theories depart from this initial formulation. For the sociological model we have talked about the index of political predisposition with the variables of socioeconomic, religious and spatial status. In other words, social, spatial or group membership largely determines individual political actions. Voters are more interested in political results than in political programmes, and the choice is also made from this perspective. 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). There is an idea of interdependence between political supply and demand, between parties and voters, which is completely removed from other types of explanations. On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. 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. 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. We talk about the electoral market in the media or the electoral supply. 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. In a phase of alignment, this would be the psycho-sociological model, i.e. It is a model that is very close to data and practice and lends itself very easily to empirical testing through measures of partisan identification and different measures of socio-demographic factors among others. Voting is an instrument that serves us to achieve an objective. For Lazarsfeld, we think politically how we are socially, there is not really the idea of electoral choice. Otherwise, our usefulness as voters decreases as a party moves away, i.e. 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. Some have criticized this model saying that it puts forward the one-dimensional image of the human being and politics, that is, that it is purely rational, hypercognitive in a way without taking into account sociological but also psychological elements. Psychology and Voting Behavior In the same years that behaviorism (of various forms) came to dominate the 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. Often, in Anglo-Saxon literature, this model is referred to as the party identification model. Fiorina reverses the question, in fact, partisan identification can result from something else and it also produces electoral choices. changes in voting behaviour from one election to the next. 0000002253 00000 n 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). Fiorina's theory of retrospective voting is very simple. This is an alternative way which is another answer to the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates. 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. 102 Lake City, FL 32055 OR 17579 SW State Road 47 Fort White, FL 32038. 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. Merrill, Samuel, and Bernard Grofman. It is easier to look at what someone has done than to evaluate the promises they made. Proximity means the closeness of the voter's interests to the political proposals that are made with the parties. When you vote, you are taking your personal time and effort to advance the collective good, without any guarantee of personal rewardthe very heart of what it means to be altruistic. 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 have been attempts to address this anomaly. What interests us is that the idea of issue voting is fundamental to spatial theories of voting. 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. It is a theory that makes it possible to explain both the voting behaviour of voters and the organisational behaviour of political parties. Here we see the key factors, namely electoral choice and, at the centre, the identification variable for a party, which depends on two types of factors, namely primary socialization and group membership. What explains historical variation in voter turnout? The idea is that you stay loyal and you do "voice", that is, act to make things change. In this model, importance is given to primary socialization. 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. startxref Prospective voting is the one that has been postulated by Downs and by all other researchers who work in proximity models but also in two-way models. The intensity directional model adds an element that is related to the intensity with which candidates and political parties defend certain positions. This economic theory of the vote, this rationalist theory, has a great advantage over the other models, which is that it does not only focus on voters, that is to say, it does not only focus on political demand, but it also looks at supply and especially at the interaction between supply and demand. Moreover, retrospective voting can also be seen as a shortcut. 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. All parties that are in the same direction of the voter maximize the individual utility of that voter. The importance of symbolic politics is especially capitalized on by the intensity directional models. Ecological regression represents one extreme: the presumption that voting behavior changes systematically across groups but only changes randomly, if at all, within groups. xref 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. Lazarsfeld's book created this research paradigm. 0000010337 00000 n The utility function of this model is modified compared to the simple model, i.e. 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. Nowadays, the internet is the most used communication environment, and therefore it becomes very important to try to determine the behavior of users regarding internet use. offers a behavior analysis of voting behavior. Moreover, there are analogies that are made even explicitly with the idea of the market. There are two slightly different connotations. The idea is that this table is the Downs-Hirschman model that would have been made in order to summarize the different responses to the anomaly we have been talking about. This paper examines two models used in survey research to explain voting behavior. 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. 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. party loyalties are freed from their social base and thus these party identifications are formed and crystallized. Basic Idea What you are vote choice ; Key foundational studies ; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet (1944) The Peoples Choice Berelson, Lazarsfeld, McPhee (1954) Voting Political parties can make choices that are not choices to maximize the electorate, unlike spatial theories, where parties seek to maximize their short-term electoral support in an election. 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. This means that we are not necessarily going to listen to all the specific arguments of the different parties. It is a moment when social cleavages directly influence the vote in this approach and therefore the sociological model, perhaps, at that moment, better explains the vote. 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. The basic idea is somewhat the same, namely that it is a way that voters have at their disposal, a euristic and cognitive shortcut that voters have at their disposal to deal with the problem of complex information. 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. That is what is called the proximity vote, that is, having a preference over a policy. 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. This jargon comes from this type of explanation. 0000007835 00000 n At the basis of the reflection of directional models, and in particular of directional models with intensity, there is what is called symbolic politics. 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