As part of spatial theories of the vote, some theories consider the characteristics of candidates. Much of the work in electoral behaviour draws on this thinking. Prospective voting says that voters will listen to what candidates and parties have to say. We are going to talk about the economic model. The organization is in crisis and no longer reflects our own needs. Voters who vote against the party with which they identify keep their partisan identification. The importance of symbolic politics is especially capitalized on by the intensity directional models. The fit of a measurement model that differentiates between the various degrees of suicidal severity was verified. There may be one that is at the centre, but there are also others that are discussed. %%EOF 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. They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. 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. 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. In other words, the homing tendency that is the explanation that the model postulates is much less true outside the United States. 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. If voters, who prefer more extreme options, no longer find these options within the party they voted for, then they will look elsewhere and vote for another party. Psychological theories are based on a type of explanation that does not focus on the issues discussed during a political campaign, for example. is premised on the assumption that elections connect the will of the people to the actions of government. The theory of the economic model of the vote is also a model that allows predictions to be made about party behaviour. Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. The main explanatory factors have been sought in socio-economic status and socio-demographic variables such as "age," "gender," and "education. 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. (1949). 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. There are several theories emphasizing different factors which may shape citizens' voting behavior. This table shows that for quite some time now there has been a strong decline in partisan identification. The anomaly is that there is a majority of the electorate around the centre, but there are parties at the extremes that can even capture a large part of the preferences of the electorate. The psycho-sociological model, also known as the Michigan model, can be represented graphically or schematically. The spatial theory of the vote postulates that the electoral choice is made in the maximization of individual utility. 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 initial formulation of the model is based on the Downs theory in An Economic Theory of Democracy publi en 1957. the maximum utility is reached at the line level. 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. 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. When the voter is in the same position, i.e. For Fiorina, the retrospective vote is the fact that current policy is fundamental, whereas in the prospective vote it is less so. The Peoples Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. A first criticism that has been made is that the simple proximity model gives us a misrepresentation of the psychology of voting. 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. On the other hand, the intensity directional model better explains the electoral choices of candidates who are not currently in power. [10], The third model is called the economic model of the vote or the Rochester School of Economics, developed by Downs in the book An Economic Theory of Democracy published in 1957.[11]. 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. 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. 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. 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. Misalignment creates greater electoral volatility that creates a change in the party system that can have a feedback on the process of alignment, misalignment or realignment. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. European Journal of Political Research, 54(2), 197215. This is a very common and shared notion. In short, it is an explanatory model that emphasizes the role of political attitudes. The vote is seen here as an instrument, that is to say, there is the idea of an instrumental vote and not an expressive one. p. 31). It can be defined as lasting feelings of attachment that individuals develop towards a certain party. The relationship between partisan identification and voting is that the model postulates that partisan identification is the explanatory variable and that voting for the electoral choice is the explained variable. This approach emphasizes a central variable which is that of partisan identification, which is a particular political attitude towards a party. 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. 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. 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. 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. We must also take into account other socializing agents that can socialize us and make us develop a form of partisan identification. 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. 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. How to assess the position of different parties and candidates. 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. 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. Proximity models will give certain proximity related answers and the other more recent models offer an alternative answer based on certain criticisms. By Web: Vote-By-Mail Web Request. It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. 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. It is possible to create a typology that distinguishes between four approaches crossing two important and crucial elements: "is voting spatial? 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. 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. The reference work is The Peoples Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. On the other hand, this is true for the directional model; they manage to perceive a policy direction. But more generally, when there is a campaign, the issues are discussed. The idea is that each voter can be represented by a point in a hypothetical space and this space can be a space with N dimensions and each dimension represents an election campaign issue, so that this point reflects his or her ideal set of policies, i.e. These are voters who proceed by systematic voting. These theories are called spatial theories of the vote because they are projected. 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. 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. 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. 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. There are other variants or models that try to accommodate this complexity. 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 this theory, we vote for specific issues that may be more or less concrete, more or less general, and which form the basis for explaining electoral behaviour. (Second edition.) 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. $2.75. it is an element of direction and not an element of distance or proximity that counts. 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. As the authors of The American Voter put 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. There may be a vote that is different from partisan identification, but in the medium to long term, partisan identification should strengthen. A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. The economic model makes predictions and tries to explain both the participation but also, and above all, the direction of the vote, which is the electoral choice. Often, in the literature, the sociological and psycho-sociological model fall into the same category, with a kind of binary distinction between the theories that emphasize social, belonging and identification on the one hand, and then the rationalist and economic theories of the vote, which are the economic theories of the vote that focus instead on the role of political issues, choices and cost-benefit calculations. Discounting is saying that the voter does not fully believe what the parties say. There are also external factors that also need to be considered, such as the actions of the government, for example, voters are influenced by what the government has done. The goal of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the measurement of suicide severity based on the Columbia suicide severity rating scale. This has created a research paradigm which is perhaps the dominant paradigm today. 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 law of curvilinear disparity takes up this distinction. Several studies show that the impact of partisan identification varies greatly from one context to another. Cross-pressure theory entered political science via the analysis of voting behavior at Columbia University (Lazarsfeld et al. The idea is that you stay loyal and you do "voice", that is, act to make things change. This model explains for Downs why we abstain. 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. But there are studies that also show that the causal relationship goes in the other direction. the difference in the cost-benefit ratio that different parties give. The reference work is The People's Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. That is why there are many empirical analyses that are based on this model. It was this model that proposed that abstention can be the result of a purely rational calculation. A lawmaker's (stochastic) voting behavior is characterized by the relationship between her position in this space and the bill's position [1 . 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. There has also been the criticism of abstention as the result of rational calculation. Basic Idea What you are vote choice ; Key foundational studies ; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet (1944) The Peoples Choice Berelson, Lazarsfeld, McPhee (1954) Voting There are a whole bunch of individual characteristics related to the fact that one is more of a systematic voter of something else. One important element of this model must be highlighted in relation to the others. 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. Does partisan identification work outside the United States? We are looking at the interaction. The idea is to see what are all the factors that explain the electoral choice. 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. So there are four main ways. changes in voting behaviour from one election to the next. It is no longer a question of explaining "why" people participate but "how", that is, in terms of voter turnout, what choice is made and what can explain an electoral choice. This refers to the Michigan model, the psycho-sociological model. In the study of electoral behaviour, there is a simple distinction between what is called prospective voting and retrospective voting. The psycho-sociological model is intended as a development that wants to respond to this criticism. For Lazarsfeld, "a person thinks politically as he or she is socially". Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. - What we're going to do in this video is start to think about voting behavior, and in particular, we're going to start classifying motivations for why someone votes for a particular candidate, and I'm going to introduce some terms that will impress your political science friends, but you'll see that they map two things that . We leave behind the idea of spatial theories that preferences are exogenous, that they are pre-existing and almost fixed. Voting is an instrument that serves us to achieve an objective. 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. Positioning on a left-right scale is related to this type of theory. The concept of electoral choice does not belong to the sociological model but rather to rationalist theories. This is something that remains difficult in theory, we don't know how much the voter will discount. 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. 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. 0000007835 00000 n 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. 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