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. Spatial theories of voting are nothing other than what we have seen so far with regard to the economic model of voting. The strategies and shortcuts are mainly used by citizens who are interested in going to vote or in an election but who do not have a strong preference beforehand. 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. What interests us is that the idea of issue voting is fundamental to spatial theories of voting. There are different types of individuals who take different kinds of shortcuts or not, who vote systematically or not, and so on. There is a kind of heterogeneity of voters. The 'funnel of causality' provided a convenient framework within which to pursue both a comprehensive program of electoral accounting and a more selective strategy of explanation. This has created a research paradigm which is perhaps the dominant paradigm today. The voters have to make that assessment and then decide which one brings more income and which one we will vote for. This model predicts a convergence of party program positions around two distinct positions, there are two types of convergence. 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. 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 possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. 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 voters are not really able to really evaluate in a forward-looking way the different positions of the parties. 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. 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. 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. 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. This is a very common and shared notion. For example, there is Lazarsfeld's theory with the idea that opinion leaders can be seen as people to whom we attribute a strong trust and maybe even an esteem in relation to the political judgment they may have and therefore, by discussing with these people, it is possible to form an electoral choice and therefore there is no need to go and pay these costs of gathering information. The second question is according to which criteria to determine the individual utility of voters. Economic theories of voting explain both voter turnout (1) and electoral choice (2). 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. The political consciousness of individuals is based on social experiences and has little weight outside these experiences. So there is an overestimation in this model with respect to capacity. 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. 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. This ensures congruence and proximity between the party and the electorate. There is also the economic vote, which is the role of the economy. 0000000929 00000 n A particular configuration is the fact that there are dissatisfied party activists who are extremist compared to voters and elected party leaders. Has the partisan identification weakened? The assumption is that mobilizing an electorate is done by taking clear positions and not a centrist position. 0 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. A third possible answer is that they will vote for the candidate whose political ideas are closest to their own. This model emphasizes the role of integration into social groups. There may be a vote that is different from partisan identification, but in the medium to long term, partisan identification should strengthen. The premise of prospective voting is too demanding for most voters. 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. Nevertheless, some of these spatial theories depart from this initial formulation. 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. Prospective voting says that voters will listen to what candidates and parties have to say. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. is partisan identification one-dimensional? 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. The spatial theory of the vote postulates that the electoral choice is made in the maximization of individual utility. in what is commonly known as the Columbia school of thought, posited that contextual factors influence the development . Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. What is interesting is that they try to relate this to personality traits such as being open, conscientious, extroverted, pleasant and neurotic. The economic model has put the rational and free citizen back at the centre of attention and reflection, whereas if we push the sociological model a bit to the extreme, it puts in second place this freedom and this free will that voters can make since the psycho-sociological model tells us that voting is determined by social position, it is not really an electoral choice that we make in the end but it is simply the result of our social insertion or our attachment to a party. How to assess the position of different parties and candidates. 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. When we talk about the Downs model, we also talk about the proximity model, which is the idea of a rational economic mode based on utility maximization. Partisan attachment is at the centre of the graph influencing opinions on certain issues being discussed or the attitudes of certain candidates. to 1/n,and thus the expected utility of voting is proportional to N/n, which is approximately independent of the size of the electorate.3 In the basic rational-choice model of voting and political participation (see Blais 2000 for an overview and many references), the relative util-ity of voting, for a particular eligible voter, is: U = pB . 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. Psychological theories are based on a type of explanation that does not focus on the issues discussed during a political campaign, for example. Finally, the results of this test are discussed and conclusions drawn. How does partisan identification develop? As part of spatial theories of the vote, some theories consider the characteristics of candidates. This model has given rise to the spatial theories of voting which are the dominant theories. In the spatial theories of the vote, we see the strategic link between a party's supply and a demand from voters or electors. This diagram shows the process of misalignment with changes in the generational structure and changes in the social structure that create political misalignment. This is related to its variation in space and time. In a phase of alignment, this would be the psycho-sociological model, i.e. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. So there is this empirical anomaly where there is a theory that presupposes and tries to explain the electoral choices but also the positions of the parties in a logic of proximity to the centre of the political spectrum, but on the other hand there is the empirical observation that is the opposite and that sees parties and voters located elsewhere. This creates a concern for circularity of reasoning. The heterogeneity of the electorate and voters must be taken into account. 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. 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 theories that are supposed to explain the electoral choice also explain at the same time the electoral participation in particular with the sociological model. This is a fairly reasonable development, as is the discounting model, whose proximity was something reasonable and which makes the model more consistent with reality. 0000007835 00000 n In other words, if we know the partisan identification of voters, we can make a prediction about what the normal vote will be, which is a vote that is not or should not be influenced by other situational factors in a given electorate. 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. In other words, in this retrospective assessment, the economic situation of the country plays a crucial role. This paper examines two models used in survey research to explain voting behavior and finds that both models may be more or less correct. These two proximity models are opposed to two other models that are called directional models with Matthews' simple directional model but especially Rabinowitz's directional model with intensity. There are several reasons that the authors of these directional models cite to explain this choice of direction with intensity rather than a choice of proximity as proposed by Downs. Most voters have a sense of allegiance to a party that is inherited through the family. 43 0 obj <> endobj The starting point is that there is a congruence of attitudes between party leaders and voters due to the possibility of exit for voters when the party no longer represents them (exit). 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. By Web: Vote-By-Mail Web Request. We speak of cognitive preference between one's political preferences and the positions of the parties. 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. An important factor is the role of political campaigns in influencing the vote. 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. A representative democracy. changes in voting behaviour from one election to the next. The reference work is The Peoples Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. 0000010337 00000 n 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. the earlier Columbia studies, the Michigan election studies were based upon national survey samples. 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. Voters assess the utility income of parties and candidates. 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. Various explanations have been offered over the roughly 70-year history of voting behavior research, but two explanations in particular have garnered the most attention and generated the most debate in the literature on voting behavior. Parties do not try to maximize the vote, but create images of society, forge identities, mobilize commitments for the future. The book's focus was sociological, mainly considering socio-demographic predictors, interpersonal influence, cross-pressures, and the effects of social groups, as well as analyzing voter activation, reinforcement, and conversion across the election year. 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