preferences and positions. There have been several phases of misalignment. Voting is an instrument that serves us to achieve an objective. xxxiii, 178. This model leaves little room for the ideology which is the idea that by putting so much emphasis on the emotional voter and feelings, it leaves little room for the ideology that is central to explaining the economic model of the vote. 0 0000000929 00000 n 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. The Lazarsfeld model would link membership and voting. There is the important opposition between an economic vote based on a choice, which is the idea that the voter makes a real choice based on a cost-benefit calculation, a choice that is rational in the end according to Weber's typology, while the psycho-sociological vote is rather based on a concept of loyalty that often makes the opposition between choice and loyalty. Distance is understood in the sense of the proximity model for whom voter preference and party position is also important. 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. 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. We need to find identification measures adapted to the European context, which the researchers have done. 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 Peoples Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944) and 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. 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. A third possible answer is that they will vote for the candidate whose political ideas are closest to their own. The term "group" can mean different things, which can be an ethnic group or a social class. Print. There may be a vote that is different from partisan identification, but in the medium to long term, partisan identification should strengthen. 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. (1949). From this point of view, parties adopt political positions that maximize their electoral support, what Downs calls the median voters and the idea that parties would maximize their electoral support around the center of the political spectrum. 1.2 Psychology and behavior 9 1.3 Voting behavior and action 13 1.4 Strategies of explanation 14 1.5 Research questions and outline 16 2 The empirical analysis of voting action 19 2.1 Introduction 21 2.2 The Wrzburg school 21 2.3 Lazarsfeld and the empirical analysis of action 23 2.4 The Columbia approach to voting action 26 We must also take into account other socializing agents that can socialize us and make us develop a form of partisan identification. 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. Voting for a candidate from one party in one race and for the other party's candidate in another race is known as. 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. 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. We worked with a sample of 516 Argentinean adults, aged 18 to 75. It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. Video transcript. Parties do not try to maximize the vote, but create images of society, forge identities, mobilize commitments for the future. 65, no. If we do not accept the idea that actors will vote according to their assessment of certain issues, to be more precise, according to their assessment of the position that the various parties have on certain issues, if we do not understand that, we cannot understand the spatial theories of voting either. On the other hand, preferences for candidates in power are best explained by the proximity model and the simple directional model. 3105. It is because we are rational, and if we are rational, rationality means maximizing our usefulness on the basis of the closeness we can have with a party. Merrill, Samuel, and Bernard Grofman. 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. So, we are going to the extremes precisely because we are trying to mobilize an electorate. The utility function of the simple proximity model appears, i.e. in what is commonly known as the Columbia school of thought, posited that contextual factors influence the development . How does partisan identification develop? 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 function of partisan identification is to allow the voter to face political information and to know which party to vote for. 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. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261(1), 194194. Finally, there is an instrumental approach to information and voting. 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. 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. 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. In directional models with intensity, there are models that try to show how the salience of different issues changes from one group to another, from one social group to another, or from one candidate and one party to another. It is a very detailed literature today. It rejects the notion that voting behavior is largely determined by class affiliation or class socialization. The limitations are the explanation of partisan identification, which is that the model has been criticized because it explains or does not explain too much about where partisan identification comes from except to say that it is the result of primary socialization. There have been attempts to address this anomaly. In both The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) and Voting (Berelson et al., 1954), the authors 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. 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 who vote against the party with which they identify keep their partisan identification. 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. 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. Its weak explanatory power has been criticized, and these are much more recent criticisms in the sense that we saw when we talked about class voting in particular, which from then on saw the emergence of a whole series of critics who said that all these variables of social position and anchoring in social contexts may have been explanatory of participation and voting at the time these theories emerged in the 1950s, but this may be much less true today in a phase or period of political misalignment. The aspect is based on the idea that there is an information problem that represents a difficulty and costs that voters must pay to gather information and to become informed about an election. 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. In the spatial theories of the vote, we see the strategic link between a party's supply and a demand from voters or electors. The concept of electoral choice does not belong to the sociological model but rather to rationalist theories. It is possible to attribute some merits and some criticisms to this model at least in its initial formulation. 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. Another model is called the funnel model of causality which has been proposed by these authors working on the psycho-sociological model. A lawmaker's (stochastic) voting behavior is characterized by the relationship between her position in this space and the bill's position [1 . There is an idea of interdependence between political supply and demand, between parties and voters, which is completely removed from other types of explanations. 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. For the sociological model we have talked about the index of political predisposition with the variables of socioeconomic, religious and spatial status. If that is true, then if there are two parties that are equally close to our preferences, then we cannot decide. 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. It is easier to look at what someone has done than to evaluate the promises they made. 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. It is the state of the economy that will decide who will win the election or not. 0000003292 00000 n By Phone: (386) 758-1026 ext. Candidate choices are made towards parties or candidates who are going in the same direction as the voter, this being understood as the voters' political preferences on a given issue. Grofman's idea is to say that the voter discounts what the candidates say (discounting) based on the difference between current policy and what the party says it will do or promise. The sociological model obviously has a number of limitations like any voting model or any set of social science theories. Of course, there have been attempts to assess the explanatory power of directional models, but according to these researchers, these spatial models were designed to be purely theoretical in order to highlight on a purely theoretical level what motivations voters may have for their electoral choice. 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. There are different types of costs that this model considers and that need to be taken into account and in particular two types of costs which are the costs of going to vote (1) but above all, there are the costs of information (2) which are the costs of obtaining this information since in this model which postulates to choose a party on the basis of an evaluation of the different propositions of information which is available, given these basic postulates, the transparency of information and therefore the costs of information are crucial. There is a small bridge that is made between these two theories with Fiorina on the one hand and the Michigan model of another party that puts the concept of partisan identification at the centre and that conceives of this concept in a very different way, especially with regard to its origin. There is a small degree of complexity because one can distinguish between attitudes towards the candidate or the party, attitudes towards the policies implemented by the different parties and attitudes about the benefits that one's own group may receive from voting for one party rather than another. In essence, those studies provided the core concepts and models used in contemporary voting research. trailer Value orientations refer to materialism as well as post-materialism, among other things, cleavages but no longer from a value perspective. 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. However, this is empirically incorrect. Moreover, there are analogies that are made even explicitly with the idea of the market. These are possible answers more to justify and account for this anomaly. . The choice can be made according to different criteria, but they start from the assumption that there are these voters who arrive in an electoral process that refers to the idea of the hexogeneity of voters' preferences. Positioning on a left-right scale is related to this type of theory. The reference work is The People's Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. 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. 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. 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. We leave behind the idea of spatial theories that preferences are exogenous, that they are pre-existing and almost fixed. The basic assumptions of the economic model of the vote are threefold: selfishness, which is the fact that voters act according to their individual interests and not according to their sense of belonging to a group or their attachment to a party. On the other hand, women tend to have less stable partisan identification, they change more often too. 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. 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