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. 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. 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). The idea is that it is in circles of interpersonal relations even if more modern theories of opinion leaders look at actors outside the personal circle. Much of the work in electoral behaviour draws on this thinking. The function of partisan identification is to allow the voter to face political information and to know which party to vote for. In their view, ideology is a means of predicting political positions on a significant number of issues and also a basis for credible and consistent engagement by the party or candidate that follows it. There is also the economic vote, which is the role of the economy. 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. These authors have tried to say that the different explanatory theories of the vote can be more or less explanatory in the sense of having more or less importance of explanatory power depending on the phases in which one is in a process of alignment and misalignment. The main explanatory factors have been sought in socio-economic status and socio-demographic variables such as "age," "gender," and "education. We worked with a sample of 516 Argentinean adults, aged 18 to 75. The second explanation refers to the directional model, i.e. 0000009473 00000 n 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 idea that one identifies oneself, that one has an attitude, an attachment to a party was certainly true some forty years ago and has become less and less true and also the explanatory power of this variable is less important today even if there are significant effects. 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. Print. Ideology is to be understood as a way of simplifying our world in relation to the problem of information. If we accept this premise, how will we position ourselves? There are several theories emphasizing different factors which may shape citizens' voting behavior. This has created a research paradigm which is perhaps the dominant paradigm today. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. The fit of a measurement model that differentiates between the various degrees of suicidal severity was verified. 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". These explanations are known as the Columbia Model and the Michigan Model, and describing these two . It is quite interesting to see the bridges that can be built between theories that may seem different. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. The Peoples Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 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. There are also studies that show that the more educated change less often from one party to another. IVERSEN, T. (1994). Since the economic crisis, there has been an increasing focus on the economic crisis and economic conditions and how that can explain electoral volatility and electoral change. [1] It is a very detailed literature today. does partisan identification work outside the United States? Today, in the literature, we talk about the economic vote in a narrower and slightly different sense, namely that the electoral choice is strongly determined by the economic situation and by the policies that the government puts in place in particular to deal with situations of economic difficulty. In the sociological and psycho-sociological model, there was no place for ideology, that's another thing that counts, on the other hand, in economic theories, spatial theories and Downs' theory of the economic vote, ideology is important. There has also been the emergence of empirical criticisms which have shown that the role of partisan identification has tended to decrease sharply and therefore an increase in the role of the issues and in particular the role of the cognitive evaluation that the actors make in relation to certain issues. The heterogeneity of the electorate and voters must be taken into account. The spatial theory of the vote postulates that the electoral choice is made in the maximization of individual utility. There may be a vote that is different from partisan identification, but in the medium to long term, partisan identification should strengthen. Downs, Anthony. This model emphasizes the role of integration into social groups. maximum proximity, as the party, his or her utility increases, and when the voter moves away from the party, his or her utility decreases. systematic voting, i.e. A distinction can be made between the simple proximity model, which is the Downs model, and the proximity model with Grofman discounting. Several studies show that the impact of partisan identification varies greatly from one context to another. Theoretically, it is possible to have as many dimensions as there are issues being discussed in an election campaign. However, this is empirically incorrect. The psycho-sociological model also developed a measure called the partisan identification index, since this model wanted to be an empirical model with behaviourism and the idea of studying individual behaviours empirically with the development of national election studies and survey data to try to measure the partisan identification index. One possible strategy to reduce costs is to base oneself on ideology. 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. trailer 0000000636 00000 n Voters try to maximize the usefulness of the vote, that is, they try to vote for the party that makes them more satisfied. These are some of the criticisms and limitations often made by proponents of other approaches. But more generally, when there is a campaign, the issues are discussed. The ideological space can be defined as a left-right ideological space but can also be defined more precisely in relation to certain issues. This means that we are not necessarily going to listen to all the specific arguments of the different parties. Certain developments in the theory of the psycho-sociological model have in fact provided answers to these criticisms. Otherwise, our usefulness as voters decreases as a party moves away, i.e. Fiorina also talks about partisan identification, that is to say that there is a possible convergence between these different theories. In this way, parties can offer relatively extreme political platforms that are not optimal in the short term, but that generate higher levels of support in the medium and long term. Also called the Columbia model (after the university from whence came the researchers), the sociological model of voting behavior was constructed with the intention of studying the effect of media on voting choice. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational choice theory , stressing the continuity and theoretical complementarity between them. A third criticism of the simple proximity model is the idea of the median voter, which is the idea that all voters group around the centre, so parties, based on this observation, will maximize their electoral support at the centre, and therefore if they are rational, parties will tend to be located more at the centre. Contenu disponible en Franais Contenido disponible en espaol Contenuto disponibile in italiano, The distinction between the three main explanatory models of voting is often found. There is an opposite reasoning. 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. Prospective voting says that voters will listen to what candidates and parties have to say. These authors find with panel data that among their confirmed hypotheses that extroverted people tend to have a strong and stable partisan identification. 0000007057 00000 n One important element of this model must be highlighted in relation to the others. There are other variants or models that try to accommodate this complexity. Direction ("Who votes for whom?") The importance of symbolic politics is especially capitalized on by the intensity directional models. In other words, this identification is part of the self-image one can have of oneself. There was a whole series of critics who said that if it's something rational, there's a problem with the way democracy works. Voters will vote for a party but that party is not necessarily the one with which they identify. The basic idea is the representation of a point that is an ideal point for each voter in a hypothetical space. 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. Economic theories of voting explain both voter turnout (1) and electoral choice (2). Symbols evoke emotions. Some parties have short-term strategies for maximizing voting and others have long-term strategies for social mobilization. The choice of candidates is made both according to direction but also according to the intensity of positions on a given issue. The idea is that you stay loyal and you do "voice", that is, act to make things change. There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. 0000008661 00000 n 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. 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. HUr0c:*+ $ifrh b98ih+I?v1q7q>. Finally, some studies show that high levels of education lead to weaker attachments to parties. They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. Basically, Downs was wrong to talk about proximity logic and to explain some of the exceptions to the proximity model. Finally, there is an instrumental approach to information and voting. La dernire modification de cette page a t faite le 11 novembre 2020 00:26. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational. This is a very common and shared notion. The theoretical account of voting behavior drew heavily upon the metaphor of a 'funnel of causality'. Harrop, Martin, and William L. Miller. 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. 0000004336 00000 n On that basis, voters calculate the utility income of the different parties and then they look at and evaluate the partisan differential. 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. The psycho-sociological model has its roots in Campell's work entitled The American Voter publi en 1960. carried out by scholars at Columbia. Proximity models will give certain proximity related answers and the other more recent models offer an alternative answer based on certain criticisms. Thus, the interpretation of differences in voting behaviour from one group to another is to be sought in the position of the group in society and in the way its relations with parties have developed. 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. 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. We must assess the costs of going to the polls, of gathering the information needed to make a decision, but also the value of one's own participation, since the model is also supposed to explain voter turnout. If you experience any difficulty accessing any part of this website, please call (386) 758-1026 or email kbanner@votecolumbiafl.gov for further assistance. The Logics of Electoral Politics. A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. Is partisan identification one-dimensional? For some, these are theories that offer reflections on the proper functioning of democracy, on presuppositions, the role of information or the role of citizens for the proper functioning of democracy and the role of parties. Today, this may be less true, but until a certain point, there were relatively few empirical analyses based on the economic model of the vote. So there are four main ways. Studies have shown that, for example, outside the United States, a much larger proportion of voters who change their vote also change their partisan identification. 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 bunch of individual characteristics related to the fact that one is more of a systematic voter of something else. 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. By Phone: (386) 758-1026 ext. This is the median voter theory. 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