- 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 . Hirschman wanted to explain what happens in organizations when they enter a situation of crisis or decline. Later, their analysis saw that party identification and attachment was the most common factor. The presupposition is that voter preferences are not exogenous but are endogenous - they change within the framework of an electoral process. Partisan identification becomes stronger over time. 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. 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. From the point of view of parties and candidates, the economic model and in particular the model that was proposed by Downs in 1957 and which predicts a convergence of a party position towards the centre. There is little room for context even though there are more recent developments that try to put the voter's freedom of choice in context. Cross-pressure theory entered political science via the analysis of voting behavior at Columbia University (Lazarsfeld et al. In this model, importance is given to primary socialization. The initial formulation of the model is based on the Downs theory in An Economic Theory of Democracy publi en 1957. In a phase of alignment, this would be the psycho-sociological model, i.e. 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. 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. Voters who rely on strong partisan identification do not need to go and do systematic voting or take one of the shortcuts. social determinism The premise of prospective voting is too demanding for most voters. . The ideological space can be defined as a left-right ideological space but can also be defined more precisely in relation to certain issues. The organization is in crisis and no longer reflects our own needs. 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. 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. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F., BERNARD BERELSON, and HAZEL GAUDET. McClung Lee, A. By finding something else, he shaped a dominant theory explaining the vote. 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. A first criticism that has been made is that the simple proximity model gives us a misrepresentation of the psychology of voting. Finally, they can vote for the candidate who is most likely in the voters' perception to change things in a way or in a way that leaves them the most satisfied. It is a theory that is made in the interaction between supply and demand, that is, between parties offering something and voters asking for something. For many, voting is a civic duty. Although the models rely on the same data they make radically different predictions about the political future. Voters calculate the cost of voting. Four questions around partisan identification. This article reviews the main theoretical models that explain the electoral behavior sociological model of voting behavior, psychosocial model of voting behavior and rational. They are both proximity choices and directional choices with intensity, since there are voters who may choose intensity and others who may choose direction. There are two variations. 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 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. 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. In this approach, it is possible to say that the voter accepts the arguments of a certain party because he or she feels close to a party and not the opposite which would be what the economic model of the vote postulates, that is to say that we listen to what the party has to say and we will choose that party because we are convinced by what that party says. The intensity directional model adds an element that is related to the intensity with which candidates and political parties defend certain positions. For most theories, and in particular Matthews' Simple Directional Model theory, the neutral point determines direction. This is an alternative way which is another answer to the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates. as a party's position moves away from our political preferences. 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. 0000010337 00000 n Video transcript. There are also intermediate variables that relate to loyalties to a certain group or sense of belonging. The same can be said of the directional model with intensity. In general, they are politically more sophisticated and better educated; those who rely on the opinion of the media and opinion leaders; that of the law of curvilinear disparity proposed by May; the directional model of Rabinowitz and Matthews; Przeworski and Sprague's mobilization of the electorate. We talk about the electoral market in the media or the electoral supply. Numerous studies have found that voting behavior and political acts can be "contagious . These are models that should make us attentive to the different motivations that voters may or may not have to make in making an electoral choice. Fiorina proposed the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates: how can voters know what the position of different parties is during an election campaign? 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. <]>> These are possible answers more to justify and account for this anomaly. A representative democracy. 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. The influence of friends refers to opinion leaders and circles of friends. Within the ambit of such a more realistic, limited-rational model of human behavior, mitigation outcomes from . But more generally, when there is a campaign, the issues are discussed. The presupposition for spatial theories of voting has already been mentioned, namely the stake vote. In the Michigan model, the idea of stakes was already present but was somewhat underdeveloped, and this perspective on the role of stakes in the psychosocial model lent itself to both theoretical and empirical criticism from proponents of rationalist models. There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. in what is commonly known as the Columbia school of thought, posited that contextual factors influence the development . The theory of the economic model of the vote is also a model that allows predictions to be made about party behaviour. We leave behind the idea of spatial theories that preferences are exogenous, that they are pre-existing and almost fixed. These criticisms and limitations are related to the original model. 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. 0 %%EOF 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. According to Fiorina, identification with a party is not necessarily the result of a long phase of socialization, but it is also the result of evaluations of a certain party, it is the fact of voting for that party that makes it possible to develop a partisan identification. In the literature, we often talk about the economic theory of voting. Many researchers have criticised the Downs proximity model in particular. Much of the work in electoral behaviour draws on this thinking. Therefore, they cannot really situate where the different parties stand. 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. 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. 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. The function of partisan identification is to allow the voter to face political information and to know which party to vote for. The psycho-sociological model has its roots in Campell's work entitled The American Voter publi en 1960. We must also, and above all, look at the links between types of factors. _____ were the first widespread barriers to the franchise to be eliminated. 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. 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. On the other hand, the focus is on the political goals of the voters, whereas the psychological model puts a little more emphasis on the social use of the vote. Voters will vote for a party but that party is not necessarily the one with which they identify. 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. There is a particular requirement, which is that this way of explaining the voting behaviour of the electoral choice is very demanding in terms of the knowledge that voters may have about different positions, especially in a context where there are several parties and where the context of the political system and in particular the electoral system must be taken into account, because it may be easier for voters to know their positions when there are two parties, two candidates, than when there are, as in the Swiss context, many parties running. 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. Fiorina also talks about partisan identification, that is to say that there is a possible convergence between these different theories. On the other hand, ideologically extreme voters try to influence party policies through party activism (voice). 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 . This table shows that for quite some time now there has been a strong decline in partisan identification. Is partisan identification one-dimensional? 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. On the basis of this, we can know. If certain conditions are present, such as good democratic functioning within the party, activists will have the opportunity to exercise "voice" and influence positions. 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. Fiorina reverses the question, in fact, partisan identification can result from something else and it also produces electoral choices. Reflects our own needs own needs science via the analysis of voting has already been,. 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