Voters try to maximize their individual utility. This is called retrospective voting, which means that we are not looking at what the parties said in their platforms, but rather at what the parties did before. It is a third explanation given by Przeworski and Sprague in their theory of partisan competition, also known as the theory of mobilization of the electorate. 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. On the other hand, this is true for the directional model; they manage to perceive a policy direction. There are a whole host of typologies in relation to issues, and we distinguish different types of issues such as position issues and issues that are more or less emotional. The third criterion is rationality, which is that based on the theory of rational choice, voters mobilize the limited means at their disposal to achieve their goals, so they will choose the alternative among the political offer that costs them the least and brings them the greatest possible benefit. 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. 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. Pages pour les contributeurs dconnects en savoir plus. The degree of political sophistication, political knowledge, interest in politics varies from voter to voter. 0000009473 00000 n The psycho-sociological model, also known as the Michigan model, can be represented graphically or schematically. Thus, voters find it easier to assess performance than declared plans during an election campaign. If someone positions himself as a left-wing or right-wing voter, the parties are positioned on an ideological level. HUr0c:*+ $ifrh b98ih+I?v1q7q>. This identification is seen as contributing to an individual's self-image. the earlier Columbia studies, the Michigan election studies were based upon national survey samples. The intensity directional model adds an element that is related to the intensity with which candidates and political parties defend certain positions. The fit of a measurement model that differentiates between the various degrees of suicidal severity was verified. We want to know how and why a voter will vote for a certain party. There are other variants or models that try to accommodate this complexity. What interests us is that the idea of issue voting is fundamental to spatial theories of voting. The psycho-sociological model initiated the national election studies and created a research paradigm that remains one of the two dominant research paradigms today and ultimately contributed to the creation of electoral psychology. 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. 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. It is an answer that remains faithful to the postulates of Downs' theory and the proximity model. This ensures congruence and proximity between the party and the electorate. 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. These authors find with panel data that among their confirmed hypotheses that extroverted people tend to have a strong and stable partisan identification. It is also possible to add that the weight of partisan identification varies from one voter to another. Simply, the voter is going to evaluate his own interest, his utility income from the different parties and will vote for the party that is closest to his interests. Video transcript. We speak of cognitive preference between one's political preferences and the positions of the parties. Today, there is an attempt to combine the different explanations trying to take into account, both sociological determinants but also the emotional and affective component as well as the component related to choice and calculation. Therefore, they cannot really situate where the different parties stand. Voting for a party and continuing to vote for such a party repeatedly makes it possible to develop an identification with that party which, in a way, then reinforces the electoral choice. From that point on, there has been the development of a whole body of literature on political psychology. How does partisan identification develop? A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. We must also take into account other socializing agents that can socialize us and make us develop a form of partisan identification. 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. In other words, they are voters who are not prepared to pay all these costs and therefore want to reduce or improve the cost-benefit ratio which is the basis of this electoral choice by reducing the costs and the benefit will remain unchanged. 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 an overestimation in this model with respect to capacity. The extent to which the usefulness of voters' choices varies from candidate to candidate, but also from voter to voter. It is quite interesting to see the bridges that can be built between theories that may seem different. These theories are the retrospective voting theories and the theories of ideological space. 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? 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. There are two slightly different connotations. 0000008661 00000 n A third possible answer is that they will vote for the candidate whose political ideas are closest to their own. There are different strategies that are studied in the literature. On the basis of this analysis a behavioral model is constructed, which is then tested on data from a Dutch election survey. 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. With regard to the limits, methodological individualism has often been evoked, saying that it is an exclusively micro-sociological perspective that neglects the effect of social structure. This is called prospective voting because voters will listen to what the parties have to say and evaluate on the basis of that, that is, looking ahead. 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. In this model, there is a region of acceptability of positional extremism which is a region outside of which the intensity of the positions or the direction shown by a party cannot go because if it goes beyond that region, the voter will no longer choose that party. Since the idea is to calculate the costs and benefits of voting for one party rather than the other, therefore, each party brings us some utility income. those who inquire: they are willing to pay these costs. 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. Radical approach regards class-based (structural) model as outdated and insufficient to explain . IVERSEN, T. (1994). Applied to the electorate, this means no longer voting for one party and going to vote for another party. What determines direction? The reference work is The Peoples Choice published in 1948 by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet. Partisan attachment is at the centre of the graph influencing opinions on certain issues being discussed or the attitudes of certain candidates. There is this curvilinear disparity because the three actors position themselves differently. In this perspective, voting is essentially a question of attachment, identity and loyalty to a party, whereas in the rationalist approach it is mainly a question of interest, cognition and rational reading of one's own needs and the adequacy of different political offers to one's needs. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Thus, voters will vote for candidates who are in the direction (1) and who are going in that direction in the most intense way (2), that is, who propose policies going in that direction in the strongest and most intense way. 0000005382 00000 n Spatial theories of voting are nothing other than what we have seen so far with regard to the economic model of voting. In other words, a directional element is introduced into the proximity model. Understanding voters' behavior can explain how and why decisions were made either by public decision-makers, which has been a central concern for political scientists, [1] or by the electorate. All of these factors and their relationships have to be taken into account, but at the centre is always the partisan attachment. The assumption is that mobilizing an electorate is done by taking clear positions and not a centrist position. There have been attempts to address this anomaly. . This theory presupposed that the voter recognizes his or her own interest, assesses alternative candidates, and on the basis of this assessment, will choose for the candidate or party that will be most favourably assessed in the sense of best serving his or her own political interests and interests. 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. Does partisan identification work outside the United States? The explanatory factors and aspects highlighted by these different models are always taken into account. 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. Numerous studies examine voting behavior based on the formal theoretical predictions of the spatial utility model. Here, preferences are endogenous and they can change. 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. Lazarsfeld was interested in this and simply, empirically, he found that these other factors had less explanatory weight than the factors related to political predisposition and therefore to this social inking. This model of directional proximity with intensity illustrates what is called symbolic politics which is related to the problem of information. 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. On the other hand, the political preferences are exogenous to the political process which is the fact that when the voter goes to vote which is the moment when he or she starts to think about this election, he or she already arrives with certain fixed or prefixed political preferences. So there are four main ways. 0000004336 00000 n The image that an individual has of himself in this perspective is also the result of this identification. The directional model also provides some answers to this criticism. This idea of an issue was not invented by the proponents of the economic model of voting but was already present in the psycho-sociological model. The voters choose the candidate whose positions will match their preferences. From the perspective of the issue vote, there are four main ways to explain how and why voters are going to vote a certain way and why parties are going to position themselves. Another model is called the funnel model of causality which has been proposed by these authors working on the psycho-sociological model. 5. 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. From the parties' perspective, this model makes different predictions than the simple proximity model, which made a prediction of convergence of a centripetal force with respect to party positioning. 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. European Journal of Political Research, 54(2), 197215. Voters will vote for a party but that party is not necessarily the one with which they identify. Harrop, Martin, and William L. Miller. party loyalties are freed from their social base and thus these party identifications are formed and crystallized. Suicide is a global public health problem. On the other hand, the intensity directional model better explains the electoral choices of candidates who are not currently in power. 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. If that is true, then if there are two parties that are equally close to our preferences, then we cannot decide. The influence of friends refers to opinion leaders and circles of friends. An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy. Journal of Political Economy, vol. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there has been a strong development of directional models. the further a party moves in the same direction as the voter, the more likely it is to be chosen by that voter. There are different types of individuals who take different kinds of shortcuts or not, who vote systematically or not, and so on. startxref 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 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. Is partisan identification one-dimensional? 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