%PDF-1.3 % xref This model explains for Downs why we abstain. <]>> It is the state of the economy that will decide who will win the election or not. It is an answer that remains faithful to the postulates of Downs' theory and the proximity model. Nevertheless, both models may be more or less correct. What voters perceive are directional signals, that is, voters perceive that some parties are going in one direction and other parties are going in another direction on certain issues. 3105. This is the proximity model. 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 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. There are a whole bunch of individual characteristics related to the fact that one is more of a systematic voter of something else. Political Behaviour: Historical and methodological benchmarks, The structural foundations of political behaviour, The cultural basis of political behaviour, PEOPLE'S CHOICE: how the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign, https://doi.org/10.1177/000271624926100137, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414094027002001, https://baripedia.org/index.php?title=Theoretical_models_of_voting_behaviour&oldid=49464, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). On the other hand, in rationalist approaches, shortcuts are cognitive shortcuts. 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. 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. According to Fiorina, retrospective voting is that citizens' preferences depend not only on how close they are to the political position of a party or candidate, but also on their retrospective assessment of the performance of the ruling party or candidate. 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. The sociological model at the theoretical level emphasizes something important that rationalist and economic theories have largely overlooked, namely, the importance of the role of social context, i.e., voters are all in social contexts and therefore not only family context but also a whole host of other social contexts. The specified . 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. These theories are called spatial theories of the vote because they are projected. That is why there are many empirical analyses that are based on this model. startxref 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. This identification is seen as contributing to an individual's self-image. Pages pour les contributeurs dconnects en savoir plus. What is interesting is that they try to relate this to personality traits such as being open, conscientious, extroverted, pleasant and neurotic. Several studies show that the impact of partisan identification varies greatly from one context to another. The initial formulation of the model is based on the Downs theory in An Economic Theory of Democracy publi en 1957. Several studies have shown that the very fact of voting for a party contributes to the development of a certain identification for that party. xb```f`` @f8F F'-pWs$I*Xe< *AA[;;8:::X"$C[6#,bH.vdM?2Zr@ ai,L The political consciousness of individuals is based on social experiences and has little weight outside these experiences. 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. A representative democracy. As the authors of The American Voter put If that is true, then if there are two parties that are equally close to our preferences, then we cannot decide. This is an alternative way which is another answer to the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates. The importance of symbolic politics is especially capitalized on by the intensity directional models. 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. This is the basic motivation for the development of these directional models. There has also been the criticism of abstention as the result of rational calculation. 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. For most theories, and in particular Matthews' Simple Directional Model theory, the neutral point determines direction. Maximizing utility is done in proximity to certain issues. 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 try to maximize their individual utility. 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 idea is to see what are all the factors that explain the electoral choice. The sociological model is somewhat the model that wants to emphasize this aspect. The intensity directional model adds an element that is related to the intensity with which candidates and political parties defend certain positions. It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. We project voters' preferences and political positions, that is, the positions that parties have on certain issues and for the preferences that voters have on certain issues. 102 Lake City, FL 32055 OR 17579 SW State Road 47 Fort White, FL 32038. in what is commonly known as the Columbia school of thought, posited that contextual factors influence the development . _____ were the first widespread barriers to the franchise to be eliminated. There is no real electoral choice in this type of explanation, but it is based on our insertion in a social context. Prospective voting is based on election promises and retrospective voting is based on past performance. In spring of 2021, key people working in homelessness services in Vancouver flew to San Diego to learn about the Alpha Project's model . Four questions can be asked in relation to this measure: For the first question, there are several studies on the fact that partisan identification is multi-dimensional and not just one-dimensional. 1948, Berelson et . 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. 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. 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. 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. Much of the work in electoral behaviour draws on this thinking. 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. This model relies heavily on the ability of voters to assess and calculate their own interests and all the costs associated with the action of going to the polls. 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. On the basis of this analysis a behavioral model is constructed, which is then tested on data from a Dutch election survey. However, he conceives the origin and function of partisan identification in a different way from what we have seen before. By Web: Vote-By-Mail Web Request. It is a very detailed literature today. We must also take into account other socializing agents that can socialize us and make us develop a form of partisan identification. Many researchers have criticised the Downs proximity model in particular. voters who follow a systematic vote are voters who are willing to pay these information or information-related costs. 0000000866 00000 n For many, voting is a civic duty. These criticisms and limitations are related to the original model. In the study of electoral behaviour, there is a simple distinction between what is called prospective voting and retrospective voting. 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 Logics of Electoral Politics. 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. In other words, a directional element is introduced into the proximity model. 59 0 obj <>stream As part of spatial theories of the vote, some theories consider the characteristics of candidates. Comparative Political Studies, 27(2), 155189. With regard to the question of how partisan identification develops, the psycho-sociological model emphasizes the role of the family and thus of primary socialization, but several critics have shown that secondary socialization also plays a role. 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. Among these bridges, one of the first bridges between the psycho-sociological voting theory and the rationalist theories was made by Fiorina because he considers partisan identification to be an important element in explaining electoral choice. The directional model also provides some answers to this criticism. There is also the economic vote, which is the role of the economy. 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. There are different strategies that are studied in the literature. In Personality traits and party identification over time published in 2014 by Bakker, Hopmann and Persson, the authors attempt to explain partisan identification. preferences and positions. The psycho-sociological model has its roots in Campell's work entitled The American Voter publi en 1960. 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. The further a party moves in the other direction, the less likely the voter will choose it because the utility function gradually decreases. There was a whole series of critics who said that if it's something rational, there's a problem with the way democracy works. Some parties have short-term strategies for maximizing voting and others have long-term strategies for social mobilization. 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 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. Fiorina reverses the question, in fact, partisan identification can result from something else and it also produces electoral choices. Ideology can also be in relation to another dimension, for example between egalitarian and libertarian ideology. 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. IVERSEN, T. (1994). 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. 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. 0000009473 00000 n When the voter is in the same position, i.e. 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. Other researchers have tried to propose combined models that combine different explanations. Otherwise, our usefulness as voters decreases as a party moves away, i.e. Therefore, they cannot really situate where the different parties stand. 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. It is quite interesting to see the bridges that can be built between theories that may seem different. In a phase of alignment, this would be the psycho-sociological model, i.e. 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. 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. [14] They try to answer the question of how partisan identification is developing and how partisan identification has weakened because they look at the stability over time of partisan identification. There is an idea of interdependence between political supply and demand, between parties and voters, which is completely removed from other types of explanations. 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. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there has been a strong development of directional models. In both The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) and Voting (Berelson et al., 1954), the authors 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. 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. Most voters have a sense of allegiance to a party that is inherited through the family. 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. The fit of a measurement model that differentiates between the various degrees of suicidal severity was verified. 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. The presupposition is that voter preferences are not exogenous but are endogenous - they change within the framework of an electoral process. 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. They find that conscientious and neurotic people tend not to identify with a political party. 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. It is by this configuration that May tries to explain this anomaly which is due to the fact that there is a group of voters who become activists within the party and who succeed in shifting the party's positioning towards the extremes. 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. There are other theories that highlight the impact of economic conditions and how voters compare different election results in their electoral choices, which refers to economic voting in the strict sense of the term. 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 People's Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944) 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. We are not ignoring the psychological model, which focuses on the identification people have with parties without looking at the parties. 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. The assumption is that mobilizing an electorate is done by taking clear positions and not a centrist position. In other words, they propose something quite ecumenical that combines directional and proximity models. Fiorina's theory of retrospective voting is very simple. 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. For Fiorina the voter does not do that, he will rather look at what has happened, he will also look at the state of affairs in a country, hence the importance of the economic vote in the narrower sense of the word. On the other hand, women tend to have less stable partisan identification, they change more often too. The second criticism is the lack of an adequate theory of preference formation. La dernire modification de cette page a t faite le 11 novembre 2020 00:26. There are two variations. In other words, the homing tendency that is the explanation that the model postulates is much less true outside the United States. The influence of friends refers to opinion leaders and circles of friends. 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. 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. 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. A distinction can be made between the simple proximity model, which is the Downs model, and the proximity model with Grofman discounting. 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. There has been a lot of criticism that has allowed the idea of issue voting to develop in a rationalist context and models. In short, it is an explanatory model that emphasizes the role of political attitudes. JSTOR. [1] The distance must be assessed on the basis of what the current policy is. 135150. 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. 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. 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. 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. it takes a political position that evokes the idea of symbolic politics in a more salient way. 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. 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. These are possible answers more to justify and account for this anomaly. how does partisan identification develop? It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. 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. In this representation, there are factors related to the cleavages, but also other factors that relate to the economic, political or social structure of a country being factors that are far removed from the electoral choice but that still exert an important effect in an indirect way the effect they have on other variables afterwards. Voters who vote against the party with which they identify keep their partisan identification. So, voters evaluate the positions of the parties and from these positions, this party is a left-wing party and this party is a right-wing party. 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. Voters have knowledge of the ideological positions of parties or candidates on one or more ideological dimensions and they use this knowledge to assess the political positions of these parties or candidates on specific issues. Adds an element that is related to the question of how to the... Abstention as the result of rational calculation answers more to justify and account for this anomaly widespread barriers to postulates! Are different strategies that are studied in the same position, i.e quite interesting to see the bridges that be... A sense of allegiance to a party moves in the study of electoral behaviour, there has also the... 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