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 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. carried out by scholars at Columbia. 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. 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. Voters try to maximize the usefulness of the vote, that is, they try to vote for the party that makes them more satisfied. 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. 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. Hinich and Munger say the opposite, saying that on the basis of their idea of the left-right positioning of the parties, they somehow deduce what will be or what is the position of these parties on the different issues. 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. There has been a lot of criticism that has allowed the idea of issue voting to develop in a rationalist context and models. 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. Parties do not try to maximize the vote, but create images of society, forge identities, mobilize commitments for the future. HUr0c:*+ $ifrh b98ih+I?v1q7q>. the translation of personal preference into a voluntary action designed to influence public policy 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. Models of Voting Behavior Models of Voting Behavior Dr. Bradley Best Asst. All parties that are in the same direction of the voter maximize the individual utility of that voter. There are two variations. What we see here in relation to the sociological model and that these variables highlighted by the sociological model such as socialization, inking or social position play a role but only indirectly. One important element of this model must be highlighted in relation to the others. The influence of friends refers to opinion leaders and circles of friends. The personality model highlights the importance of childhood experiences for political behavior and belief in adulthood; the sociological model highlights the importance of primary and interest . This approach would be elitist, this assumption that voters have the ability to know what is going on which is the idea of information and this ability that voters have to look at that information and process it. Symbols evoke emotions. The explanatory factors and aspects highlighted by these different models are always taken into account. When we talk about the Downs model, we also talk about the proximity model, which is the idea of a rational economic mode based on utility maximization. What interests us is that the idea of issue voting is fundamental to spatial theories of voting. Although the models rely on the same data they make radically different predictions about the political future. This electoral volatility, especially in a period of political misalignment, is becoming more and more important and is increasingly overshadowed by this type of explanation. 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. The Logics of Electoral Politics. Others have criticized this analogy between the economic market and the political market as being a bit simplistic, saying that, basically, the consequences of buying a consumer product have a certain number of consequences, but they are much more limited compared to what buying a vote can have in terms of choosing a party. Value orientations refer to materialism as well as post-materialism, among other things, cleavages but no longer from a value perspective. We must also take into account other socializing agents that can socialize us and make us develop a form of partisan identification. This jargon comes from this type of explanation. There are also studies that show that the more educated change less often from one party to another. In Person: 971 W Duval St. Ste. In other words, party activists tend to be more extreme in their political attitudes than voters or party leaders. There is the idea of the interaction between a political demand and a political offer proposed by the different candidates during an election or a vote. 43 17 In order to explain this anomaly, another explanation beside the curvilinear explanation beside the directional theories of the vote, a third possibility to explain this would be to say that there are some parties that abandon the idea of maximizing the vote or electoral support in order to mobilize this electorate and for this we have to go to extremes. 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. Later, their analysis saw that party identification and attachment was the most common factor. In Switzerland, the idea of an issue is particularly important because there is direct democracy, which is something that by definition is based on issues. emotional ties between voters and parties; a phase of political misalignment (2), which may be the one we are currently in in Europe since the economic crisis, which is a weakening of partisan loyalties resulting in increased electoral volatility, i.e. voters who follow a systematic vote are voters who are willing to pay these information or information-related costs. 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 basic idea is the representation of a point that is an ideal point for each voter in a hypothetical space. It is a rather descriptive model, at least in its early stages. 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. party loyalties are freed from their social base and thus these party identifications are formed and crystallized. This is something that remains difficult in theory, we don't know how much the voter will discount. There are other models and economic theories of the vote, including directional theories that have a different perspective but remain within the framework of economic theories of the vote. If we take into account Przeworski and Sprague's idea that there can be a mobilization of the electorate in a logic of endogenous preference and non-maximization of the utility of voters. 0000001124 00000 n 0000009473 00000 n The original measurement was very simple being based on two questions which are a scale with a question about leadership. 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. Voters assess the utility income of parties and candidates. 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. 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. The utility function of this model is modified compared to the simple model, i.e. 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. 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. the maximum utility is reached at the line level. 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. 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 The second question is according to which criteria to determine the individual utility of voters. According to Merril and Grofman, one cannot determine whether one pure model is superior to another because there are methodological and data limitations. But more generally, when there is a campaign, the issues are discussed. This theory is not about the formation of political preferences, they start from the idea that there are voters with certain political preferences and then these voters will look at what the offer is and will choose according to that offer. changes in voting behaviour from one election to the next. 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. (Second edition.) Harrop, Martin, and William L. Miller. In the study of electoral behaviour, there is a simple distinction between what is called prospective voting and retrospective voting. 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. A distinction must be made between the affective vote of the psycho-sociological model and the cognitive vote of the theories of the economic model. The Peoples Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. There are several theories emphasizing different factors which may shape citizens' voting behavior. On that basis, voters calculate the utility income of the different parties and then they look at and evaluate the partisan differential. 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 people talk about membership voting for the first two theories and cognitive voting for the economic model of voting. Direction ("Who votes for whom?") It has often been emphasized that this model and approach raises more questions than answers. 102 Lake City, FL 32055 OR 17579 SW State Road 47 Fort White, FL 32038. According to them, it is necessary to combine different types of explanations and in particular, in the electoral choice, the components related to proximity, leadership, and also the rather "intensity" leadership, all of which play a significant role in the positioning of candidates and parties. However, he conceives the origin and function of partisan identification in a different way from what we have seen before. On the other hand, the intensity directional model better explains the electoral choices of candidates who are not currently in power. Theoretically, it is possible to have as many dimensions as there are issues being discussed in an election campaign. Linked to this, it is important to look at individual data empirically as well. 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. 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. Has the partisan identification weakened? 0000003292 00000 n This paper examines two models used in survey research to explain voting behavior. The fit of a measurement model that differentiates between the various degrees of suicidal severity was verified. This is an alternative way which is another answer to the question of how to evaluate the position of different parties and candidates. Ideology is to be understood as a way of simplifying our world in relation to the problem of information. It is an explanation that is completely outside the logic of proximity and the spatial logic of voting. Voting is an instrument that serves us to achieve an objective. The premise of prospective voting is too demanding for most voters. 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 accept this premise, how will we position ourselves? Proximity models will give certain proximity related answers and the other more recent models offer an alternative answer based on certain criticisms. 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. 0000002253 00000 n The theoretical account of voting behavior drew heavily upon the metaphor of a 'funnel of causality'. An important factor is the role of political campaigns in influencing the vote. Four questions around partisan identification. 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. The idea is to see what are all the factors that explain the electoral choice. This model predicts a convergence of party program positions around two distinct positions, there are two types of convergence. These explanations are known as the Columbia Model and the Michigan Model, and describing these two . What we are interested in is on the demand side, how can we explain voters' electoral choice. The psychological and socio-economic model are strongly opposed, offering two explanations that are difficult to reconcile, even though there have been efforts to try to combine them. The idea is that this table is the Downs-Hirschman model that would have been made in order to summarize the different responses to the anomaly we have been talking about. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F., BERNARD BERELSON, and HAZEL GAUDET. 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. This model shows that there is more than political identities, partisan identification and social inking. For Lazarsfeld, "a person thinks politically as he or she is socially". 0 Regarding the causal ambiguity, there are also critics who say that this approach is very strongly correlational in the sense that it looks for correlations between certain social variables and electoral choices, but the approach does not explain why this variable approach really has a role and therefore what are the causal mechanisms that lead from insertion, positions, social predispositions to electoral choice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. A distinction is made between the sociological model of voting from the Columbia School, which refers to the university where this model was developed. does partisan identification work outside the United States? p. 31). The idea is that voters are not really able to really evaluate in a forward-looking way the different positions of the parties. As this is the first model that wanted to study empirically and test hypotheses on the basis of survey data, it was necessary to develop conceptual tools, in particular the political predisposition index, which focuses on three types of social affiliations that are fundamental in this perspective to explain electoral choices, namely social status, religion and place of residence. Three notions must be distinguished: a phase of political alignment (1), which is when there is a strengthening of partisan loyalties, i.e. 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. It is possible to create a typology that distinguishes between four approaches crossing two important and crucial elements: "is voting spatial? 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 other words, social, spatial or group membership largely determines individual political actions. In this model, importance is given to primary socialization. Downs, Anthony. 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