The SAGE Handbook of Electoral Behaviour

Kai Arzheimer, Jocelyn Evans, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Kai Arzheimer, Jocelyn Evans, Michael S. Lewis-Beck

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473959255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Kampagnen & Wahlen

The study of voting behaviour remains a vibrant sub-discipline of political science. The Handbook of Electoral Behaviour is an authoritative and wide ranging survey of this dynamic field, drawing together a team of the world?s leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art review that sets the agenda for future study.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach and focusing on a range of countries, the handbook is composed of eight parts. The first five cover the principal theoretical paradigms, establishing the state of the art in their conceptualisation and application, and followed by chapters on their specific challenges and innovative applications in contemporary voting studies. The remaining three parts explore elements of the voting process to understand their different effects on vote outcomes.

The SAGE Handbook of Electoral Behaviour is an essential benchmark publication for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of politics, sociology, psychology and research methods.

1 Introduction

Kai Arzheimer

Jocelyn Evans

Michael S. Lewis-Beck

How do we decide how to vote? Since the post-war behavioural revolution, psephologists have proposed a set of relatively simple theories to account for the social and psychological processes which result in the nature of the vote cast. To test the simple theories, a larger set of varyingly complex and technically sophisticated models have been operationalised to provide a more or less rigorous empirical validation, or negation. The complexity of models has derived both from a desire to combine theories, either to generate more complete accounts of voting behaviour, or to test competing hypotheses, and from a need to specify such models robustly, to avoid spuriousness and biased estimations.

Party identification, the pivotal variable to any full model of voting in post-war democracies, is a case in point. A baseline to any well-specified voting model in countries where there has been demonstrated validity, the underlying concept of an affective attachment to a party has remained relatively untouched as a cornerstone of vote motivation. The principal source of its development has been debated, the social–psychological bases to Michigan's take on early political socialisation being challenged by the retrospective learning process posited by Morris Fiorina and other rational choice adepts. This tension between a social–psychological approach and a rational choice approach also finds expression in the argument over the extent to which party identification is exogenous or endogenous. Put another way, does party identification have the characteristics of a stable, long-term enduring attachment, or the characteristics of a changing, short-term, more unstable predisposition? This question finds some resolution in the dynamic models of party identification which enable both theories to consider how identification evolves over time, information and experience recasting what early socialisation has imbued.

But all these refinements, re-conceptualisations and re-interpretations notwithstanding, the core of the argument made by Campbell et al. back in 1960 still stands. Taken together, the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate that the act of voting grows out of some form of partisanship and sociological status that anchors the voters in the long term, while they are buffeted about by short-term forces, such as the pressing issues and leadership appeals of a campaign. Of course, once in the voting booth, voters themselves must reconcile these contradictions by making a unique party choice.

Sociological accounts of voting, though at first sight having experienced greater changes over time, betray a similar stability at the conceptual level. The binary simplism of the class divide, or the secular–religious conflict which for so long dominated many countries’ Left–Right content, has given way to more variegated accounts of occupational class and gradations of religious practice. At the same time, evidence for the growing influence of other socio-demographic attributes as explanatory variables rather than the ‘standard controls’ they were once relegated to – gender, age, ethnicity, amongst others – has been clearly seen in countries even where class has been most widely (and somewhat erroneously) written off. Underlying all such behavioural approaches to the sociology of voting – as opposed to the structural–functional determinism of cleavage theory which in many ways relegated voters to ballot-wielding pawns to be pushed along the electoral board – is an assumption that the environmental context of individuals drives their behaviour and shapes information, attitudes and preferences. An atomised account of value-neutral information gathering and processing by a voter qua data miner is absent in any empirically founded account of voting.

Given the debates which have taken place over the past 30 years regarding the decline of social–structural and socio-demographic accounts of voting, some may be surprised at the space we give to these individually. Undoubtedly, the role of class, religion and other social identities has changed in accounts of voting, and in some senses declined. Where religious identification, and more importantly religious practice, has declined in absolute terms across most if not all democratic societies, the amount of variance these factors can account for in a voting model will likely decline. However, among a greater patchwork of social identities and group belongings, rather than as one side of a binary cleavage, religious affiliation can still be a powerful predictor of vote. The patchwork metaphor works well for social class in the modern era too. The Marxist dyad or the manual/non-manual split, which suited simple numerical indices of class voting – but little else – have been replaced by more granular and only quasi-hierarchical categories of occupational class and sector belonging which are a far more satisfactory description of social structure by employment than an a priori politicised frame with a decidedly Procrustean approach to fit. Social structure remains important even where voting no longer lines up with its categories, because at the very least it provides the researcher with a benchmark against which to see both how voting has changed from the demand side and also how parties have shifted their offer, consciously or otherwise, away from the social structuration which previously oriented their programmes.

Nevertheless, it remains a difficult argument to make that, even where the direct causal link of social structure on vote is broken, the more proximate explanations of vote, such as attitudes towards policies and leaders, derive from something other than social context. While the disconcertingly random voter discovered through Converse's belief system paradigm has since been shown to be somewhat more consistent and ordered than previously assumed, homo economicus is certainly not a reasonable label for modern voters any more than it was for their forebears. A greater quantity of political information is available through traditional, electronic and social media, but this information is processed through biased filters and prejudiced cognitive systems, if it is received at all. Modern voters no more sit down and neutrally construct a political ideology based upon beliefs and context than they apply this strategy to any other habitual and affective behaviour in their lives. Context preconditions behaviour through attitudes. If not the context of social position, gender, ethnicity and identity, then what?

Modern studies of voting have come up with a complementary answer to social context that previous work had only hinted at more or less anecdotally, by beginning to operationalise the workings of the human cognitive and affective system(s) and, even beyond that, the very building blocks of human life – DNA and genetics – which associate with political choice. Where Wallas described impulse and instinct, and the non-rational side of politics, biology, psychology and neuroscience now show us how such unconscious drivers activate in political behaviour as much as in other aspects of life. For a discipline which spends much of its time asserting its broad relevance and interest to an external audience increasingly turned off by the topic's content, political science has generally proved remarkably resistant to studies that lodge ‘political behaviour’ in the ‘behaviour’ box. Methodological concerns over causality, the extrapolation from lying in an MRI machine to standing in front of a voting machine, and processes which remain largely ‘black box’ can be well taken, if they acknowledge that similar concerns need to apply as strongly to more traditional approaches with exactly the same methodological issues. Clinical science variables may be latecomers to the party, but they are not gatecrashers¹.

Again, however, the challenge comes not to the ‘heavy variables’ (les variables lourdes as French psephologists call them) of social context and party identification, or the more proximate issue causes, but rather to the process of interaction between the individual and their context, and how cognitive and affective processes within that context arrive at a political choice. The history of voting studies has been at its most productive not from trying to turn traditional voting accounts on their heads, but rather by better explaining how those accounts work under the bonnet. Party identification is measurable as a phenomenon in the United States. Refinements in understanding the conditions of its appearance, its mutability, and its manner of influence do not undermine the concept, but rather reinforce its core role in voters’ decision making. True, the extent to which strong identifiers have been increasingly offset by ‘leaners’ demonstrates that the factors responsible for party identification have changed in their relative strength and composition. But party remains the key shortcut to vote choice. The findings of Columbia, indirectly, and Michigan, directly, remain valid seven decades on.

Continuity of a similar kind will strike readers who cover the majority or all of the chapters. A handful of key texts return no matter what the content. The American Voter by the Michigan team and VO Key's The Responsible Electorate, along with Anthony Downs's Economic Theory of Democracy and Fiorina's Retrospective Voting in American National Elections, are four texts whose concepts and approaches have influenced a substantial proportion of all research into voting. Those readers who are struck by the rich collection of sociological explanations may well be those equally struck by the absence of a dedicated rational choice chapter. As a field which in the past has been characterised as cartelising schools of thought and journals in a way that many physicists have more recently bemoaned string theory doing², why have we apparently bypassed this theoretical canon? The answer is to be found in the abundance of chapters where rational choice's influence lies implicit in the assumptions about voter behaviour. What is implied may not be perfectly informed homo economicus (not that Downs ever assumed perfect information) with a cognitively processed cost-benefit analysis resulting in utility maximisation. Rational choice's eventual influence may well have come instead from the modifications imposed by boundedness, by psychological insights into low-cost habitual, affective action and by all manner of shortcuts, heuristics and thought-saving devices that voters employ. Rational choice's first-principles derived theory was required to step away from the empiricist induction characteristic of many ‘explanations’ – pattern spotting and anecdotal in many cases – of vote, to spur more realistic accounts of the decision calculus employed by the electorate. As the chapters in this Volume attest, party identification; economic voting; strategic voting; core ideology; valence; geolocation – all partly or totally rely upon a level of cognitive evaluation and choice for the theoretical framework to function.

With an emphasis on theoretical refinement and improvements in analysis, rather than paradigm shift, the technical sophistication of explanatory models has inevitably increased over the years. We would be mistaken to think that anything pre-1990 and the advent of PC-based statistical software could only be rudimentary. Nevertheless, the realms of maximum likelihood, simulations and Bayes were computationally, if not theoretically, off-limits. As the respective chapters on cross-national data sources, multi-level modelling and technology show, psephology has always been at the forefront of technological innovation in political science and has in turn benefitted hugely from novel ways of collecting, sharing and analysing data. The best models employ the technical sophistication to reflect as accurately as possible the functional form of an outcome, to map involved causal pathways, to anticipate the role that time plays in variation of effects, to correct bias – in short, to try to depict a simplified reality as accurately as possible in quantitative terms. But where technical sophistication begins to outweigh simplicity as an end, rather than a means, the balance has shifted, and for the worse.

This may seem like a truism, but where simple models of electoral behaviour still add immense value is in exploring new inflections to the vote calculus which better data now provide. For, while we would underline that the principal explanations of vote remain constant in their relevance, if not in the hierarchy of their importance, there is still work to be done in exploring minor influences on voter choice. The personal vote, candidate effects, campaign effects more generally and even electoral institutions may not always be game-changers, but rather condition baseline voting propensities, yet their influence adds to our understanding of what matters to voters beyond the main causal drivers. This knowledge has helped tremendously in developing a new branch of electoral studies, that of election forecasting. Of course, the causal factors enabling successful forecasts of this sort have always been present in voting research, at least on the margins and often at the heart, for example in The American Voter. Yet, the dominance of large-n national sample survey work has in the past diverted the study of candidate-specific, or campaign-driven, investigations of aggregate-level electoral effects to a separate stream of research. Advances both in choice modelling and data linking mean that this stream has now become a river, whose major forks (e.g. political markets or econometric forecasting) thankfully branch back to the main channel eventually.

Such refinements have occurred largely in the countries where voting models have been most prevalent – from the US origins through to mainly European counterparts. In these countries, commitment to collection of large-scale election data, and to funding supplementary studies with specific analytical foci, has ensured that researchers can test across time and space. However, it is evident that an increasing number of newer democracies provide auspicious setting for refining and retesting models. In Latin America, Asia and Africa, rigorous election studies are increasingly present for researchers wishing to find different contexts in which to test their assumptions. European studies have a growing set of cases with the inclusion of Central and Eastern European countries. Whilst comparative datasets across large numbers of countries have not always provided the highest level of rigour or comparability in the past, national election studies predicated upon the full model of voting are now increasingly the norm. Even where such data are still not directly accessible, or do not exist, developments in datascraping of online sources mean almost no country is now beyond the scope of some degree of electoral analysis, and from multiple sub-disciplinary perspectives.

Indeed, one might argue that, roughly a century after its beginnings, psephology has come full circle: while political science is at its core, psephology is forever borrowing methods, concepts and data from other disciplines – geography, statistics, sociology, economics, psychology, and now even neuroscience, genetics and computer science. Looking back at the highlights of this remarkable story would have made for an interesting (if slightly nostalgic) book, too. But instead of a sentimental journey, the authors of this book have aimed for something much more rewarding: each of the following chapters presents the current state of knowledge on the respective topic whilst highlighting several points of departure for new research. Inevitably, the state of the art moves continually forward and, by the time of publication, steps will have been taken to refine voting models further, and to apply them to new contexts. Like the survey data which provide the raw material for many electoral studies, this collection is a set of snapshots of the status quo, which provide a guide to the community of electoral research. We hope you enjoy the tour.

Notes

1. One suspects no small part of the problem also comes from a certain envy at the ‘interlopers’ having better toys at their disposal.

2. It is presumably coincidental that both have been criticised in their respective fields as being long on theory, short on empirical testing.

Part I Institutional Approaches

2 Institutions and Voter Choice: Who Chooses, What Do They Choose Over, and How Do They Choose

Shaun Bowler

One of the important sources of variation across democratic systems is the variation in institutional context. That variation in institutional context is important in helping to understand the workings of electoral democracy in a comparative sense. Indeed, in one sense what is being compared in comparative studies of voter beha...