Voting Behaviour

6 Key excerpts on "Voting Behaviour"

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  Politics & Power

  • Warren Kidd, Karen Legge, Philippe Harari(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  For example, it might be rational to vote tactically and this choice might be the result of an individual’s own subjective sense of class that they have developed across a whole lifetime of experiences. VOTING: WILL WE EVER HAVE A CLEAR PICTURE? As we have discussed, Voting Behaviour is complex and varied. Perhaps the reason why so many models exist to explain Voting Behaviour is in part explained by the fact that so many individuals are involved. With so many different choices and decisions being made, it would be a mistake to assume that because all these decisions might look the same (they are all crosses on a ballot paper) they might be the same. They are clearly not. A vote for the same 154 Politics and Power party might be made for very different reasons depending on the individual voting. In recent years sociological views on psephology have moved away from models that look at group behaviour and towards models that look at indi-vidual behaviour. These seek to understand the act of voting, like many other forms of decision-making, as being influenced by a wide range of factors that include social class, but also ethnicity, gender, regional factors and other fac-tors linked to class, such as home ownership and trade union membership. The importance of each factor will vary from election to election, depending on the issues of the day and the changing policy positions of the different parties. The complexity of Voting Behaviour means that it is very difficult to predict how an individual will vote, but what is clear is that turnout in elec-tions and membership of political parties is declining. This may be a sign of political apathy resulting from a disillusionment with party politics and the Westminster process, or it may be that people are choosing to become involved in politics in different ways, such as pressure groups and new social movements.

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  Electoral Territoriality in Southern Africa

  • Stephen Rule(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Factors Influencing Voting Behaviour

  Statement of the Problem

  Whereas it is not easy to determine the causes of individual Voting Behaviour, studies of election results have demonstrated that political allegiances are related to a variety of factors. Prominent amongst these are the socio-economic characteristics of an electorate, and the spatial context within which their political socialisation has occurred.1 This text explores variations of Voting Behaviour within the states of southern Africa, with particular reference to the role of the geographically localised influences of regional ethnic territoriality and urbanism.

  In the past, much critical social theory has neglected to examine the role of the geographical variations of human socio-economic characteristics, as a means of explaining political processes and practices. This has been a consequence of the inordinate salience ascribed to economic determinism, in the search for explanations about the operationalisation of society. Marx actually dismissed geographical variation as an unnecessary complication in the analysis of the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. For example, the rise of territory-based nationalisms, and the emergence of modern nation-states is not adequately explained in terms only of a history of social class conflict. In recent years, social scientists have formulated theories of space and nationalism, which enhance explanations of political behaviour. This text draws upon such theories as a basis for interpreting regional variations in political affiliation in the anglophone states of southern Africa: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

  Nairn (1977) pointed out the absence of a viable theory of the existence of nationalism in the writings of Marx. Nairn held that the worldwide system of nationalisms, the concept of humanity consisting of several hundred different and discrete 'nations', has purely ideological roots. In reality, separate nationalisms have emerged concentric to the western capitalist core countries as a reaction, or a defence mechanism, against the spread of global capitalism. The social elite of countries peripheral to the Eurocentric source of nineteenth century capitalism perceived that their own material interests were being undermined by the diffusion thereof. In response they engineered the mobilisation of a 'militant inter-class' community which would soon become aware of its own identity in relation to the outside forces of domination. This was achieved by 'rediscovering a sentimental culture which was sufficiently accessible to the lower (social) strata' (Nairn, 1977, p. 340) to encourage a sense of belonging and 'national' unity. The myth of a steady diffusion of development and progress could then be passed on to the peripheral proletariat, just as it had reached the peripheral elite from its source in the capitalist core countries. Nairn asserted that ethnolinguistic factors in nationalist ideology are secondary to the material factors of uneven development. He cites the example of the discovery of oil in the North Sea (Nairn, 1977, p. 72) as having 'awakened the Scottish bourgeoisie to a new consciousness of its historic separateness, and fostered a frank, restless discontent with the expiring British world'.

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  The Austrian Party System

  • Anton Pelinka, Fritz Plasser(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 125 Intermediate and short-term factors In addition to these factors, which influence voting behavior on a long-term basis, other factors, of an intermediate and short-term nature, are of importance: 6. Issue orientation During election times the voter also forms his opinion about current po-litical issues. These issues also include certain topical events, such as scandals, which influence voting behavior and/or voting intention. The survey itself differentiated between position-issues (topical questions where the various political parties assume different positions) and va-lence-issues (the parties have the same position, e.g. with regard to job-security, but offer different solutions). The first type of issues requires the voter's concrete knowledge about the individual questions, while the second asks him to decide whom he would rather trust to present a so-lution. Valence-issues, such as job-security, environmental protection, and political morals, are not a question of knowledge but one of trust. 7. Image of the parties and candidates (party and candidate orientation) The voters attribute certain qualities and characteristics to parties and politicians. This is the basis of the subsequent evaluation of political in-formation. The image of parties and politicians can be established as a relatively stable pattern, which is very often changed only hesitantly. Frequently, the image of a party is personified by its top candidate. 8. Selected indicators of political behavior It can be assumed that there are certain predispositions in political be-havior which form preferences regarding the support of a campaigning party-for instance above-average interest in political events, the ten-dency to be an opinion leader in political discussions, or flexibility in one's political behavior (party shifters) lead to a voting decision in favor of protest parties.

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  Beyond the Electoral Connection

  A Reassessment of the Role of Voting in Contemporary American Politics

  • Kim Ezra Shienbaum(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  TWO VOTING AS AN ACT OF POLITICAL RITUALISM Τ A. he heated and seemingly endless debates over whether citizens behave rationally (instrumentally) have focused primarily on people's behavior in-side the polling booth. In other words, debate has focused on the decision of who to vote for rather than on the rationality of the decision whether to go to the polls at all. The former emphasis can be easily explained. Elections are assumed to be at the core of the American political process, and it follows that, through their choices between candidates, citizens can secure political influence over the direction of future government policy and retain control over decision-makers. Based on the assumption that voting is essentially a choice between candidates based on expectations of their future performance (prospective voting), Gerald Pomper states: Voters can meaningfully intervene to sup-port a leadership group which is seeking to enact a particular program. By their endorsements of particular contestants in the bargaining process the voters can have the final word. The choice of governors can thereby become a choice of government policy. 1 Other and more recent efforts have chosen to focus on retrospective voting, that is, voting as a judgment on past perfor-mance. Morris Fiorina, for instance, suggests, elections do not signal the direction in which society should move so much as they convey an evaluation of where society has been. 2 Pomper claims, To exert their influence, voters 16 17 Voting as an Act of Political Ritualism have the most obvious and vital sanction: they control the politician's job. They can quickly and bloodlessly dismiss an offensive official and thereby end his power, prestige and profit. 3 Although voters in a democracy are supposed to have control over poli-ticians and influence over their policies through the ballot, American practice is demonstrably at odds with democratic theory woven into electoral myth.

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  Money and Votes

  Constituency Campaign spending and Election Results

  • Ron Johnston, R. J. Johnston(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  These estimates use not only census and electoral data at the constituency scale but also national data (obtained from sample surveys) showing the link between voting and such attributes as occupation and housing tenure. The latter source is by far and away the most important for most psephologists today, because it avoids the ecological problem of inference that is present in the analysis of constituency data and provides a much greater range of material that can be linked to Voting Behaviour. Such surveys are usually small (most are based on about 2000 respondents; the 1983 British Election Study had 3955) which precludes much detailed analysis of spatial variations. This leads to the unfortunate implicit assumption underlying much British psephological writing that there is a uniform political culture that is spatially invariant (see Johnston, 1985a, 1986b) — an assumption that much of the geographical research has shown to be unfounded. (If it is unfounded, then the randomised sampling procedures which are the basis of the surveys are probably invalid: Miller, 1984; Warde, 1986.)

  British Voting Behaviour as modelled in the British Election Studies

  Of the various analyses of Voting Behaviour in Britain that are based on survey data, the most important are those in the sequence known as the British Election Studies: these began at the University of Oxford under David Butler’s direction in the 1960s; were moved to the University of Essex in the 1970s, where they were directed by Ivor Crewe and B. Sarlvik; and returned to Oxford for the 1983 election with a study directed by Antony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice. Their main output is a series of three books — Political change in Britain (Butler and Stokes, 1969 and 1974), Decade of dealignment (Sarlvik and Crewe, 1983), and How Britain votes (Heath, Jowell, and Curtice, 1985) — which present a common implicit model of British Voting Behaviour.

  This model (whose characteristics are clearly delineated in the structure of the three books) has two basic components. The first refers to the long-term processes of political socialisation. To most analysts, the principal determinant of how people vote is their class position; they are socialised into a particular set of attitudes as a function of their occupation, and these are linked to one particular party. Thus, the Labour party has developed as the party of the working class, those with manual occupations; the Conservative party as the political voice of the middle class, those with non-manual occupations; and the Liberal party has not been associated with a particular set of attitudes but rather has been represented as a focus of protest votes only (Himmelweit et al

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  Women and Politics in France 1958-2000

  • Dr Gill Allwood, Gill Allwood, Dr Khursheed Wadia, Khursheed Wadia(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Electoral behaviour and attitudes The study of participation has tended to concentrate on elections, not least because of the accessible and comparable nature of the available data. It is one of the most developed areas of French political science, and has been dominated by two models which have competed with each other in the search for an explanation of patterns of Voting Behaviour. These are ‘social determinism’ and ‘rational choice’. Social determinism stresses the importance of the ‘demand side’ of electoral decision-making, focusing on the social categories which make electoral choices. The rational choice model focuses on the various components of the ‘supply side’ and how these influence individual voter–consumers. The social determinist model posits that voting preferences are determined by certain sociological factors, the most important being class, wealth and religiosity. It was the dominant model during the 1970s and appeared able to account for changes in electoral behaviour since the Second World War, relating these changes to socio-economic and cultural change. Economic growth, urbanisation, the growth of the tertiary sector, the decline in religious practice and the mass entry of women into the labour market were all seen as factors contributing to an increase in the number of potential left-wing voters, and the Socialist victory of 1981 seemed to confirm the hypothesis. However, after 1981, the declining support for the left amongst the very categories which had brought it to power, the rise of parties outside the parliamentary system, such as the Front national and the Verts, and the changing allegiances of voters from one election to the next, favoured the competing explanatory model: that of the informed voter– consumer, who based his/her rational decision on the salient issues of the moment (Mayer and Perrineau 1992: 84)

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