Implausible hypotheses in the directional theory of issue voting

Two implausible hypotheses implied by the directional theory of issue voting were tested using six Swedish national election studies, 1979–1994. The hypotheses that (a) centrists are indifferent toward parties, and that (b) people leaning slightly in one direction prefer an extremely intense party on the same side were not supported. However, alternative hypotheses from proximity theory were also not supported consistently. Self–placement on the left–right dimension and liking for a party form a logistic function. Party set and latitudes of acceptance, rejection, and noncommitment are concepts that may prove useful in understanding this relationship.     

The proximity and the directional theories of issue voting: Comparative results for the USA and Germany

In several recent studies George Rabinowitz and his co–authors challenge the 'classical' spatial model of issue voting, the proximity model, by introducing a directional model. In this article we examine whether different measurement of perceived issue positions of candidates or parties leads to diverging judgments about the predictive power of the directional model (which is claimed to be empirically superior), as compared to the proximity model, using data from the USA and Germany. The results demonstrate that the measurement preferred by Rabinowitz et al. tends to bias empirical findings in favour of directional theory. If we use a more plausible operational definition of issue positions of candidates and parties the directional model in both countries fails to turn out superior.     

The proximity and the directional theories of issue voting: Comparative results for the USA and Germany

Abstract In several recent studies George Rabinowitz and his co–authors challenge the 'classical' spatial model of issue voting, the proximity model, by introducing a directional model. In this article we examine whether different measurement of perceived issue positions of candidates or parties leads to diverging judgments about the predictive power of the directional model (which is claimed to be empirically superior), as compared to the proximity model, using data from the USA and Germany. The results demonstrate that the measurement preferred by Rabinowitz et al. tends to bias empirical findings in favour of directional theory. If we use a more plausible operational definition of issue positions of candidates and parties the directional model in both countries fails to turn out superior.     

Testing proximity versus directional voting using experiments

A long-running debate about how voters use issues to evaluate candidates pits the proximity theory of voting against directional theory. Using surveys, both sides of the debate have found support for their preferred theory, but disagreement remains because of differing ways of analyzing the data. Lewis and King (2000) point out that these researchers make assumptions that bias results in favor of their theory. To avoid these difficulties, our approach creates fictitious candidates with controlled positions, presents these candidates to randomly-assigned subjects, and examines the relationship between subjects’ evaluations of these candidates and their ideological beliefs as a neutral test of proximity and directional theory. Our results provide reasonably strong support for proximity theory but little for directional theory.     

Proximity and directional voting: Testing for the region of acceptability

Although countless articles examined proximity and directional voting, little attention has been paid to a central concept of directional theory – the region of acceptability (ROA) – and very few empirical tests of the concept have been conducted. We remedy this gap and focus in this study on the ROA and the individual nature of the penalty imposed. Relying on original data collected in a survey in Switzerland (N = 2000) and an experimental design manipulating the positions of the fictional candidates, we find clear evidence for the existence of the ROA. Our findings also support the idea that the ROA is an individual-level concept, as variables like political extremism and interest in politics have an influence on the effect of the ROA.     

Assessing the rise of issue voting in British elections since 1964

Measuring the extent to which issues determine electoral choice requires a suitable causal model that takes into account the tact that party identification may colour issue perceptions as well as being partially determined by them. In this paper several possible models are evaluated before settling on one considered to be plausible. This one shows issue-based voting choice to have increased in recent British elections, more or less in step with the decline of class voting documented in previous research. The possibility that this rise in issue voting might be a spurious concomitant of increasing milieu influences is considered and rejected. It is tentatively concluded that the rise of issue voting was due to a decline in the class structuring of British electoral choice.     

A communotropic theory of economic voting

Within the social sciences, there is a long and storied history of the effect of economic conditions on vote choice. The traditional arguments are that voters have personal (egotropic) and/or other-regarding (sociotropic) preferences and that they reward and punish politicians electorally based on economic conditions at these levels. However, there is a third option. As industries, employment, and economic conditions are not uniformly distributed across the country, preferences may be locally based. This project combines unique survey data with Metropolitan Statistical Area unemployment numbers and finds evidence of distinct preferences at a third “communotropic” level.     

An assessment of voting systems under the proximity and directional models of the vote

I evaluate five single-winner voting systems according to their tendency to elect Condorcet candidates under alternative models of issue voting derived from behavioral research. These behavioral models posit that voters have both issue and nonissue motivations; within this framework, I study the effects of both the directional and proximity voting models, with varying degrees of issue voting. Under the proximity metric, all voting systems are most efficient when voters attach little importance to issues, while the opposite is generally the case under directional voting. In contrast to previous results, voting systems tend to be more efficient for large than for small electorates. All voting systems – including the widely-criticized plurality method – are extremely efficient when voters in mass elections are inattentive to issues.     

A test of the predictive dimensions model in spatial voting theory

We model correlated voter-candidate issue data within the framework of the Enelow-Hinich spatial model of predictive dimensions. The empirical consequences of this model of the issue data are surprising and allow for an indirect test of the Enelow-Hinich spatial model. The central prediction of the correlated data model we construct, which depends critically on the underlying spatial model, is tested with issue data from the 1980 NES pre-election interview. The test results are highly supportive of the model's predictions. We conclude both that the spatial model of predictive dimensions is empirically supported and that candidate spatial locations estimated by the model are not an artifact of correlated voter-candidate issue data.     

Economic voting theory: Testing new dimensions

Classical economic voting theory has received considerable empirical support. Voters reward the incumbent for good times, punish it for bad. But the success of this paradigm, which views the economy as strictly a valence issue, has crowded out testing of other theoretical dimensions. In particular, positional and patrimonial economic voting have hardly been examined. The former concerns the different preferences voters have on economic policy issues, such as progressive taxation. The latter concerns the place of voters in the economic structure itself, not merely as members of a social class but as actual property owners. Through analysis of a special battery of economic items, from a 2008 US presidential election survey, we demonstrate that the economy was important to voters in three ways: valence, position, and patrimony. Taken together, these dimensions go far as an explanation of vote choice, at least with respect to the short-term forces acting on this political behavior.     

Alternative models of issue voting: The case of the 1991 and 1995 elections in Belgium

Abstract. Previous research has indicated that the success of the directional model of issue voting depends on levels of political sophistication and how party position is measured. Using 1991 and 1995 Belgian Election Surveys, the predictive power of proximity and directional measures are compared controlling for both variables. It is shown that when one uses overall mean placements, instead of mean placements by level of political sophistication, the proximity effect declines most among the highly sophisticated voters. The article also compares the performance of the proximity and directional measures across party systems. Contrary to theoretical expectations, party–system differences between Flanders and Wallonia do not affect the explanatory power of either of these measures. It is only in the cases of the liberal, socialist and extreme right parties that the directional measure is clearly superior. A closer analysis of this result indicates that the relative success of the directional measure is due to the limited number of issues from which those parties draw support.     

EU issue voting and the 2014 European Parliament elections: a dynamic perspective

EU issue voting in European Parliament elections has been shown to be highly conditional upon levels of EU politicization. The present study analyzes this conditionality over time, hypothesizing that the effect of EU attitudes on EP vote preferences is catalyzed as EP elections draw closer. In contrast to extant cross-sectional post-election studies, we use a four-wave panel study covering the six months leading up to the Dutch EP elections of 2014, differentiating between party groups (pro, anti, mixed) and five EU attitude dimensions. We find that EU issue voting occurs for both anti- and pro-EU parties, but only increases for the latter. For mixed parties we find no effect of EU attitudes, yet their support base shifts in the anti-EU direction as the elections draw closer. The overarching image, however, is one of surprising stability: EU attitudes form a consistent part of EP voting motivations even outside EP election times.     

Protest voting in plurality elections: a theory of voter signaling

This paper develops a model of protest voting in which unsatisfied voters may abandon their most-preferred candidate even though he or she has a good chance of winning, in the hope that this signal of disaffection will lead to downstream improvements in that candidate??s performance. We use a spatial model to identify voters whose ideological profile makes protest voting an option, and an expected utility model to identify the conditions under which potential protest voters will in fact use their vote as a signaling device. Aggregate-level data provide suggestive evidence in the argument??s favor.     

Distant allies and proximate enemies in issue voting: Myth or reality?

The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation as to why Euclidean distance serves as a reasonably good approximation of reality when it does not incorporate explicity a consideration of the sides of the issue taken by the voter and candidate. The empirical evidence indicates quite clearly that Euclidean distance and side of issue are extremely highly correlated. Two general classes of explanation are offered. First, this powerful association can be seen as a function of the mathematical difficulty of actually being in close proximity to a preferred party while being on the opposite side of an issue on a 7-point scale. Second, even after this mathematical artifact is taken into account, the combined effects of assimilation, contrast, and negativity may bring favored candidates closer to the voter and drive the opposition further away, resulting in a strong correlation of Euclidean distance and side of the issue.     

Individual and contextual variation in EU issue voting: The role of political information

Increasing politicization in EU member states about European issues can be expected to strengthen the impact of attitudes towards Europe on vote choice in European Parliament (EP) elections. At the same time this impact is likely to vary between voters and contexts as a function of political information. This study explores the role of political information in explaining individual and contextual heterogeneity in the degree of EU issue voting. Using a two-step hierarchical estimation procedure to explore both individual and contextual variation, we show that while EU issue voting in the 2009 EP elections is only slightly more pronounced among the politically sophisticated, it is clearly more extensive in contexts that provide higher levels of political information on European matters.     

Economic conditions and populist radical right voting: The role of issue salience

In this article, we show with the European Election Study from nine Western European countries that issue salience of the economy and immigration contributes to our understanding of the puzzling relation between economic conditions and populist radical right support. In countries with relatively weak or worsening economic conditions, the economy is considered more salient, whereas immigration loses salience – also compared to other issues. Voters who perceive the economy as most important problem are less likely to opt for the populist radical right than people who perceive immigration or even other issues as most important. Populist radical right parties appear to not only win votes on the immigration issue, they also lose votes on the economic issue. Finally, in contrast to actual economic conditions, negative perceptions of the economy increases populist radical right voting, despite stronger salience of the economy and partly due to stronger salience of immigration compared to other issues.     

Beliefs and errors in voting choices: A restatement of the theory of fiscal illusion

This paper reformulates the theory of fiscal illusion to make it more compatible with the median-voter model of collective choice. It emphasizes the requirement that misperceptions about marginal tax-costs and benefits must be permanent to have any significant effect on the level of public expenditures. The Lancaster-Becker model of consumer demand is then used to demonstrate the peculiar effects of permanent misperceptions on consumer demand. It can be shown, for example, that other things being the same, a Republican who underestimates continuously the marginal benefits of public activities may demand more public goods than a Democrat who overestimates those same benefits in a permanent fashion.     

Estimating relative prevalence of competing issue voting rules in multiparty elections using finite mixture modeling

How do citizens of democratic polities translate their policy preferences into voting choices? Proximity and directional theories of issue voting offer different answers to this question that have strong implications for parties’ strategies. Controlled scenarios in imaginary two-candidate contests have gained popularity as a method to estimate proportions of proximity and directional voters in the population. However, this method is not always applicable in comparative research where scholars often have to study multiparty elections with observational data. In the present paper, I demonstrate how relative prevalence of different issue voting rules can be estimated using finite mixture modeling. Using both a paradigmatic and a recent case, I demonstrate that the mixture model predicts observed voting choices better than the alternatives. I also show how finite mixture modeling can be used to study individual-level characteristics of proximity and directional voters using education as an example.