Tactical Voting and Party Preferences: A Test of Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Studying the development of stable political attitudes, political scientists have argued that repeated voting for a political party reinforces initial party preferences, in a seemingly mechanistic process of habit-formation. However, the empirical evidence is scarce and the theoretical framework underdeveloped. Does the act of voting for a party improve an individual’s evaluation of this party? If so, is this effect simply due to habit-formation, or a more complex psychological mechanism? Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we examine the act of voting as a choice inducing dissonance reduction. We go beyond existing research, by focusing on tactical voters—a group for which the notion of habitual reinforcement does not predict an effect. The analyses reveal a positive effect of the act of voting tactically on the preferences for the parties voted for and may thus call for a revision of the traditional understanding of the role of voting in shaping party preferences.     

Heterogeneous Preferences and Collective Action

In recent years, scholarshave turned to alternative representationsof utility to capture motivationalheterogeneity across individuals. In theresearch reported here, we examine twomodels of heterogeneous utility –linear-altruism and inequity-aversion – inthe context of two-person, social dilemmagames. Empirical tests are conducteddrawing on data from experiments andsurveys. We find that the model ofinequity-aversion accounts for asubstantial proportion of the preferencetypes and behavior that are not explainedby the standard model of self-interestedpreferences. In contrast, the altruismmodel does not provide a significantincrease in explanatory power over theinequity-aversion model.     

Social Capital and Endogenous Preferences

In this paper we analyze whether social capital can emerge endogenously from a process of preference evolution. We define social capital as preferences that promote voluntary cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We investigate how the endogenous preferences depend on the amount of information individuals have about each other’s preferences. When there is sufficiently much information, maximal social capital emerges. In general, the level of social capital varies positively with the amount of information. Our results may add to an understanding of the factors that determine a society’s ability to generate cooperative outcomes.     

Preferences,loyalty and party choice

The paper analyses the electorate's voting intentions with respect to the Labour and Conservative parties in Great Britain. Almost all policy issues are found to be endogenous, i.e. to be influenced by party choice within a simultaneous relationship. Socio-economic factors which influence choice through the endogenous policy issues include education, geographical location, age, gender, income and wealth. Parental, particularly maternal, influence is also found to be important and not to decline with age or education. The paper also highlights the importance of competence, rather than policy, issues.     

The Dating Preferences of Liberals and Conservatives

American politics has become more polarized. The source of the phenomena is debated. We posit that human mate choice may play a role in the process. Spouses are highly correlated in their political preferences, and research in behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and endocrinology shows that political preferences develop through a complex interaction of social upbringing, life experience, immediate circumstance, and genes and hormones, operating through one’s psychological architecture by Hatemi et al. (J Theor Politics, 24:305–327, 2012). Consequently, if people with similar political values produce children, there will be more individuals at the ideological extremes over generations. This said, we are left with a mystery: spousal concordance on political attitudes does not result from convergence over the course of the relationship, nor are spouses initially selecting one another on political preferences. We examine whether positive mate assortation—like seeks like—on non-political factors such as lifestyle and demographics could lead to inadvertent assortation on political preferences. Using a sample of Internet dating profiles we find that both liberals and conservatives seek to date individuals who are like themselves. This result suggests a pathway by which long-term couples come to share political preferences, which in turn could be fueling the widening ideological gap in the United States.     

Forecasts and Preferences in the 1992 General Election

Little attention has been paid to the influence of expectations for victory on the formation of general election preferences in U.S. presidential races. There is good reason to believe, however, that under certain conditions citizens' forecasts of who will win the fall election may influence their preference and their vote. We model preferences during the course of the fall 1992 campaign as a function of two kinds of expectations. First we attempt to identify a component of expectations that is independent of political projection. We discover that expectations based only on information about the race play a prominent role in preference formation early in the fall but decline later as the cost of information drops. Similar results obtain when we include projection in the model of expectations. We conclude that general elections may have some of the same dynamic properties that are observable in primaries. Since early momentum in the fall campaign may influence subsequent preference formation, we contend that leads in early polls are valuable.     

Intense Preferences, Strong Beliefs and Democratic Decision-making

Some decisions require individuals to make judgements rather than to express preferences. Some conflicts of preference arise from different beliefs about the efficacy or propriety of a policy rather than from different wants. Should the 'intensity' with which a judgement is made, or a belief is held, figure in decision-making in the way that it should ideally influence decisions concerning wants? This article questions the relevance of intensity to matters of judgement and examines how far decision processes that are sensitive to different intensities of preference, such as pressure group activity, vote trading and point voting, are o pen to criticism for failing to discriminate between intense wants and strong beliefs.     

Industries, Occupations, and Trade Policy Preferences

The nature of one’s work, not just who one works for, is central to political and economic life. Yet models of trade policy preferences mostly ignore occupation, focusing exclusively on industries (perhaps because industries are the usual organizing dimension of economic policymaking). This article proposes new measures of how much risk trade imposes on different workers based on how diversified their occupation is across industries, thus considering both industry and occupation. Having a job specific to any sector appears to encourage protectionism, regardless of that sector’s comparative advantage, supporting the idea that public opinion may treat trade policy as insurance.     

Are Preferences for Fiscal Discipline Endogenous

Differences in voters' fiscal preferencesare examined taking advantage of theexceptional Swiss institutional setting.Empirical evidence suggests thatpreferences are determined by strictlycultural patterns (cultural area measuredby language). Thus, fiscal preferences canbe considered as being largely exogenous.This implies that, except for specialcases, it is not possible to find simpleproxy variables for fiscal preferences. Anad hoc index of fiscal preferencesought to be built up when the introductionof this variable is required forcomprehensive explanatory models of fiscaldiscipline or for other related studies.     

Expert Opinion, Agency Characteristics, and Agency Preferences

David E. Lewis Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540 e-mail: delewis{at}princeton.edu e-mail: clinton{at}princeton.edu (corresponding author) The study of bureaucracies and their relationship to politicalactors is central to understanding the policy process in theUnited States. Studying this aspect of American politics isdifficult because theories of agency behavior, effectiveness,and control often require measures of administrative agencies'policy preferences, and appropriate measures are hard to findfor a broad spectrum of agencies. We propose a method for measuringagency preferences based upon an expert survey of agency preferencesfor 82 executive agencies in existence between 1988 and 2005.We use a multirater item response model to provide a principledstructure for combining subjective ratings based on scholarlyand journalistic expertise with objective data on agency characteristics.We compare the resulting agency preference estimates and standarderrors to existing alternative measures, discussing both theadvantages and limitations of the method. Authors' note: We thank Tom Hammond, George Krause, and JoshuaTucker for helpful comments. We are grateful to Simon Jackmanand Shawn Treier for generously providing their code and oursurvey respondents for their time and expertise.     

Median Voter Preferences,Central Bank Independence and Conservatism

This paper studies how the independence and theconservatism of a central bank relate to the structureand stability of the median voter preferences. This isdone by means of a model of endogenous delegationwhere an opportunistic policy maker chooses themonetary regime (independence and conservatism) tomaximise the welfare of the median voter. The resultsshow that a high degree of inflation aversion ofmonetary policy is not necessarily associated with ahigh degree of central bank independence. A high andstable degree of inflation aversion of society (i.e.of the median voter) may lead to establish a dependentcentral bank which is highly inflation averse. This suggests that the negativecorrelation between inflation and central bankindependence indices detected by several empiricalstudies may reflect a link between inflation and somedeep features of social preferences.     

Ideology and Voter Preferences as Determinants of Financial Globalization

We propose that the global spread of ideas affects international economic openness policies, and that to omit ideology as an explanatory variable for economic globalization is to risk omitted variable bias. Using voting data, we create measures of global ideology regarding economic openness and propose that changes in both global and domestic ideology influence how open or closed to international finance an economy is. We also test other influences on liberalization, including proposed state-centered diffusion mechanisms. Using PCSTS and system-GMM models, we estimate the determinants of change in international capital account regulation for 82 countries, 1955 to 1999. We thereby examine diffusion of both liberalizations (1950s and 1990s) and closures (1960s and 1970s). Changes in both global and domestic ideology robustly influence liberalization and closure. The capital account policies of neighboring countries (positively) and of the leading economies (negatively) also influenced a country's capital account liberalization.     

Fear as a Disposition and an Emotional State: A Genetic and Environmental Approach to Out‐Group Political Preferences

Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out‐groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out‐group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti‐immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out‐group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes.     

Nonseparable Preferences, Measurement Error, and Unstable Survey Responses

A person has nonseparable preferences when her preference onan issue depends on the outcome of other issues. A model ofsurvey responses in which preferences are measured with errorimplies that responses will change depending on the order ofquestions and vary over time when respondents have nonseparablepreferences. Results from two survey experiments confirm thatchanges in survey responses due to question order are explainedby nonseparable preferences but not by the respondent's levelof political information, partisanship, or ideology.     

Heat Waves,Droughts, and Preferences for Environmental Policy

Using data from a new household survey on environmental attitudes, behaviors, and policy preferences, we find that current weather conditions affect preferences for environmental regulation. Individuals who have recently experienced extreme weather (heat waves or droughts) are more likely to support laws to protect the environment. We find evidence that the channel through which weather conditions affect policy preference is via perceptions of the importance of the issue of global warming. Furthermore, environmentalists and individuals who consult more sources of news are less likely to have their attitudes toward global warming changed by current weather conditions. These findings suggest that communication and education emphasizing consequences of climate change salient to the individual's circumstances may be the most effective in changing attitudes of those least likely to support proenvironment policy. In addition, the timing of policy introduction could influence its success.