voting behaviour

voter turnout and paradox of voting

turnout in the UK (1959-2019)

  • turnout has declined considerably since 1959

  • there is also a break with the arrival of new labour, the last election with turnout above 70% was 1997, all elections afterwards have lower turnout

  • signs of recovery after 2010 ⇒ repolarisation?

model of rational voting

developing on the work of Anthony Downs, in his Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), Riker and Ordershook (1968) proposed a “calculus of voting”:

V = pB - C + D

where:

  • V = the probability that a voter will turn out

  • p = probability of that the voters vote will “matter”

  • B = the “utility” benefit of voting (the differential benefit of one candidate winning over the other)

  • C = costs of voting (time/effort spent)

  • D = “civic duty”, goodwill feeling, psychological and intrinsic benefit of voting

paradox of voting: in most election, p is infinitely small for individual voters, meaning the benefit of voting pB is also infinitely small, meaning voting usually have negative utility

how the rational model explain patterns in turnout

  • efficacy (perception that ones vote count and that one does understand politics)

  • political knowledge

  • political supply-side: issues and positions offered by parties

    • mainstream party convergence is usually associated with lower turnout

    • e.g. the convergence of New Labour to Conservatives turned many WC voters into non-voters

    • new parties competing on new issues might increase turnout (e.g. increase in voter turnout in recent US elections)

  • electoral systems (PR lead to multi-party systems with larger variety of parties for voters to choose from)

3 models of voting

cleavage voting

where do social classes come from?

Karl Marx (mid 19th century)

  • individuals’ political interests are determined by their relationship to economic production

⇒ workers vs. owners of capital/land

Max Weber (early 20th century)

  • individuals’ political interests are determined by their relationship to economic consumption

⇒ wealth and power are key factors

cleavages and party identification

social group

  • working class

  • middle/upper class

  • religious

  • atheists/agnostics

  • centre

  • periphery

party the group identifies with

  • social democrats

  • conservatives (or liberals)

  • conservatives (or christian democrats)

  • liberals/social democrats

  • social dems/conservatives/liberals

  • agrarian/regionalist/linguistic parties

whether some or all of these cleavages are manifested in political competition is dependent on:

  1. electoral system

  2. if these cleavages reinforce or criss-cross each other

measuring ‘class voting’

the ‘Alford Index’ (Alford 1962)

  • % of WC voters who vote for a left-wing party

minus

  • % of non-WC voters who vote for a left-wing party

causes of ‘dealignment’

economic growth + prosperity

economic security no longer the primary goal of all voters (embourgeoisement of WC, John Goldthorpe)

  • declining ‘class conflict’

  • changing class composition

changing economic structure

growth to 40-50% of GPD in the public sector + deindustrialisation:

  • new social groups, with new values & new interests

  • shrinking in size of traditional WC > left wing parties need to broaden its appeal to MC voters

expansion of higher education

growing social mobility ⇒ changing aspirations

  • higher levels of ‘cognitive skills’ in society

  • vote choice more based on evaluations and less on loyalties

mass media

replacement of ‘party-controlled’ media

  • personalisation of politics

dealignment or realignment?

  • in line with the decline of classical cleavage-based voting, there has been a long debate as to whether the old social divisions in voting behaviour have just diminished or replaced by other, new cleavages in voting behaviour

  • this implies not only dealignment, but the emergence of a second dimension of political competition and thus realignment on non-economic issues (post-materialism, cultural issues such as abortion, immigration, identity politics)

  • in a nutshell → voters do no longer base their voting behaviour on classical socio-economic issues (first dimension) but increasingly on socio-economic issues (second-dimension)

  • parties reposition themselves according to the voters or even take the lead and try to attract new voters by repositioning

from economics and class to ‘post-materialism’

  • Ronald Inglehart (1997)

  • materialism → focus on economic and physical security

  • post-materialism → focus on personal autonomy, self-expression, intellectual satisfaction - e.g. civil liberties, gender equality, minority rights, environmentalism, anti-nuclear, anti-war etc

  • hypothesis → economic wealth + mass university education → shift from materialists to post-materialist values from one generation to next

issue voting

what is issue voting?

  • the simplest model of issue voting has 3 assumptions:

  1. voters have policy-positions on those issues that are salient to them

  2. voters are aware of the parties’ positions

  3. voters compare their own issues positions with those of the parties and vote for the “closest” party

  • consistency/congruence between the parties’ and the voters’ positions as minimum requirement models of issue voting

issue position or ownership? (Petrocik 1996)

  • premise: parties have a reputation to best handle a given issue, they “own” the issue

    • e.g. in the UK Labour own NHS and welfare, while Tories own taxes and crime (Green and Hobolt (2007))

  • voters choose the parties based on their issue ownership for salient issues

  • strategic incentive → parties try to get their issues on the agenda and try to avoid issues that other parties own ⇒ politics as agenda-setting game

  • implication → volatility in voting pattern between elections because of changing salience of issues

explaining rise of issue voting

  • electoral research has pointed to fundamental changes in party competition and the quest for votes: from class politics to issue competition (’the decline of cleavage politics and the rise of issue voting’ (Franklin 1992, p. 387))

  • changes on the macro-level (top-down processes)

    • increasing importance of media for party politics: parties compete by using media systematically to set the agenda

    • parties have become more independent of the old mass organisations (unions, churches etc)

    • fewer member make party leaderships more independent (leadership-based parties instead of mass parties)

    • new issues that are not related to class politics (e.g. environment, immigration, EU)

  • changes on the micro-level (bottom-up processes):

    • voters make decisions based on single issues (and often in the short-run) as consequence of educational expansion since 1960s

    • parties are judged based on their positions/performance (cf Clarke et al. 2009)

    • increased volatility and dealignment

  • consequence → increased importance of issue voting, at the expense of cleavage-based voting behaviour

issue voting or realignment?

  • some issues have the potential to break old party alignments and to create new alignments

  • voters sort themselves into new camps based on the new issues/new dimensions of conflict and their preferences

  • are voters merely making choices on individual issues? (i.e. Brexit) or are voters realigning themselves along new dimensions/cleavage of social conflict?

is issue position dependent of party ID?

  • instead of issue position drive support for parties, what if it’s the other way round? party identification drive positions on issues

  • Rob Ford (2014) illustrates this point clearly by looking at attitudes of British voters towards Humphrey (a non policy issue), the 10 Downing Street cat of Margaret Thatcher (Con PM) & Tony Blair (Lab PM)

  • issue position can in fact be merely motivated reasoning based on voter’s party identification

valence voting

economic and performance voting

  • premise → voters do not (or no longer) primarily base their vote choice on their social background and their class

  • instead, they evaluate & judge governments, parties and policy-makers based on their performance, salient issues and achievement

  • this is also called valence voting (Clarke et al. 2009)

  • usually on issues where most people have the same opinion:

    • unemployment

    • economy

    • fighting crime

    • inflation

definitions of valence and economic voting

  • a definition of valence voting:

    • “[…] valence theory asserts that people support the party best able to deliver on issues they care about and crucially, these are issues over which there is virtually no disagreement. everybody has the same preference” (Clarke et al. 2009: 31)

  • the simplist version of economic voting is conceptualised as:

    • “the citizen votes for the government if the economy is doing all right; otherwise, the vote is against” (Lewis-Beck & Stegmaier 2000: 183)

    • “accountability rooted in economic voting thus constitutes a minimalist but nevertheless legitimate version of democracy as a form of government that allows ill-informed electorates to exert a circumscribed measure of control through their ability to “throw the rascals out” (Anderson 2007: 277)

there are different perspectives to judge governments

  • Miller & Wattenberg (1985): there are different perspectives that voters use when judging parties and candidates and all combinations do play a role

  • temporal → retrospective vs prospective

  • personal → egocentric vs socio-tropic

  • additional factors for cross-country variation in economic performance voting:

    • clarity of responsibility of the political system

    • economic openness, dependence on other countries’ economies and export

    • alternatives for the voters? opposition can be perceived as even more incompetent than incumbents (Labour in 1987 & 1992 as examples)

how economic performance affect vote choice

  • economic growth is correlated with higher vote share for the incumbent party, but

  • only in elections with high clarity of responsibility (single-party government)

sincere v strategic voting

strategic voting and spatial model of politics

voters have ‘preferences’ about a range of policies

  • these preferences are ‘single-peaked’ ⇒ each voter has an ‘ideal point’ in a single- or multi-dimensional policy

sincere (expressive) voting

⇒ a citizen votes for the party whose policy position is closest to her ideal policy

tactical (strategic) voting

⇒ a citizen votes to try to influence the outcome of an election, so that the overall policy outcome (e.g. the person elected, or the government that is formed) is closest to her ideal policy of all the likely outcomes

⇒ this might be the party closest to her ideal point, or it might not

why vote strategically?

2 main reasons for voting strategically in an election:

  1. local: to influence the election outcome in a constituency → if the candidate a person most prefers has no chance of being elected, then vote for the ‘closest’ candidate from amongst the candidates who have a reasonable chance of being elected

  2. national: to influence government formation and policy outcomes → if the party a person most prefers has no chance of influencing government formation or might form a coalition with a party which is further away from a person’s preference, then vote for a party which is ‘further’ away, but which will lead to a policy outcome closer to a person’s ideal policy

summary

  • factors that determine voter turnout and the paradox of voting

  • cleavage voting, class dealignmennt and possible realignment

  • rise of issue voting and its limitation in explanatory power

  • valence voting and accountability

  • sincere v strategic voting