Final PSCI 3172

Spatial Voting

What are the Spatial models of Vote Choice?: Voters pick their candidates or parties that best represent their interests.

Proximity Voting: Spatial voting in its purest form. Voters pick parties closest to their preferences.

Are voters paying attention?: Yes. They listen and are pretty accurate about where parties stand.

Directional Voting: voting for the candidate that best represents the intensity and “direction” of your preferences.

What is the Region of Acceptability?: the bound which you are willing to consider candidates further to your left or right.

Compensational Vote Model: in a majoritarian system where they know the winner will likely have to make a few compromises, who do they vote for?

Institutional Balancing: the more compromise is required by the institutional arrangement, the more voters will vote to the extreme of their true preferences (PR system, federalism, presidentialism).

Are voters outcome motivated?: Yes.

What are critiques of the Spatial Model?: It is unidimentional and left-right is an oversimplification, voters are not that sophisticated, preferences are malleable, group identities, social cues, and partisanship matter, has a hard time with valence issues, performance evaluations are largely ignored.

Spatial Model Critique Acronym:

  • S – Sophistication of voters is overestimated

  • L – Left-right oversimplifies ideology (unidimensional flaw)

  • I – Identities and social cues are more influential than assumed

  • P – Preferences are malleable, not fixed or stable

  • V – Valence issues (like candidate integrity) aren’t captured well

  • P – Performance evaluations (e.g., of incumbents) are overlooked

What is Ideological Congruence?: the ideological gap between a party and a voter.

What does the Spatial model assume?: When congruence foes up, voters are more likely to vote for the party they are most congruent with.

How do we measure Congruence in a Traditional Spatial model space?: Take the party’s left-right position, ask the voter their left-right position, find the absolute value of the difference (skip for directional voting).

What are the three dimensions of politics?: Left-Right Dimension, GAL/TAN (Cultural) Dimension, and Transnational Dimension.

Dimensions of Politics Acronym:

  • L – Left-Right Dimension (economic/ideological)

  • G – GAL/TAN Cultural Dimension (Green, Alternative, Libertarian vs. Traditional, Authoritarian, Nationalist)

  • T – Transnational Dimension (globalism vs. nationalism)

Left-Right Dimension: Traditional, economic, dimension. Taxes, welfare, unemployment, spending, market.

GAL/TAN (Cultural) Dimension: second, cultural dimension. Social libertarianism and equality or more hierachical and traditional. Women’s rights, Environment, LGBTQ+ rights, immigration.

Transnational Dimension: third, more EU focused dimension. A new one that might replace an old one or is just a third dimension. Questions about integration and globalization.

Which dimension still reigns supreme at predicting vote choice and behavior?: left-right dimension.

What congruence matters most for Niche parties?: GAL?TAN congruence matters a lot more.

Is the unidimensional spatial model compatible with the saliency theory?: The multidimensional spatial model is more compatible with it.

Saliency Theory: voters identify their most important issue and then vote for the party that owns that issue.

What is a stronger predictor of vote switching when the inconfruence is on the voter’s most salient issue?: Ideological incongruence.

What has ideological congruency been linked to?: greater sense of political efficacy, increased likelihood of political participation and engagement, greater trust in politicains, and greater satisfaction with democracy.

Economic Voting

What is economic voting?: when voters use their vote to send a message about the state of the economy and whether they are happy or mad about it.

What happens if the economy is performing well?: voters stick with th incumbents and reward the incumbent’s party.

What about if the economy is performing poorly?: voters punish the incumbents and choose their alternative.

What are the two types of views voters can hold about the economy?: retrospective and prospective

Retrospective voting: Your assessment of the past informs your vote. How did your incumbent do during their term?

Prospective voting: your assessment of the future prospects inform your vote. How do the candidate’s plans promise to change things.

What leads to prospective voting?: When there are open seats and when the economy is really struggling.

Pocketbook Voting: a voter is voting based on their own financial situation. Are they themselves better or worse?

Sociotropic Voting: a voter is voting based on the overall economic conditions. Is the overall economy better or worse off?

What leads to pocketbook voting?: Voters tend to report more favorable evaluations of the economy when they have just received a raise, have a job, and their finances are good or improving. Most voters make inferences about the economy based on how they’re doing.

What leads to sociotropic voting?: Surprsiginly, the consensus is that voters are more sociotropic than pocket book. The most important economic indicators are aggregate uneployment, GDP growth, and gas prices/inflation. Voters use increasingly proximal units to make inferences. The locality and state tends to matter more than national factors.

What do voters base their assessment on?: objective measures or perceived conditions.

Objective Conditions: The measures of economic conditions a.k.a. what the stats are saying.

Fundamentals of Economy Voting Summary: voters reward incumbents for a strong economy, punish for a weak one. This is complicated by retrospective, prospective, pocketbook, socioptopic, objective, and perceived assessments.

Crtiques of Economic Voting: Voters are not economists, evaluations of the economy are subjective because voters are not economists, and there is almost always an incumbent penalty in vote share.

Insufficient Information Theory: voters lack suffiecient information to make sound economic decisions so they rely on heuristiscs to help them such as the stock market, local and refional ecoonmic performance, and media coverage.

Clarity of Responsibility (CoR): the ability of voters to assign blame and responsiblity for the performance of government and economic outcomes.

High CoR = voters can easily pinpoint who to blame for government outcomes and performance

Low CoR = voters have a hard time assigning responsibility

Low CoR indicators: opposition control of committee chairs, weak party cohesion, significant bicameral opposition, minority government, multi-party governments.

Why does the CoR matter?: low CoR makes it harder for voters to hold politicians accountable.

Insitutional Clarity Dimension: institutional concentration of power. Either horizontal or vertical.

Horizontal: dispersion of power between branches (presidentialism, bicameralism)

Vertical: dispersion of power between levels of government (federalism)

Government Clarity dimension: cohesiveness of the incumbent government. Is there a single person or party to blame?

Clarity of Alternative: how clear is the difference between the incumbent and alternative im considering (policy alternative) and how differently would the alternative be able to produce a different outcome?

What happens to performance voting if there’s no clear alternative?: It goes down.

Policy Alternative: How clear is the difference between incumbent v. alternative.

Institutional Alternative: how differently would the alternative be able to produce a different outcome?

What is CoA reduced by?: ideological convergence, insitutional constraints on policy action, and retrospective party performance.

Globalization

Room to Maneuver (RtM): the degree of space parties have to set their own agenda.

What does a low RtM mean?: parties have a limitied number of choices.

What was the Euro Ciris?: Portugual, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain (PIIGS) were hit harder by the financial crisis than the rest of the Eurozone. The problem was that the European Central Bank controlled the Euro and set monetary policy for all Euro countries. These states had no abiilty to set their own monetary policy, so when interest rates skyrocketed, these states could not increase their money supply (which is usually the solution). This made things worse and resulted in austerity that the states had no choice by to accept, which went over horribly.

What is the correlation between party responsiveness and globalization?: as globalization increases, party responsiveness to the mean voter position decreases.

What is the correlation between RtM and Economic Voting?: evidence is mized. the rate of voitng for incumbent increases as globalization does, but worse evaluations are still lower.

Benchmarking: a theory of vote choice that says all voters will evaluate their economic conditions relative to comparable global partners.

Partisanship

What is Partisanship?: A political ID that you hold based on your loyalty to a given political party. Tells us everything about someone’s political beliefs.

What are the two models on partisanship?: Michigan Model and Running Tally

Michigan Model: Partisanship is a PID that informs how we approach and perceive politics. It’s basically a super-heruistic.

Running Tally: Partisansihp is an accumulation of factors that push you into one camp vs. another.

Instrumental Partisanship: PID based on your evaluations of the government, party positions, and a party’s valence. This is grounded in the Running Tally model.

Expressive Partisanship: PID based on your identity, socialization, and as an expression of self. Based in Michigain model.

Partisanship as a social identity: PID is increasingly a social identity that you hold, which is coming to shape more than just politics.

Where does Partisanship come from? : the result of variety of political stimuli pushing you in one direction.

When is partisanship usually adopted?: during your teenage years.

Partisanship in the U.S. vs. EU: PID in the US is expressive and in Europe it is instrumental. America has a stronger partisanship.

What influences partisanship strength across countries?:

  • State Homogeneity:
    → Partisanship can align with radical/ethnic groups

  • Class Consciousness:
    → Voting tied to class (e.g., UK working class = Labour)

  • # of Political Parties:
    → Fewer parties = stronger partisanship

  • Party System Strength:
    → Established systems = stronger PID
    → Easier party formation = weaker PID
    → S/E Europe = weaker PID than N/W Europe

PID vs. Economic Model: economic factors matter less as partisanship strength increases. More partisans = less economic voting.

PID vs. Spatial Model – Key Differences?:

  • Left: PID strength → predicts gov’t formation perception

  • Middle: PID strength → predicts who you think will win

  • Right: PID strength → predicts vote choice more than ideology
    ➡ Undermines Spatial Model!

Society and Democracy

What does a good government have?: Responsiveness and effectiveness

Responsiveness: policy choices should reflect citizen demands

Effective: Government needs to actually get things done (like trash cleanup)

Why did this Happen in Italy?: probably cuz of civic community.

Civic Community: relates to a place’s democratic culture.

What are the four components of civic community?:

  • C – Civic Engagement: Do people follow and care about politics?
    A – Associations: Are there groups that help people cooperate?
    P – Political Equity: Are people treated equally in politics?
    T – Trust and Solidarity: Do people trust one another and feel like part of a community?

How does Putnam Measure Civic Community?: Associations (frequency of various clubs), newspaper readership, referenda turnout (how engages are people on the issues), and preference voting (less is good)

Horizontal Associations: groups in which there is very little hierarchy, and members are equal to one another.

Vertical Associations: groups in which hierarchy is reinforced ad are inherently unequal.

Unions vs. Church: both hierarchical and vertical so-to-speak (unions less so).

Affects of Civic Community: higher satisfaction with government, lower perceptions or corruption, higher social and political trust, and lower feelings of powerfulness.

Social Capital: horizontal networks of civic engagement with norms of trust, reciprocity, and mutuality.

What does the article by Kedar argue?: Institutional balancing - voters vote for more extreme candidates because they anticipate the moderation required of policy compromise.

What is the main argument of Bakker et al 2018?: As incongruence in a multi-dimensional space goes up, so does the likelihood of switching your vote.

What is the argument made by Hobolt et al (2013)?: Institutional clarity does not matter, government clarity does not moderate performance voting, and degree of government influence on the issue does not matter.

What is the argument made by Hellwig (2014)?: As globalization increases, voters become less likely to think the economy is the most salient.