Electoral Studies 25 (2006) 419e423

www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud

Editorial

Modeling Electoral Choice in Europein the Twenty-First Century:

An Introduction

There are some common trends emerging in elections in Europe and elsewhere inthe democratic world which attest to significant changes in mass political behaviour.These trends include declining turnouts, the weakening of partisan attachments, therise of issue voting (particularly economic issues voting), the rise of media partiesand the rise of candidate-centred politics. Alongside these changes, the internationalcommunity of electoral researchers in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systemsproject have progressively sought to adopt a common scientific framework, leadingto similar research designs, and similar survey instruments (see Dalton, 2004;Franklin and Wlezien, 2002).

Yet, a closer examination of the growing number of national election studiessuggests a more problematic image: rather than adopting a clearly defined model ofelectoral participation and voting choice, there is a reliance on an implicit, thoughvariously modified and adapted, version of the traditional Michigan model. At thesame time the changes mentioned above are creating severe strains for the Michiganmodel1 and this in turn has produced a growing proliferation of competingparadigms, which now guide voting research. These alternative paradigms are rootedin sociology, social-psychology, rational-choice, and cognitive psychology (Daltonand Wattenberg, 1993; Carmines and Huckfeld, 1996). Many of these approachesare inconsistent with the Michigan model with its emphasis on electoral participationrooted in partisan attachments, which are in turn reinforced by social structures andhighly resistant to change. This has produced a divergence of explanations ofelectoral choice, a proliferation of survey instruments and research methodologiesand a lack of a willingness to evaluate competing theories.

Recent work towards establishing a new perspective on voting behaviour involvesmodeling the reasoning processes underlying electoral choice (Popkin, 1994; Pappi,

1 See the recent collection of papers on the ‘future of election studies’ in Wlezien and Franklin, 2002.

0261-3794/$ - see front matter � 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2005.06.001

420 Editorial / Electoral Studies 25 (2006) 419e423

1996; Sniderman et al., 1991). This represents a change of perspective from analysinglong-term factors to focussing on the short-term determinants of electoralparticipation. This reflects not only a modification of the political environmentwithin which electoral analysis takes place, but also testifies to the current efforts tointegrate traditional explanations based on socio-psychological and rational choicemodels with findings from cognitive psychology (Saris and Sniderman, 2004). The‘reasoning voter’ paradigm depicts a voter who, facing a political environment whichis often distant from every-day life, and possessing only vague information,nonetheless tries to make a reasoned choice. The reasoning voter, as an image of theelectorate, occupies a middle place between the rational actor on the one hand andthe sociological voter on the other. The former is fully informed and makes votingchoices on the basis of utility maximisation undertaken anew at each election, andthe latter is ‘cleavage-encapsulated’ individual, that is, captured by ideological,partisan or social attachments, whose political choices recur over time.

While this, rather eclectic, approach appears at first to bridge a gap betweencompeting paradigms it nonetheless fails to solve some of the controversies currentlyat the core of electoral research. These include the ‘declining anchors of partisanship’,the growing heterogeneity of the electorate, dynamic factors driving party choice, andinstitutional and contextual variations in campaigning and in voting.

It is well known that the effects of traditional anchors of party choice such as class,region, religion and ethnic identity are eroding (Franklin et al., 1992). This has broughtto the fore a rise of issue voting and cue taking from leaders, suggesting a realindividualisation of the vote choice. Also changes in the social structures of advancedindustrial societies have made electorates more heterogenous. While, on the one hand,there is a need to understand the nature of this heterogeneity - and how it links to class,ethnicity, gender and regional variations in Western political systems e on the otherhand, it points to the possibility that different models of electoral choice are needed fordifferent sub-groups in society. Moreover, traditional explanations of voting oftenassume a static approach and tend to overlook dynamic factors in party choice, leavingvery little scope for understanding the dynamics of party strategy and how theseinfluence electoral choice. Spatial based models of party choice directly address theseconcerns, but cross-national comparisons of the impact of party and leadershipstrategies are still rare.Ananalysisofvariations in electoral strategies acrossdemocraciesis required to allow researchers to understand these processes more fully. Lastly,the opportunity structures which mould voting behaviour, that is the institutional andcontextual variations of the political environment, need to be considered more fully.

With the aim of addressing these issues, an ECPR Joint Sessions Workshopon ‘Modelling Electoral Choice in Europe’ was convened at the University ofEdinburgh in March 2003, where the articles which appear in the present issue ofElectoral Studies were originally presented. Overall, the papers presented at theworkshop constitute a fair sample of current research endeavours on voting andpolitical behaviour. The discussion has allowed a comparison of electoral researchin several Europe countries and elsewhere, singling out some elements of a newemerging (and eclectic) paradigm being pursued by contemporary political science.Obviously, the papers did not cover all the topics emerging in the literature, and they

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do not exhaust the range of issues and controversies confronting contemporaryempirical research on voting. But they address key aspects of it.

It is useful to present them by framing the issues they discuss within the‘bidimensional’ funnel of causality proposed originally by Rokkan (1970), and lateroperationalized graphically by Mannheimer (1989). Rokkan ordered the variablesemployed in studying and explaining voting choice along two dimensions or axes.The first dimension is the macro-micro axis, running from the structure of thepolitical system on the one hand to the characteristics of single voters on the other.The second dimension is a voting proximity axis, a temporal dimension whichdistinguish factors distant from or proximate to the vote choice, running from earlypolitical socialization-through the family and the environment e to the features ofindividual decisions on polling day. The voter, and the political choice, is then seenas enabled/constrained by the many factors which can be grouped in the fourquadrants: the Macro-Distant one refers to the overall features of the politicalsystem (political cleavages, party systems, and electoral systems) which are ‘givens’,i.e., exogenous to the voters; Micro-Distant variables include political socialization,political values, and partisan identifications; Macro-Close conditions refer to theactual working of the polity in the electoral-specific arena, and include factorssuch as the pattern of party competition, type of elections, the state of the economy,etc.; and lastly, Micro-Close variables identify voters’ decision making processes(Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Topics of papers in Rokkan’s two-dimensional space.

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Within this framework, the articles address three broad topics:

- the Micro-Close quadrant focussing on conceptions of electoral choice. Thefocus here is on measurement issues, and voters’ motivations

- the Micro-Close and Macro-Distant quadrants which relate to the heterogeneityof the electorate and its implications for modelling vote choice

- the Macro-Close quadrant involving issue voting and economic voting

The paper by van der Eijk et al. addresses then the question of the dependentvariable, that is the concept of political choice and its meaning to the electors. Thearticle argues against a revealed preference approach, which derives preferences fromreported choices, and instead proposes an alternative measurement strategy focussingon voters’ preferences and utilities. In this way, the outcome in the form of reportedvoting is separated from the process of developing political choices. This issue isfurther explored in a second set of papers which focus on the issue of heterogeneityand the lack of political knowledge and sophistication apparent from much con-temporary research. Baldassarri and Schadee contrast different types of electorsbased on the heuristics they employ, that is the cues and political knowledge theybring to bear on the task of deciding how Italians vote. Their results show a ratherstructured and coherent mass electorate. Rosema analyses the possible sources ofpartisanship, distinguishing between identification and evaluation, thus contrastingtraditional social identity theory and the contemporary political psychologyperspectives in which attitudes are considered to be affective phenomena. Partisan-ship in the Dutch multiparty-system is clearly distinguishable from vote choice, and arelevant determinant, along with candidate and retrospective government evalua-tions, of voting behaviour. Similarly, Marsh’ paper addresses the issue of partyidentification in Ireland, assessing its relevance vis a vis other determinants of votingbehaviour in a society with rather weak traditional social cleavages based on factorssuch as class. In this context party identification appears to be a rather weak factor inexplaining the vote, compared to other short-term election-centred factors.

A third group of papers focuses on the influence of issues in voting behaviour.Kedar’s comparative paper tackles the proximity vs directional controversy in thespatial literature, detecting an institutional effect on voting behaviour, and relatingextent and type of issue voting to the insitutional features of the political system. Theimportance of the institutional format is also evident in the paper addressing a specificissue: the state of the economy. In a comprehensive review Duch and Stevensonexplore cross-country and over time variations in individual economic voting indemocratic polities. Finally, Bellucci’s paper inquires the electoral relevance ofelectors’ perception of party competence and valence issues in Italy and the UK.

This diverse set of papers attests to the liveliness of current debates in the researchon electoral behaviour, together with a search for explanations of electoral choicewhich reflect the dynamic character of electoral politics in modern democracies. Ina world of choice politics (see Clarke et al., 2004), new perspectives are needed toaddress the key issues of why people vote, and if they do vote, why they choose oneparty or candidate rather than another. We have come a long way since the original

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Michigan model, although echoes of this model still inform contemporary debates.This collection of papers addresses many of the key issues facing the analysis ofelectoral choice in the contemporary world.

References

Carmines, E.G., Huckfeld, R., 1996. Political Behavior: An Overview. In: Goodin, R.E., Klingemann, H.

(Eds.), A New Handbook of Political Science. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 223e254.

Clarke, H.D.C., Sanders, D., Stewart, M.C., Whiteley, P., 2004. Political Choice in Britain. Oxford

University Press, Oxford.

Dalton, R., Wattenberg, M.P., 1993. The Not So Simple Act of Voting. In: Finifter, A.W. (Ed.),

Political Science. The State of The Discipline II. The American Political Science Association,

Washington, pp. 193e218.

Dalton, Russell, J., 2004. Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support

in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Franklin, M., et al., (Eds.), 1992. Electoral change. Responses to evolving social and attitudinal structures

in western societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Franklin, Mark, N., Christopher, Wlezien, (Eds.), 2002. The Future of Election Studies. Pergamon,

Amsterdam.

Mannheimer, R., 1989. Elezioni e comportamento elettorale. In: Morlino, L. (Ed.), Scienza Politica.

Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, Torino, pp. 145e178.

Pappi, F.U., 1996. Political Behavior: Reasoning Voters and Multi-party Systems. In: Goodin, R.E.,

Klingemann, H. (Eds.), 255e274.

Popkin, S., 1994. The Reasoning Voter. Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaign 2nd.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Rokkan, S., 1970. Citizens, elections parties, Oslo.

Saris, W.E., Sniderman, P.M. (Eds.), 2004. Studies in Public Opinion. Princeton University Press,

Princeton, NJ.

Sniderman, P., Brody, R.A., Tetlock, P.E., et al., 1991. Reasoning and Choice. Explorations in Political

Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Paolo Bellucci�Centre for the Study of Political Change e CIRCaP,

Universita di Siena, Via Mattioli 10,43100 Siena,

Italy

Paul WhiteleyDepartment of Government,

University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park,Colchester, CO4, 3SQ,

UK

�Corresponding author. Tel.: C39 0865 4789875.E-mail addresses: belluccip@virgilio.it (P. Bellucci);

whiteley@essex.ac.uk (P. Whiteley)