Voting behaviour

Empirical questions What explains vote choices? Socialisation/attachment Social structure (class, religion etc.)

Electoral change (dealignment, realignment)

Electoral system (strategic voting)

Evaluations (issues, leaders, ideology, economy etc.)

What explains voting/non-voting? Decline in turnout?

Paradox of turnout

Varying importance of elections First/second-order; closeness; polarization

Voting

Collective decision-making procedure Deliberation

Unanimity

Voting Majority

Plurality

Proportionality

Democratic meaning of elections Manifestation of general will (Rousseau)

Elite replacement (Schumpeter)

Historical roots of voting studies

Extension of franchise (early 20th century)Predictions/expectations about working class parties

Data limitations Electoral geography

Census data vs. electoral data

George Gallup (1901-1984)Founder of American Institute of Public Opinion (1935)

Predicting correctly Roosevelt victory in 1936 Literary digest poll (2 million respondents) predicting Landon win

Gallup poll (5,000 respondents, random sample) predicting FDR win

FDR landslide, establishing Gallup, and the use of scientific polling in general, as a quasi-institution in US electoral politics

Studying the electoral process

Columbia voting studiesLazarsfeld & Berelson

The People’s Choice (1948)

Voting (1954)

“We were not interested in how people voted but in why they voted as they did.”

Preference formationSix-wave panel design

Studying influence of campaign and media

“the social psychology of the voting decision” Stable preferences

Little knowledge, interest, few direct short-term effects

Mutually reinforcing social networks vs. cross-pressures

Party identification

The Michigan modelCampbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, The American Voter (1960)

Socio-psychological model

Party identification Long-term stable psychological affinity with either party

Analogy with religion (party believers)

Emotional/affective attachment, developed during socialisation

Picking up values and attitudes from parents, peers

Explanatory value Stability of voting patterns within individuals over time

Issue alignment (partisan cues for perceptions and choice)

Potentially tautological

Political sociology

Social contextBeliefs, values, attitudes

Political behaviour (vote choice)

Group membershipCollective experience, attitude formation

Party mobilisation

Social cleavagesDominant dividing lines in society

Social cleavages and voting

Seymour Martin Lipset & Stein RokkanParty Systems and Voter Alignments (1967)

Historical macro-sociological approach History of nation-building, industrialisation, democratisation

Varying traditional divisions across European societies Center-periphery

Class

Religion

Language

Frozen party systems (1920s-1960s) Stable patterns of party competition around salient primary cleavages

Class-voting (Britain, Germany), religious voting (France, Netherlands)