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Despite the importance of local elections in the United States, political scientists have little knowledge of what shapes vote choice in most municipalities and special districts, particularly in the suburbs where a majority of Americans live. This article develops and tests models of local voting behavior using unique survey data of over 1,400 voters in 30 different suburban communities. Suburban electoral politics are dominated by a nonrepresentative group of "stakeholders," who are highly informed and interested in local affairs. Because of this, vote choice in suburban elections ends up sharing many characteristics with larger contests (i.e., issue salience, partisanship, and candidate likeability), although their impact varies with the size and diversity of the particular community (e.g., in smaller suburbs, voters are more engaged in local politics, more likely to know candidates personally, and more likely to vote against incumbents). These findings suggest the importance of developing new theories about voting behavior in micro-electoral contexts.

This article digs into the relationship between voters' political resentment and their electoral choice in 2019 by focusing on the respondents' emotions towards politics. Using the RepResent 2019 voter survey, eight emotions are analysed in their relation to voting behaviour: four negative (anger, bitterness, worry and fear) and four positive (hope, relief, joy and satisfaction). We confirm that voters' emotional register is at least two-dimensional, with one positive and one negative dimension, opening the possibility for different combinations of emotions towards politics. We also find different emotional patterns across party choices, and more crucially, we uncover a significant effect of emotions (especially negative ones) on vote choice, even when controlling for other determinants. Finally, we look at the effect of election results on emotions and we observe a potential winner vs. loser effect with distinctive dynamics in Flanders and in Wallonia. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In this paper, I have advanced what I regard as the "truly rational" account of voting behaviour. This account depends essentially on the application of relative price logic in the comparative institutional context. For that logic to get purchase, certain (I think, minimal) psychological assumptions are required. These assumptions are: that people have views about matters over which they exercise negligible control; and that they have a desire to express those views. Of course, they also have a desire for their own material flourishing. This latter desire predictably plays a larger role in market settings where the individual's choices are consequential; the former play a larger role in the electoral setting where the individual's choices are not consequential. When I say "larger" here, I mean relative to markets: and I mean LARGER by a factor of many thousands! This means that homo economicus and homo politicus are likely to be rather different animals- behaviourally speaking. This difference is, I think, something that the rational choice method properly applied would predict. To deny it requires what seem to me to be very strong psychological claims about expressive and instrumental preferences - namely that they are very highly correlated. No one, to my knowledge, has provided any direct evidence on this matter. Certainly, the fact that we can find occasional instances (areas of policy say) where they do appear to be highly correlated does not, of course, establish the case one way or the other! Equally, to assert a difference in market and political behaviour does not commit one to a "wholly different model of man". On the contrary, it is this same model of man - the rational responder to incentive changes - that drives the whole analysis. I am totally committed to the logic of rationality. But I believe that much of public choice has got the "behavioural implications" of that logic just plain wrong! Voters and consumers are the same, rational persons: but the considerations that drive them in the marketplace where their choices are decisive are not the same considerations that drive them in the ballot-box. In that sense, rational choice logic predicts that homo economicus and homo politicus will exhibit different behaviours, in the sense that the kinds of considerations that weigh with them are likely to be rather different.

In this paper, I have advanced what I regard as the "truly rational" account of voting behaviour. This account depends essentially on the application of relative price logic in the comparative institutional context. For that logic to get purchase, certain (I think, minimal) psychological assumptions are required. These assumptions are: that people have views about matters over which they exercise negligible control; and that they have a desire to express those views. Of course, they also have a desire for their own material flourishing. This latter desire predictably plays a larger role in market settings where the individual's choices are consequential; the former play a larger role in the electoral setting where the individual's choices are not consequential. When I say "larger" here, I mean relative to markets: and I mean LARGER by a factor of many thousands! This means that homo economicus and homo politicus are likely to be rather different animals- behaviourally speaking. This difference is, I think, something that the rational choice method properly applied would predict. To deny it requires what seem to me to be very strong psychological claims about expressive and instrumental preferences - namely that they are very highly correlated. No one, to my knowledge, has provided any direct evidence on this matter. Certainly, the fact that we can find occasional instances (areas of policy say) where they do appear to be highly correlated does not, of course, establish the case one way or the other! Equally, to assert a difference in market and political behaviour does not commit one to a "wholly different model of man". On the contrary, it is this same model of man - the rational responder to incentive changes - that drives the whole analysis. I am totally committed to the logic of rationality. But I believe that much of public choice has got the "behavioural implications" of that logic just plain wrong! Voters and consumers are the same, rational persons: but the considerations that drive them in the marketplace where their choices are decisive are not the same considerations that drive them in the ballot-box. In that sense, rational choice logic predicts that homo economicus and homo politicus will exhibit different behaviours, in the sense that the kinds of considerations that weigh with them are likely to be rather different.

Analyzing the relationships between political parties and voters is one of the central topics of political science. Parties are expected either to be responsive to the demands of their voters or are presumed to have the power to influence voting decisions by structuring the political discourse and thereby competition regarding political issues. These two aspects are covered in the literature by research on the way parties present themselves and by electoral research, respectively. Focusing on the latter, this state-of-the-art article reviews how recent publications have analyzed the impact of party competition (macro level) on vote choice (individual level). It does so by introducing the most prominent theories of voting and party competition, summarizing the most recent results and pointing to potential problems for international comparisons such as methodological choices and different approaches to the measurement of party positions. ZusammenfassungDie Analyse der Beziehungen zwischen politischen Parteien und Wahlern ist eines der zentralen Themen der Politikwissenschaft. Hinsichtlich der Parteien wird davon ausgegangen, dass sie sich entweder responsiv gegenuber den Forderungen ihrer Wahler zeigen oder aber die Macht haben, deren Wahlentscheidung zu beeinflussen, indem sie den politischen Diskurs und damit den Wettbewerb um politische Themen strukturieren. Diese beiden Aspekte werden zum einen in der Parteien-, zum anderen in der Wahlforschung behandelt. Mit Blick auf Letztere wird in diesem State-of-the-Art-Artikel dargestellt, wie neuere Veroffentlichungen die Auswirkungen des Parteienwettbewerbs (Makroebene) auf die Wahlentscheidung (Individualebene) analysieren. Dies geschieht durch eine Einfuhrung in die wichtigsten Theorien zur Wahlentscheidung und zum Parteienwettbewerb, auf deren Grundlage eine Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse neuerer, quantitativer Studien erfolgt. Potenzielle Probleme fur den internationalen Vergleich werden hierbei ebenso erortert wie wichtige methodische Neuerungen und die verschiedenen verfugbaren Ansatze zur Messung von Parteienpositionen.

This piece analyzes the subject Time of Vote Choice in India, a hitherto under-researched aspect of voting behaviour in the country. Using longitudinal data from National Election Studies conducted by Lokniti between 1996 and 2014, it shows that voting intentions of India's voters are increasingly crystallizing before the start of the campaign period of an election. On the other hand, the proportion of voters postponing their vote choice to after the start of a campaign has declined over the last two decades. This declining trend is unique to India as most Western democracies have registered an overtime increase in campaign-period decision-making. While Indian voters who are less political, less partisan and less exposed to media are more likely to be late deciders than early ones, nevertheless, we also find that late deciders—both campaign-period and last-minute—have gradually become more politically sophisticated and attentive over the years. In this respect, our findings validate both the traditional floating voter theory of the Columbia School and some of the newer studies that have countered it.

This article examines a fundamental aspect of democracy: the relationship between the policy positions of candidates and the choices of voters. Researchers have suggested three criteria—proximity, direction, and discounting—by which voters might judge candidates' policy positions. More than 50 peer-reviewed articles, employing data from more than 20 countries, have attempted to adjudicate among these theories. We explain why existing data and methods are insufficient to estimate the prevalence of these criteria in the electorate. We then formally derive an exhaustive set of critical tests: situations in which the criteria predict different vote choices. Finally, through survey experiments concerning health care policy, we administer the tests to a nationally representative sample. We find that proximity voting is about twice as common as discounting and four times as common as directional voting. Furthermore, discounting is most prevalent among ideological centrists and nonpartisans, who make sophisticated judgments that help align policy with their preferences. These findings demonstrate the promise of combining formal theory and experiments to answer previously intractable questions about democracy.

This dissertation addresses the effects of electoral complexity for voters and how voter responses to complexity affect the quality of representation. I identify a tradeoff between more representative elections and the cognitive burdens longer ballots create for voters. Chapter 1 provides the motivation for the project and highlights the role of choice set size in creating complexity for voters. Chapter 2 tests for a relationship between the number of candidates and participation rates in four Brazilian elections. In Chapter 3, I introduce an experimental approach to study the microfoundations of the effects of complexity on voters. Using a survey experiment that randomly varies ballot length and the presence of information about candidates' partisan affiliations, I find strong support for the relationship identified in Chapter 2. When presented with more candidates, many voters are deterred from participating, with party labels facilitating participation but not mitigating the effects of choice set size. Chapter 4 turns to the consequences of complexity for voters' information acquisition strategies. Using a second survey experiment, I manipulate both ballot length and the candidates' attributes while monitoring voters' information acquisition strategies. Here I introduce an original online survey platform that fully randomizes the generation of the experimental ballots as well as a new measure of correct policy voting. I find that even for those voters who are not deterred by complex ballots, variations in the number of candidates can have substantial effects on their decision-making strategies. When presented with more candidates, many voters learn less about their options, rely on potentially unreliable cues of candidates quality, and make poor choices

Political scientists have assumed that dividing the electorate into issue publics, on the basis of salient issues, leads to a better understanding of the relationships between issues and both candidate evaluations and electoral choice. This portrait accords nicely with the description offered by pluralists of the operation of the electoral arena. Our data suggest that, at least in 1972, the portrait is flawed. Using a variety of multivariate tech niques we show that salience fails to sharpen the impact of issues and that electoral choice was, fundamentally, a question of candidate images.