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Analyzes effects of stereotypes, voters' baseline gender preference, and a hypothetical vote choice question involving two candidates; based on a telephone survey of 455 residents of Ohio, conducted from late Mar.-mid Apr. 2000.

Seeking to understand how individual voters can be influenced by their social environment, a microlevel model of the operation of contextual influences on political behavior was developed to specify the effects of both personal contact & individual perception of the partisan nature of the local environment. A test of the model based on interviews with working-, middle-, & mixed-class samples in the US & GB (total N = 1,500+) reveals little support for personal contact as a mechanism of contextual influence but shows that perception of partisan dominance markedly enhances the impact of partisan identification on vote choice. 3 Tables, 1 Figure, 38 References. Adapted from the source document.

Studies of gubernatorial elections have found vote choice to be a function of party identification, assessments of economic conditions, & the president's job performance but have not tested for a referendum effect concerning the incumbent governor. This analysis uses state polling data to demonstrate that voters with favorable images of the incumbent governor have a higher probability of voting for the candidate of the incumbent's party. The effect is greater when the incumbent seeks reelection, but it is present in open contests as well. 4 Tables, 1 Appendix, 42 References. Adapted from the source document.

Research on voting, particularly on legislative behavior, tends to focus on the choices of those casting ballots. Yet, intuitively, abstentions and vote choice should be jointly determined. As such, the relevance of participation depends upon both the extent to which it can be explained by the costs and the benefits of voting and on the nature of the interactions between participation and preferences. To this end, we provide a framework for explaining roll call behavior that simultaneously considers legislators' decisions about whether and how to vote. Application to roll call voting in the 104th Congress finds that abstention and voting choices are integrated; our approach generates sensible and substantively important results which yield important insights into legislative behavior and public policy.

Two images of the voter are examined for factors explaining vote choice. The first image suggests that the voter operates as a consumer in the political environment. In this view, the voter shops for the best personal "value" in candidates based on judgments of short-term economic self-interest. The second image suggests that the voter is concerned about fairness. Results from two surveys suggest that vote choice in the 1984 election for president depended upon citizens' judgments of the fairness of the candidates as well as concerns about each candidate's ability to benefit them. Two types of fairness concerns, concerns about distributions and concerns about procedures, were investigated for their impact on vote choice. Of the two, procedural fairness significantly affected vote choice while distributive fairness did not. The results are discussed with respect to the relationship between procedural and distributive fairness, on the one hand, and American political values, on the other.

Voters' preferences for political parties and their choices can be modeled as a set of equations with three endogenous variables: (1) the perceived distance between the voter's ideological position and that of a party; (2) the utility that the voter assigns to a party; and (3) behavior—whether or not a voter votes for a given party. Spatial models of party competition imply that (1) the perceived ideological distance between a voter and a party is a function of the perceived spatial distances between the voter's most preferred point on each electorally relevant issue and the party's position—the greater these distances, the greater the perceived ideological distance; (2) the utility assigned to each party is a function of this ideological distance, as well as the issue distances; and (3) the higher the assigned utility, the higher the probability that a voter votes for a given party, but the greater the ideological and issue distances, the lower this probability. These hypotheses are operationalized and tested with individual-level data from the 1970-1973 Dutch Election Study.