topic: voting

Michael Lister makes a useful contribution to the discussion on aggregate variables that foster or depress turnout by drawing attention to societal factors, but his analysis is fraught with methodological problems. While his article builds on an interesting theoretical argument about the impact of institutions on attitudes, his claims about causal relationships are not backed by data. There is no rationale for the selection of countries, and most explanatory variables are actually constant within countries. The specification of the model is problematic in many ways. A careful re-analysis shows that the t-values reported in Lister’s article are far too large, while the estimates are unstable and dependent on the selection of observations. Moreover, the effects are trivial in terms of their political implications. There is no robust evidence for a universal, politically relevant relationship between inequality and turnout.

There is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “fringe party”. “Fringe party” is mostly used by journalists, politicians and political scientists as a pejorative term to demarcate the boundary between “reasonable politics” and the “lunatic fringe”, a label famously applied by Theodore Roosevelt in his Autobiography to describe “the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a [reform] movement and always discrediting it” (Roosevelt 1922, 206). Consequently, some political scientists have argued that the term should best be replaced by more neutral expressions, such as “marginal parties”, “non-established parties” or “non-mainstream parties”.

Between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, four basic models of voter behavior have been proposed on which almost all studies of electoral behavior draw. These models describe how humans react to environmental factors and choose between different courses of action. Homo sociologicus (more or less implicitly) forms the basis of the approaches to voting behavior laid out in the first three parts of this entry. In contrast rational voter theory explicitly invokes homo oeconomicus through deductive reasoning. A closer examination reveals, however, that these seemingly very different approaches are in fact complementary and can be regarded as aspects of an overarching model. In the past few years this line of reasoning has become increasingly present both in social-psychological as well as rational choice writings.