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Voter Behaviour

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.

Bread and butter à la française: forecasts of the French legislative vote from regional economic conditions

It is well known that citizens tend to blame the government for economic hardship, and that they see legislative elections as
an opportunity to “throw the rascals out”. However, while this mechanism has been thoroughly explored as a basis for election
forecasting in the US and many Western European countries, research carried out on the semi-presidential case of France has
only developed more recently. We employ a constrained model predicting votes for principal party groupings, rather than relying
upon simple incumbent/opposition vote prediction. Building upon work by Auberger and Jerome and Jerome-Speziari, we adopt
a time-series approach, using data from 1981 forwards to look for evidence of variation at the departmental level in support
for party groups and economic indicators such as unemployment and GDP. We then assess the model’s efficacy in retrodicting first-round legislative election results in France.

Sports Cars, Sleaze and Gamma Rays: Rhineland-Palatinate Elects Its FirstRed-Green Government

The 2011 election in Rhineland-Palatinate was a political earthquake: Following a string of political scandals, the SPD lost almost ten percentage points of their support, while the CDU could hardly improve on their disastrous 2006 result. The FDP is no longer represented in the state parliament. The Greens more than tripled their last result, allowing them to enter a coalition with the SPD for the first time.

Analyses at the municipal level show that the party improved most in their urban strongholds while still showing a (relatively) weak performance in rural areas. This will make it difficult to sustain the momentum of their victory. Moreover, the SPD is battered and bruised and needs to select a new leader, but veteran minister president Kurt Beck shows no inclination to step down. This does not bode well for a coalition that needs to organise the state’s fiscal consolidation and structural
transformation.

Geolocation and voting: candidate-voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 General Election in England

The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants’ support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual’s support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters’ choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.

Electoral Sociology: Who Votes for the Extreme Right and why – and when?

Over the last 15 years or so, analyses of the Extreme Right’s electorate(s) have become a minor industry within the larger context of (comparative) Political Sociology. By necessity, this chapter aims at summarising the main findings from this research program, but cannot strive for a comprehensive presentation of all that has been achieved during these…