Partisan Attitudes and the Vote

Abstract

The study of voting has been dominated by several major research traditions—social class and social structure, party identification, and rational choice—each of which has been subject to major criticism. In this article, we develop an alternative approach to the study of electoral behavior. We view vote choice as a decisional process, and the assumptions of our model are in line with available knowledge of simple human decision making and with related theoretical approaches to the subject. In addition to accounting for vote choices in Britain in 1970 and 1974, our argument rests on relatively few and simple assumptions and provides hypotheses that account for stability and change in the votes cast by individuals and by the electorate taken as an aggregate. It also provides a proper theoretical and empirical understanding of the concept of party identification. The result is an alternative to more widely used explanations of electoral behavior.