Ideological Voting Research Articles

Voter ideology in western democracies, 1946–1989

Abstract. We propose a measure of voter ideology which combines party manifesto data compiled by Budge, Robertson, Heari, Klingemann, and Volkens (1992) and updated by Volkens (1995), with election return data. Assuming the comparability and relevance of leftright ideology, we estimate the median voter position in 15 Western democracies throughout most of the postwar period. The plausibility of our assumptions, and therefore the validity of our measure, is supported by the results of several validity tests. With this new measure we are able to make crossnational comparisons of voter ideology among these countries as well as crosstime comparisons within individual countries. We discuss the potential application of our measure to various debates in political science.

Voting Cues in Low-Information Elections: Candidate Gender as a Social Information Variable in Contemporary United States Elections

Theory: Theories of low-information voting are used to examine the effect of candidate demographic characteristics on voting behavior, specifically candidate gender. Hypotheses: For voters in low-information elections, candidate gender operates as a social information cue signaling that women candidates are more liberal than men candidates of the same party. As a result, the gender of a candidate affects ideological voting. Method: Logistic regression analysis is performed on data from the 1986 through 1994 American National Election Studies. Results: Women Democratic candidates fare better than men Democratic candidates among more liberal voters and worse among conservative voters, especially those with minimal knowledge of the candidates. The effect is less clear with Republican women candidates who provide conflicting informational cues (woman and Republican).

A reexamination of the principal-agent relationship in politics

That senators from the same state often have a large difference in their ideological voting records has proven inconvenient for a literature that has largely relied on a median voter model of elections. One exception is Palfrey ( Review of Economic Studies, 1984, 51, 139–156), whose analysis implies the hypothesis that the expected difference in such voting records varies directly with the variance of that state's density function of constituent ideological preferences. This paper provides empirical testing consistent with this hypothesis. The paper then argues that currently accepted methodology for measuring senatorial shirking is systematically biased towards indicating shirking and provides empirical analysis consistent with this argument.

Ideology and candidate evaluation

How does the expressed political ideology of voters influence their evaluation of presidential candidates? The classic answer to this question is provided by the spatial theory of electoral choice in which utility for a candidate is a function of the proximity between the voter and candidate positions on the liberal-conservative continuum. We have argued elsewhere that spatial theory, while intellectually appealing, is inadequate as an empirical model of mass behavior. We have developed a directional theory of issue voting that we believe provides a more realistic accounting of how specific policy issues influence utility for a candidate. Directional theory is based on the view that for most voters issues are understood as a dichotomous choice between two alternative positions. While ideology is widely understood as a continuum of positions, the directional model can be applied to the relationship between ideology and candidate evaluation. In this paper we compare the two theories using National Election Study data from 1972 to 1988. The results tend to favor the directional model over the traditional proximity model. We conclude by briefly tracing out the implications of this finding.

Approval voting in scientific and engineering societies

Approval voting is a system in which members can vote for as many candidates as they like in multicandidate elections. In 1987 and 1988, four scientific and engineering societies, collectively comprising some 350,000 members, used this election reform for the first time. Their reasons for adoption varied but centered around efforts to elect consensus candidates. Approval voting has indeed elected so-called Condorcet candidates, who can defeat all other candidates in pairwise contests. Moreover, these winners generally enjoy support among different classes of voters, so they are not merely “lowest common denominators,” as some analysts had feared. In at least one instance, approval voting would have led to a different winner from plurality voting (in which voters can vote for exactly one candidate); arguably, this winner would have been the better social choice because he had wider support than his closest opponent. On another occasion, approval voting led to “ideological voting”—in which the voting patterns reflected an underlying ordering of the candidates—but voting in most societies tends to be nonideological. Overall, the recent experimentation with approval voting has shown that it not only may make a difference but also elects broadly acceptable candidates.

The Attitudinal Model and Fluidity Voting on the United States Supreme Court

The attitudinal model, as applied to the United States Supreme Court, posits that voting by a justice on the Court is determined by his or her policy attitudes and by the location along the policy dimension of the stimulus provided by the case. Howard (1968) maintained that there was extensive fluidity in voting between the original vote on the merits and the final vote, that such fluidity deflated the ideological voting and that, as a consequence, the final vote, used in the attitudinal model, is an unreliable indicator of judicial attitudes. We question whether there is extensive fluidity in voting on the Court and argue that the fluidity in voting that takes place usually moves in the expected ideological direction. Nevertheless, Howard's general argument that the attitudinal model does not capture the reality of Supreme Court decision-making seems to be valid. For not all fluidity votes move in the expected direction and the most frequent type, i.e. the minority-majority votes, is also driven by small-group variables.

Ideological conviction and persuasion in the rent-seeking society

The paper develops a model of rent-seeking in a democratic political context where voting, as well as rent-seeking, matters. In this context, the paper demonstrates that voter ideology is a constraint on the rent-seeking game as well as a possible avenue of rent-seeking. In a setting where there are both rent-seeking and ideological interest groups, rent-seekers can free ride on the efforts of ideologues, which tends to reduce rent-seeking effort. In a setting where complementary economic and ideological interest groups coordinate their efforts, both rent- seeking and ideological conflict tend to increase.

Shirking, representation, and Congressional behavior: Voting on the 1983 amendments to the Social Security Act

Our central goals at the outset of the paper were three: (1) to report on the relative significance of a sophisticated measure of constituent economic interest and a commonly used variable, ADA score, that purports to measure the personal ideology of the candidate; (2) demonstrate that the constituent economic interest variable should be adjusted to account for the fact thatvoters, not citizens, are the only effective principals in influencing a legislator's voting activities; and (3) call into question, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, the claim that legislators shirk their responsibilities to voters by voting their own ideological preferences. In order to evaluate our efforts, consider Table 5. For a large majority (15) of the 18 relevant runs, the ideological variable is significant. Our measure of constituent economic interests does not eliminate the explanatory power of the ideological voting variable, but this does not indicate shirking. As opposed to shirking, we may observe ideological voting because (1) it provides brand name capital, (2) it represents the ideological preferences of the constituents, or (3) it acts as a measure of median voter economic preferences. Further, ADA scores do not allow us to differentiate between these competing explanations. For 11 of the 18 models one of the economic variables accounts for a significant portion of the variance in the dependent variables. The results derived from our measure of constituent economic interests contradict most findings of the LASI school and raise questions about the validity of the empirical characterization of constituent interests in that research. A breakdown of the results by chamber indicates that significant differences in the degree of ideological voting between the House and Senate may exist. This is important in that most research has focused only on the Senate where ideological voting is more prevalent. For the House, Table 5 reveals the constituent economic interest variable isalways significant, and in fully one-half of the relevant regressions it is theonly significant variable, knocking ADA out of the race. As noted earlier, the insignificance of ADA is some indication of the absence of ideological shirking though its significance may indicate only measurement error, voter ideology, or reputational capital. In the Senate, the results are more evenly split, though it is clear that the adjusted (for reelection constituency) economic interest variable is an improvement. ADA is significant in all 12 Senate regressions, and the respective economic variables are significant in 5, or just under half. This side-by-side comparison is provocative, though it remains to be tested in detail. But our preliminary conclusions can be stated as follows. First, as Peltzman (1984) suggested, a better specification of economic interest and constituency representation reduces, though it does not eliminate, the role of the ADA variable in the Senate. Second, we find evidence that ideological shirking, if it exists, is much smaller in the House. In fact, from an institutional perspective, it can be argued that economic interests are dominant, since House districts are smaller and more homogeneous. Further, the shorter terms for House members may make them more directly accountable to voters, and smaller groups of voters may force a lesser reliance on pure ideological campaigning and require a more personal presentation of self.

Ideological Voting on the Vinson Court: A Comparison of Original & Final Votes on the Merits

In every fully argued and fully decided case before Supreme Court of United States, justices vote on merits on at least two occasions. The first is original vote on merits, which is cast in secret conference within 24 to 96 hours after oral argument; second is final vote on merits, which is cast in course of writing or joining various opinions and is recorded in published reports of these opinions. On both votes, justices decide whether to reverse or to affirm decision of lower court. Ideology is a major factor in decision making on Court, and this study explores whether changes in votes between original and final vote on merits increases or reduces level of ideological voting on Court. J. Woodford Howard argues that intervening variables operating in a collegial court mediate significantly between individual attitude and behavior, which suggests a reduction in influence of judicial attitudes over course of reaching a final decision. Indeed, based on an examination of private papers of several justices in 1940s, Howard concludes that the data point to a deflation of ideological component in decision-making of this period.2 One should note that Howard's conclusion refers both to changes in votes and to changes in content of majority opinions, and it is unclear whether it is relevant to vote changes alone. But even if his conclusion pertains to vote changes alone, it cannot be accepted without further investigation because it is based on impressionistic, instead of systematic, research.

The Rationality of Ideology

SEVERAL recent empirical studies of legislative voting conclude that forces other than the objectively identifiable self-interest of voters in a district influence a representative's voting behavior.1 Each of these studies finds that the explanatory power of a regression of congressional votes on constituent characteristics is improved by including a separate measure of the ideology of the representative in question. The authors of these studies differ, however, with regard to what their respective measures of ideology represent. Kau and Rubin view politicians as accurate representatives of the ideological views of their constituents.2 Kalt and Zupan acknowledge the possibility that ideological voting by representatives reflects the ideology of their constituents. They also accept Downs's3 point that ideology may be an efficient way for politicians to summarize their positions on the issues. They claim, how-

Ideological Voting in 1980 Republican Presidential Primaries

Primary voters compare candidate ideologies and support the one most like their own. This rule was tested with data from CBS News/New York Times exit polls for the 1980 Republican presidential primaries in Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. When primary voters perceived a difference in candidate ideologies, they usually supported the candidate closer to their own ideology. The rule postulates that ideologies guide voters' choices. The evidence suggested that voters probably used ideologies to rationalize their choices.

A Comparison of Voting for U.S. Senator and Representative in 1978

This article compares voting for U.S. senator and representative in 1978. Analysis of data from the Center for Political Studies 1978 Election Study reveals that incumbents were better known and more positively evaluated than challengers, but House incumbents enjoyed a much greater advantage than Senate incumbents. The invisibility of most House challengers was a serious obstacle to accountability in House elections. Senate challengers were much more visible to the electorate. In addition, ideology and party identification had a greater impact on evaluations of Senate candidates than on evaluations of House candidates. Evaluations of House incumbents appear to have been based largely on frequent positive contacts between voters and their representative. As a result, ideological voting was more prevalent in Senate elections than in House elections.

Self-Interest, Ideology, and Logrolling in Congressional Voting

LAWS may be passed because of self-interest or because of ideology. All national laws are ultimately passed by Congress; therefore, an analysis of the factors which determine the way in which congressmen vote can be used to determine the extent to which each of these factors is involved in passage of legislation. Because of the development of statistical tools such as logit analysis, which enable the analyst to handle situations in which the dependent variable is dichotomous, determinants of voting have recently been examined using roll-call voting data. The basic technique in this work has been to define the vote by a congressman on a bill as the dichotomous dependent variable and to use economic factors associated with the district as independent variables. But if this research is to proceed, it is necessary to separate out the factors-self-interest, logrolling, and ideology-which actually determine voting. This separation is the purpose of this paper. Kau and Rubin' and Silberman and Durden2 have analyzed voting on minimum wages; Danielsen and Rubin3 have examined voting on energy issues; Davis and Jackson4 have examined voting on income redistribution; and Kau and Rubins have examined the effect of public-interest lobbies such as Common Cause on the legislative process. Thus, statistical analysis of roll-call voting has been, and is likely to continue to be, a useful tool. This work in economics has differed somewhat from related work by political

Ideological Identification and the American Voter

Ideological Identification and the American Voter

Presidential Election Results and Congressional Roll Call Behavior: The Cases of 1964, 1968, and 1972

The extent to which electoral divisions in congressional districts correspond with the roll call behavior of members of the House of Representatives during the 1964-1973 period is the focus of the research. District results for both the presidential and congressional elections are examined. While little relationship is found with congressional election results, strong correlations are repeatedly found with the presidential election results. Moreover, what one would expect to be the most direct linkage between presidential election results and the members' roll call records-the linkage with members' roll call support for the president-is instead found to be of secondary importance, especially since 1968. A decidedly stronger relationship is seen to occur between presidential election results and members' roll call records when measured along liberal and conservative lines. This finding parallels the emergence of relatively strong ideological voting patterns within the presidential electorate between 1964-1972, and in turn suggests the likelihood that policy linkages of some importance existed between members and their districts over the period covered.