Model Of Voting Behavior Research Articles

How Do Outside Experts Evaluate Team Performance? An Empirical Analysis of Harris Poll Voting Behavior

How do outside experts evaluate different group performance? Using Harris Poll voter behavior for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Football Bowl Subdivision teams under the previous Bowl Championship Series (BCS) system, we created a model of voter behavior and found that team performance and team quality affect voting behavior, but not equally. We further investigated these voting differences and found that Harris Poll voters view some conferences more favorably than others. Before drawing a conclusion of discrimination, we also investigated whether differing non‐conference team performance was statistically different and found supporting evidence that different conferences perform at differing levels.

Towards the development of a cross‐cultural model of voter behavior

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reinterpret and test empirically Newman's model of voter's choice behavior, where three elements influencing the choice of a given candidate were included: the media's role in the election; cognitive reasons to vote for; and emotional feelings toward the candidate.Design/methodology/approachThe data from Polish and US 2000 presidential elections have been analyzed and compared. The research purpose is concerned with the measurement of the model's seven domains of political object evaluation (issues and policies, emotional feelings, candidate image, current events, social imagery and epistemic issues), and its predictive power for the choice of a presidential candidate. The data are analyzed using the methodology of structural equations modeling, and are interpreted with the terms of mutual causal relationships between these domains.FindingsThe key factor in influencing voting behavior is evoking positive emotions towards the candidate and then providing voters with a justification for such affect. However, this is especially applicable in an evolving democracy like Poland. In an established democracy like the USA, voters have already learned to more carefully analyze messages from presidential campaigns and they are more resistant to the unconscious power of affect. Furthermore, in the case of challengers, the media exerts a stronger influence on the valuation of their candidacies, but for incumbents, the role of the media is not so pervasive.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitation of the results of this study is the non‐representative character of the samples used and its size. Research should be carried out on a representative sample as the next step toward a complete verification of the voter behavior model.Practical implicationsThe reported results make it possible to elaborate more precisely and effectively strategies to segment voters and position candidates in the minds of voters. Political consultants can use the level of electorate cognitive stability to accurately control the media in political campaigns for their candidate.Originality/valueThe paper presents an interdisciplinary and cross‐cultural approach to analyzing and understanding voter behavior. It offers a baseline to carry out research in disciplines pertinent to political marketing, communication, and psychology.

The instability of instability of centered distributions

Democratic simple majority voting is perhaps the most widely used method of group decision making in our time. Standard theory, based on “instability” theorems, predicts that a group employing this method will almost always fail to reach a stable conclusion. But empirical observations do not support the gloomy predictions of the instability theorems. We show that the instability theorems are themselves unstable in the following sense: if the model of voter behavior is altered however slightly to incorporate any of the several plausible characteristics of decision making, then the instability theorems do not hold and in fact the probability of stability converges to 1 as the population increases, when the population is sampled from a centered distribution. The assumptions considered include: a cost of change; bounded rationality; perceptual thresholds; a discrete proposal space, and others. Evidence from a variety of fields justifies these assumptions in all or most circumstances. One consequence of this work is to render precise and rigorous, the solution proposed by Tullock to the impossibility problem. All of the stability results given here hold for an arbitrary dimension. We generalize the results to establish stability with probability converging to 1 subject to trade-offs between the assumptions and the degree of non-centeredness of the population. We also extend the results from Euclidean preferences to the more general class of intermediate preferences.

Incommensurability and Issue Voting

In this article, I examine several models of voter behavior that are consistent with recent work in political psychology (Fiske and Tetlock, 1997) concerning incommensurability and individuals’ reluctance to make decisions involving explicit trade-offs between competing ideals or principles. In so doing, I show that one ramification of such cognitive dissonance is policy convergence in multidimensional (i.e. multi-issue) electoral competition between two parties or candidates. Furthermore, the predicted policy outcome is a weighted median, which represents, on each issue, each voter’s preferences to the degree that he or she is likely to use that issue to choose between the candidates.

When a Plurality is Good Enough

This paper investigates when a runoff election is desirable and when a plurality result is good enough. A runoff election increases the likelihood that the Condorcet winner will be elected but also entails additional costs. The metric for determining whether a runoff election is desirable will be the probability that the winner of the plurality election would win an ensuing runoff. Models of voter behavior are developed that estimate this probability, which are verified with runoff-election data from United States elections. The models allow governments to make more informed choices in creating rules to decide when to hold runoff elections.

Models of Voter Behavior in Traditional and Evolving Democracies

ABSTRACT The data of Polish, Slovenian, and U.S. political elections have been analyzed according to Newman's model of voter's choice behavior (Newman & Sheth 1985; Newman 1999). The results of the research were interpreted with the methodology of structural equations, where cognitive domains, the media, and the emotional feelings toward the candidates were variables in mutual cause-and-effect relationships. The results of the analyses demonstrated the differences in the importance of the media for the election process. In established democracies like in the U.S. the media play an important role as independent means of delivering information, while in evolving democracies media are not independent and are oftentimes used by the competing political sides as an element in electoral battles. The article also presents proposals for studying voter behaviors within constructivist and realistic paradigms as well as some suggestions for marketing practice.

Models of Voter Behavior

This article reports on a test of a predictive model of voter behavior in Slovenia. The study is based on Slovenian parliamentary elections held on 15 October 2000. A survey was made in an electoral unit (“Vrhnika”). This is one of the tests that were simultaneously done in three countries-Poland, the US and Slovenia. The purpose of the test reported in this study was to test the model in a different cultural and political setting from the one in which it was designed, and also in a different electoral setting-in a proportional instead of majority system of voting. The model proved itself as working in Slovenia.

Testing a Predictive Model of Voter Behavior on the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Utilizing a predictive model of voter behavior, this study identified the motivations behind a sample of voters who cast a ballot for George W. Bush and AI Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign. The motivations of the voters were differentiated on the basis of the “value” they sought in a president. In other words, just as companies in the “commercial marketplace” have to create value to attract customers, so does a candidate in the “political marketplace” who is seeking to carve out a niche for himself that separates him from his competition. Pairwise discriminant analysis is used to identify the motivations behind the choice behavior of voters at both the candidate and party level. The results reveal the complimentary roles that the political party and each candidate's campaign organization played in their respective marketing strategies.

Structural Models of Voter Behavior in the 2000 Polish Presidential Election

The data of the 2000 Polish presidential election have been analyzed according to Newman and Sheth's model of voter's choice behavior (1985). Although this model was originally interpreted within the statistical perspective of discriminant analysis, it could be also extended within the framework of structural equation methodology. Namely, if the seven cognitive domains (Issues and Policies, Emotional Feelings, Candidate Image, Current Events, Epistemic Issues, Social Imagery and Epistemic Issues) are assumed to be distinct and separate, they can be treated as independent (predictive) variables with the voter's intention as a dependent or predicted variable. The three models were tested and the resuits of path analysis show the complex pattern of mutual interdependence between the cognitive domains and voter behavior. The specificity of the cause-effect relationship obtained by the structural equation methodology presented in the paper allows us to put forward some practical suggestions regarding the way electoral campaigns should be conducted.

Estimating the Probability of Events That Have Never Occurred: When Is Your Vote Decisive?

Abstract Researchers sometimes argue that statisticians have little to contribute when few realizations of the process being estimated are observed. We show that this argument is incorrect even in the extreme situation of estimating the probabilities of events so rare that they have never occurred. We show how statistical forecasting models allow us to use empirical data to improve inferences about the probabilities of these events. Our application is estimating the probability that your vote will be decisive in a U.S. presidential election, a problem that has been studied by political scientists for more than two decades. The exact value of this probability is of only minor interest, but the number has important implications for understanding the optimal allocation of campaign resources, whether states and voter groups receive their fair share of attention from prospective presidents, and how formal “rational choice” models of voter behavior might be able to explain why people vote at all. We show how th...

Estimating the Probability of Events That have Never Occurred: When is Your Vote Decisive?

Researchers sometimes argue that statisticians have little to contribute when few realizations of the process being estimated are observed. We show that this argument is incorrect even in the extreme situation of estimating the probabilities of events so rare that they have never occurred. We show how statistical forecasting models allow us to use empirical data to improve inferences about the probabilities of these events. Our application is estimating the probability that your vote will be decisive in a U.S. presidential election, a problem that has been studied by political scientists for more than two decades. The exact value of this probability is of only minor interest, but the number has important implications for understanding the optimal allocation of campaign resources, whether states and voter groups receive their fair share of attention from prospective presidents, and how formal “rational choice” models of voter behavior might be able to explain why people vote at all. We show how the probability of a decisive vote can be estimated empirically from state-level forecasts of the presidential election and illustrate with the example of 1992. Based on generalizations of standard political science forecasting models, we estimate the (prospective) probability of a single vote being decisive as about 1 in 10 million for close national elections such as 1992, varying by about a factor of 10 among states. Our results support the argument that subjective probabilities of many types are best obtained through empirically based statistical prediction models rather than solely through mathematical reasoning. We discuss the implications of our findings for the types of decision analyses used in public choice studies.

Social choice by majority rule with rational participation

This paper explores the social choice properties of majority rule when voters rationally participate in elections. Employing the basic model of voter behavior developed originally by Ledyard (1984) and Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985), we show that when the electorate is sufficiently large, a participation equilibrium exists and is unique. The main result of the paper shows that under these conditions the social preference ordering induced by majority rule is identical to that given by the expected utility of a randomly selected voter, implying the existence of a Condorcet point in the proposal space. A final section provides intuition for the main theorems and relates the equilibrium of this majority rule game to the median voter result.

Fiscal illusion, uncertainty, and the flypaper effect

The flypaper effect is the empirical observation that increases in intergovernmental aid stimulate greater local government expenditure than do increases in voter income. Fiscal illusion provides a widely accepted explanation for this asymmetry. Models of voter behavior under fiscal illusion typically assume that taxpayers consistently misperceive nonstochastic average for marginal tax prices. This paper develops an alternative framework in which rational voters recognize marginal tax prices but must make tax and expenditure plans under imperfect information or uncertainty. Various sources of uncertainty are analyzed and related to the flypaper effect, and implications for public expenditure demand theory are discussed.

The retention of state governors

In this paper, we have provided some support for several hypotheses about the determinants of which governors get reelected. The benefit from being a member of a particular party varies from state to state and from year to year. Personal characteristics such as age are also important. The logits give some support to the importance of coalition formation; reelection is easier in states with low voter turnout and in farm states. The paper is most concerned with the connection between the economic performance and the electoral success of incumbent candidates for governor, and we find support for a model of electoral acountability, in which governors are powerful in state governments and state governments have the ability to differentially tax fixed factors relative to neighboring states. This paper raises some important issues regarding the measurement of variables in political economy, which have wide applicability to other studies in the economics of politics. Peltzman (1988) finds that the difference between the growth rate in state personal income and the national growth rate over a one to four year period prior to the election does not affect gubernatorial electoral outcomes. Concurrently, we find that the current year's growth rate in state personal income and its difference from the national growth rate are not significantly related to electoral success but that the average deviation from predicted state personal income during the governor's tenure in office is significantly related to the odds of getting reelected. That is, the data reject simplistic views of voter behavior and support a sophisticated model of voter behavior. Similarly, Peltzman (1988) has greater success using more sophisticated, cumulative measures of national economic performance. This suggests that great care must sometimes be taken to create variables that are capable of giving our economic models a fair hearing. Voting studies often find that only current period effects matter, which is attributed either to voter myopia or — and this is the more popular explanation nowadays — to the confinement of effects by rational expectations to current period, ‘white noise’ effects. The specifications in these voter studies ignore the cumulative information generated in political economy. Both our results and Peltzman's (1988) results suggest that variables that reflect this cumulative information may be more successful than variables that are based only on the current year.

Revealed preferences for public goods: Applying a model of voter behavior

Most analyses of preferences for government-supplied goods disregard the fact that in a democratic society, these preferences are revealed by an individual choice: the vote. In this paper this is taken account of in a model, explaining the dynamics in voting behavior in a multi-party system. The model assumes that voters may be categorized into K groups of individuals, pursuing the same interests, who remember how parties do in representing these interests (given the level to which they are held responsible for government policy). The model allows one to estimate party identification, sensitiveness to economic performances, time preference, and relative preferences for public versus private goods, all for each of the groups. Furthermore, the model allows for an estimation of the level to which various parties are held responsible for government policies. An empirical application of the model to the Netherlands is presented, albeit that data restrictions did not allow a distinction of more than one group. The results in terms of significance of the coefficients as well as the interpretation of the original parameters are promising. The two main conclusions are that the relative preference for private versus collective consumption is lower than the existing ratio in the Netherlands, and that two parties forming a government coalition are not held equally responsible for the policies. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research is gratefully acknowledged. Previous drafts of this paper were presented at the following congresses: The European Consortium for Political Research (Amsterdam, 10–15 April 1987); the Meeting of the European Public Choice Society (Reggio Calabria, 22–25 April 1987), and the Econometric Society European Meeting (Copenhagen, 24–28 August 1987). The participants in these sessions, as well as the participants in the seminar of the Sociological Institute of the University of Milan are gratefully acknowledged for their useful suggestions. Special thanks are due to Nathaniel Beck and Friedrich Schneider for carefully reading the manuscript and presenting helpful comments.

A new theory of voting: Why vote when millions of others do

I believe to have shown that a signalling model of voter behavior is bothconsistent with neo-classical economic theory, and in agreement withmany of the important features of the political system. I cannot provethat the theory is a correct one, only that the assumptions appearreasonable, that these assumptions lead to some testable predictions, andthat many of these predictions agree with the available evidence. The argument may appear to be discomforting to some; I often findit so. For the view here is that important decisions - war, peace, civil rights- are not made on the basis of considered judgment by the citizens.Instead, citizens realize that their votes will not matter and they there-fore do not vote to affect policy. Voters view politics as a game orentertainment; it is only one of many ways to impress one's friends orassociates, and fulfills the same function for many voters that designerjeans do.

Voting For and Against Unions: A Decision Model

Models of voting behavior in union representation elections have largely been concerned with the relationship between work dissatisfaction and pro-union voting and post-hoc analyses of election outcomes. A comprehensive model of union voting behavior should account for the reasons why employees vote for unions and also why they vote against unions in both certification and decertification elections. A model is developed which incorporates some variables not previously given prominence in the literature and some testable propositions are derived.

Agenda control by budget maximizers in a multi-bureau setting

While the present extension of the single issue model of agenda control has permitted the examination of a wide array of questions within a consistent overall framework and has generated new insights, some qualifications are in order. First, the analysis, like Niskanen's and Romer and Rosenthal's is strictly limited to one form of agenda control — take-it-or-leave-it offers made relative to some reversion level. Second, each of the bureaus in this extension are single activity bureaus. As a result, certain types of agenda control that might exist when there are several dimensions to each bureau's activity, such as the mix chosen for various sub-activities or the spatial distribution of the bureau's output, are ignored. See Denzau and Mackay (1980) and Mackay and Weaver (1979a, b) for analyses of these types of agenda control for the case of a single bureau. Third, as a point of reference and for expositional simplicity, the analysis for the most part was executed with a single decisive voter on all issues. As a result, certain complexities and, perhaps, additional ambiguities were avoided. Finally, in an effort to isolate and study the effects of the supply side phenomenon of agenda control, a simple, traditional model of the demand side of the collective choice process was employed. For the simplest demand side-passive supply side models this has typically proved quite adequate. As models of the collective choice process have become more complex, however, taking on more strategic features, the weaknesses of certain of the standard assumptions implicit in this demand side model become more apparent. In particular, the assumption that voters vote sincerely and non-strategically is likely to be strained by most specifications of the dynamics of the voting process since learning on the part of voters would condition expectations and, perhaps, alter choice. The inclusion of expectations formation into the model of voter behavior would certainly seem, at least at the intuitive level, to introduce an interesting additional set of constraints on agenda setters that may limit to some extent the expansionary tendencies described in this paper. In short, each of these qualifications should provide fertile ground for future research.