VT Models Flashcards
What are the main VT models?
Smets & van Ham (2013):
- rational choice
- mobilisation
- resources
- psychological
- political institutional
what is the rational choice model?
Smets & van Ham (2013)
- From a rational choice perspective, the decision to vote is conceptualised as the result of a personal cost-benefit calculation in which the expected benefits of voting should outweigh its costs (Downs, 1957)
- ‘Extended’ rational choice models posit that in addition to cost-benefit considerations, a sense of civic duty drives citizens to the polls (Riker and Ordeshook, 1968; Blais, 2000). Alternatively, voting is seen as an act involving the consideration not only of personal benefits but also those of others (Fowler, 2006).
what is the resource model?
turnout is driven by resources and expects turnout to be higher for citizens with a higher economic status, more skills, and more knowledge (Verba and Nie, 1972)
what is the mobilisation model?
Theories of mobilisation view voting essentially as social behaviour guided by norms and sanctions, and argue that citizens go to the polls just because their family and peers do so, or even simply because they are asked to vote by campaigners (Arceneaux and Nickerson, 2009; Gerber and Green, 2000).
Sociological explanations of turnout have regained prominence recently with research demonstrating that turnout is subject to (parental) socialisation, learning and habit-formation (Plutzer, 2002; Gerber et al., 2003).
what is the psychological model?
stress the role of attitudes and psychological predispositions such as political interest, partisanship, and political efficacy in explaining voter turnout
what is the political institutional model?
sees the decision to turn out as a by-product of the political and institutional context in which citizens live
what support is there for the psychological model?
Smets & van Ham (2013) - find party ID & pol interest important
De Kadt (2017) Findings: Eligibility to participate in 1994 affects future voting by 3 percentage points, with an average treatment effect of actually voting between 3.5 and 8.5 percentage points - Given low turnout rates, these effects account for 7%– 20% of the size of the electorate Argument: psychological model - persistence (or habituation) in voting behaviour is at least partly driven by the creation of associations between first-time voting and positive emotional states - those who have positive emotional states should habituate, while those who have negative emotional states may cease political participation - One important implication of this research is that overwhelmingly negative electoral experiences may actually serve to shrink turnout, a proposition that potentially finds some support in the case of Tanzania. Data: Compare those who were 17 and 19 in 1994
Curtice (2016)
Examines effect of constitutional developments (coalition gov and refs on electoral reform and Scottish independence) on public attitudes and 2015 GE turnout
Political engagement increased, but not turnout
Despite a relatively low turnout (66%) at the 2015 election, there are signs that people are somewhat more committed to the political process.
People have become more likely to feel a duty to vote, to be interested in politics and to feel a strong sense of attachment to a political party. However, those without a strong sense of political commitment were particularly likely to stay at home at the 2015 general election.
Groenendyk (2019)
Heart or head accounts
Popular psychological accounts argue that successful candidates address their appeals to citizens’ “hearts”
research on campaigns shows that candidates win elections by getting voters to think about particular issues—especially issues that create ambivalence in the minds of opposition supporters.
Article reconciles these two accounts of preference formation
a “good gut feeling” toward a candidate helps citizens to overcome the paralysing effect of ambivalence on attitude formation and turnout
since turnout is most tenuous among those with lower income, this is where the effect is most pronounced
Since Democratic candidates rely disproportionately on support from these lower-income voters, it is particularly important that they inspire positive affect among latent supporters.
‘Head’ tactics create ambivalence in opposition supporters which can be broken by ‘heart’ tactics through positive inspiration
Data: An original experiment and ANES data analyses (1980–2004)
what support is there for the mobilisation model?
Look at whether online social networks operate in the same way as face-to-face social networks which have been shown to spread human behaviour
report results from a randomised controlled trial of political mobilisation messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections
The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people
the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users’ friends, and friends of friends
Effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between ‘close friends’ who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship
Suggests face-to-face and online social networks important
Dahlgaard (2018)
Assess theory of trickle-up socialisation - effect of parenting a recently enfranchised voter
Data
Regression discontinuity design
Danish municipalities in four elections
find that parents are more likely to vote when their child enters the electorate
On average across all four elections in Danish municipalities, I estimate that parents become 2.8 percentage points more likely to vote. In a context where the average turnout rate for parents is around 75%, this is a considerable effect. The effect is driven by parents whose children still live with them while there is no discernible effect for parents whose child has left home. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications and placebo tests.
Fieldhouse & Cutts (2012)
Why do some young people vote and others do not?
we find that young people’s participation is particularly sensitive to the presence of other voters in the household
we discount the possibility that the effect is simply attributable to varying levels of political interest and strength of partisan support between households
Data - electoral returns from the 2001 British General Election
Gray & Caul (2000)
Aim: aim to explain the pattern of decline in turnout within industrial democracies
Data: Multivariate analysis of a pooled cross section of 18 industrial democracies between 1950 and 1997
Argument: turnout decline can best be explained in terms of changing patterns of group mobilisation and electorate demographics
The authors specifically point to the decline of unions and labour parties, which have traditionally been associated with the mobilisation of peripheral voters and the real increases in the cost of mobilisation.
The authors control for institutional changes and find that they are less useful in explaining variation in turnout within advanced industrial democracies
Karp, Banducci & Bowler (2008)
A long tradition within political science examines the impact of party canvassing on voter participation. Very little of this work, however, is comparative in scope
examines how system-level characteristics shape the nature and impact of party canvassing and how voters respond to those efforts
Parties are found to target the same types of potential voters everywhere – those who are likely to participate
overall levels of party contact are far greater in candidate-based systems than in proportional representation (PR) systems. Party mobilisation, therefore, cannot explain the higher rates of turnout observed in PR systems.
Argument: discount party mobilisation model for why turnout higher in PR
what support is there for the rational choice model?
Edlin et al (2016)
Edlin, Aaron, Andrew Gelman, and Noah Kaplan. 2016. “Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote to Improve the Well-Being of Others.” Rationality and Society.
Argument
For voters with `social’ preferences, the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate, suggesting that rational voter turnouts can be substantial even in large elections
For individuals with selfish and social preferences, the social will dominate
rational socially motivated voting has a feedback mechanism that stabilises turnout at reasonable levels (e.g., 50% of the electorate)
Rallings, Thrasher & Borisuk (2003)
Rallings, Colin, Michael Thrasher, and Galina Borisyuk. 2003. ‘Seasonal factors, voter fatigue and the costs of voting.’ Electoral Studies 22 (1): 65-79.
Data: more than 4000 British local government by-elections occurring between 1983 and 1999
Such by-elections occur in virtually every week of the year providing an opportunity to study fluctuations in electoral turnout
Aim: look at impact of voting costs on turnout
Seasonal component that affected participation
By-election turnout peaks in the months March–June and is at its lowest during the winter months. Voter turnout appears to be related to varying times of sunset throughout the year, suggesting that a visit to the polling station is a variable cost
Voter fatigue impact participation
The study shows that, ceteris paribus, the less time that has elapsed between a by-election and the previous election the lower the turnout. Voter fatigue, therefore, has a measurable impact on turnout.
Cancela & Geys (2006) - find voter registration important
what support is there for the political institutional model?
Kostelka (2017)
Argument: challenges the conventional wisdom that democratic consolidation depresses voter turnout
The article identifies three main sources of decline.
the most important is the democratisation context.
When democratizations are opposition-driven or occur in electorally mobilised dictatorships, voter turnout is strongly boosted in the founding democratic elections. As time passes and the mobilising democratisation context loses salience, voting rates return to normal, which translates into turnout declines.
The second source is the democratic consolidation context, which seems to depress voter turnout only in post-Communist democracies.
Finally, new democracies mirror established democracies in that their voting rates have been declining since the 1970s, irrespective of the two previous mechanisms.
democratic legislative elections held worldwide between 1939 and 2015
Marshall & Fisher (2014) - globalisation
Marshall, John, and Stephen D Fisher. 2014. “Compensation or Constraint? How Different Dimensions of Economic Globalisation Affect Government Spending and Electoral Turnout.” British Journal of Political Science.
considers how distinct dimensions of globalisation may produce different effects on turnout
data from twenty-three OECD countries from 1970–2007
The study finds strong support for the ownership-constraint hypothesis in which foreign ownership reduces turnout, both directly and – in strict opposition to the compensation hypothesis – indirectly by reducing government spending (and thus the importance of politics)
The results suggest that increased foreign ownership, especially the most mobile capital flows, can explain up to two-thirds of the large declines in turnout over recent decades.
CV
- Frank & i Coma (2021) and Stockemer (2017) both find support
- Jackman (1987) estimates that compulsory voting increases turnout by about 13 percentage points. This pattern has been confirmed by every study of turnout in western democracies, and the magnitude of the estimated impact is almost always around 10 to 15 points (Blais & Carty 1990; Blais & Dobrzynska 1998; Franklin 1996, 2004; Blais & Aarts 2005)
- Norris (2002) finds that compulsory voting increases turnout only in “older” democracies, and she speculates that the law may be enforced less strictly elsewhere or that its impact is conditional on the presence of broader norms about the desirability of obeying the law
- Fornos et al. (2004) develop a four-point compulsory voting scale, and they report a strong impact of compulsory voting on turnout in Latin America, the region with the highest frequency of compulsory voting laws. They do not sort out, however, the specific contribution of sanctions and their degree of enforcement.
- In comparative multivariate analyses, compulsory voting has been found to raise turnout by 7 to 16 percentage points e.g. Powell (1980, 9-10) finds a differ- ence of about 10% in his study of 30 democracies (Lijphart, 1997)
- Hirczy (1994) - the impact of CV depends on the baseline - Brazil and Venezuela are additional examples of low baselines and hence high turnout boosts due to compulsory voting. Average official turnout in Venezuela from 1958 to 1988 was 90.2% but, after the abolition of mandatory voting in 1993, turnout fell to 60.2% (Molina Vega 1995, 164) whereas when Austria intro, increase only about 3 percentage points
electoral system
Studies that have been confined to advanced democracies (Blais & Carty 1990, Jackman & Miller 1995, Franklin 1996, Radcliff & Davis 2000) as well as one study of turnout in postcommunist countries (Kostadinova 2003) have confirmed that turnout is higher in proportional representation (PR) and/or larger districts, whereas research dealing with Latin America reports no association (Perez-Linan 2001, Fornos et al. 2004), and an analysis that incorporates both established and non-established democracies concludes that the electoral system has a weak effect (Blais & Dobrzynska 1998)
Important - lack generalisability outside Europe
Perez-Linan (2001) - Multiple regression (OLS and biweight robust regression) is applied to a sample of 17 Latin American countries in the 1980s.
Cancela & Geys (2016) find support for PR whereas Stockemer (2017) find only affect minority of cases
