Week 23 Flashcards
Positional Models of Voting
What are examples of positional factors?
- Issue voting
- Ideological positions
What is issue voting?
- Voters focus on selected issues –> voters care about some specific issues
- They
What are examples of issues that may be issue voting?
- Government cuts and taxation
- NHS
- Environment
- EU membership
- Relations with Russia
What are conditions for issue voting?
- Voters must be aware of the issues
- Voters must have opinions about the issues
- Voters must know the difference between the parties on the issues
- Voters must vote for the party that is closest to them on the issue
What are positional issues?
Parties support different goals and policies
What are examples of positional issues?
Taxation and welfare spending
Why are taxation and welfare spending positional issues?
Parties have very different views on the appropriate amount of taxation
All parties and voters don’t hold unanimous views on welfare policy
What is issue salience?
- The perceived importance of an issue
- Voters weigh high-salience over low-salience issues
Do voters really know issues or do their preferences reflect broader ideaologies?
Voters might support parties on ideological positions rather than specific issues
- But voting choice is still positional
What ideologies might voters vote for parties based on?
- Conservatism
- Thatcherism
- Liberalism
- Socialism
- Nationalism
What was Anthony Downs’ book called?
An Economic Theory of Democracy
What is Anthony Downs famous for?
Creating the Downsian Model
Who created the Downsian Model?
Anthony Downs
What is the Downsian Model?
- A famous positional model
- Based on ideological positions
- Ideologies as information economising devices
- One-dimensional politics: left-right –> all issues are assumed to fall on this scale
What are left-wing issues?
Big state, higher tax-and-spend
What are right-wing issues?
Small state, lower tax-and-spend
What did Downs assume about voters?
- Voters have fixed preferences over policy (determined externally)
- These preferences can be located on a single left-right spectrum
- No second dimension of policy
- Voters are rational but not always well-informed - voter for ideologically closest party
What did Downs assume about parties?
- Parties are vote-maximisers
- Parties move along the left-right spectrum
- Parties use ideology to mobilise voters
- Parties are unified actors, no internal factions
What does parties being vote maximisers mean to Downs?
- They want to win elections by appealing to public opinion
- Interested in policy if it helps to win elections, not for the parties own sake
How did Downs view party movement along the political spectrum?
Policy change is neither costly nor difficult
How do parties use ideology according to Downs?
- Voter preferences are fixed from the perspective of the party
- Parties don’t need to persuade voters, the party’s proximity in positions only matters
- Ideology as an information-economising device
What are criticisms of the Downsian model?
- Assumptions about parties
- Assumptions about voters
- Assumptions about political space
What is the criticism about Downs assumptions about parties?
- Parties are not unified actors
- Parties are not only vote-maximisers
- Parties cannot easily change policy
- Complex strategic situation (many parties and internal factions)
What is the criticism about Downs assumptions about voters?
- Voters do not understand the left-right spectrum
- No stable preferences, voters are often inconsistent across issues
What is the criticism about Downs assumptions about the political space?
- There is more than one ideological dimension
- Valence issues are also important - perhaps increasingly so
