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"The central feature of democracy is that the will of the people determines the policies enacted by the government. In representative democracies such as the United States, citizens influence the government primarily through voting in elections. The success of democratic governance, therefore, rests in large part on the ability of citizens to select leaders who will act in accordance with their policy preferences. In the end, a government lives up to this democratic ideal (or doesn't) through the enactment of specific policies. How, then, do citizens' votes relate to their preferences over government policy outputs? What intervening factors either assist or interfere with voters' selection of candidates who espouse views closest to their own? Understanding the relationship between citizens' policy views and their voting behavior is central to the evaluation of elections and of democratic governance more generally. This book studies the opinions of ordinary citizens on specific policies and the relationships between these policy views and people's vote choices in presidential elections. Specifically, I focus on testing the empirical implications of spatial theories of voting, which, in their simplest form, assume that each citizen's policy views can be represented by a location on some liberal-conservative policy spectrum, with candidates in a given election each taking a position on this same dimension. Each voter then casts his or her ballot for the candidate whose position is closest to the voter's own ideological location"-- Provided by publisher.
This volume brings together eight original essays designed to provide an overview of developments in spatial voting theory in the past ten years. The topics covered are: spatial competition with possible entry by new candidates; the "heresthetical" manipulation of vote outcomes; candidates with policy preferences; experimental testing of spatial models; probabilistic voting; voting on alternatives with predictive power; elections with more than two candidates under different election systems; and agenda-setting behavior in voting. Leading scholars in these areas summarize the major results of their own and other's work, providing self-contained discussions that will apprise readers of important recent advances.
This book provides an introduction to an important approach to the study of voting and elections: the spatial theory of voting. In contrast to the social-psychological approach to studying voting behaviour, the spatial theory of voting is premised on the idea of self-interested choice. Voters cast votes on the basis of their evaluation of the candidates or policy alternatives competing for their vote. Candidates fashion their appeals to the voters in an effort to win votes. The spatial theory provides explicit definitions for these behavioural assumptions to determines the form that self-interested behaviour will take. The consequences of this behaviour for the type of candidate or policy that voters will select is the major focus of the theory. There is a twofold purpose to this work. The first is to provide an elementary but rigourous introduction to an important body of political science research. The second is to design and test a spatial theory of elections that provides insights into the nature of election contests. The book will appeal to a wide audience, since the mathematics is kept to an accessible level.
Years of collective political science research has fueled the stereotype of the uninformed or illogical American voter who ardently supports parties or candidates but lacks any cohesive ideological reasons for doing so. Prior works, however, do not tell the whole story nor fully capture the nature of public opinion in today's increasingly polarized political environment. Thus, this Element makes the case for more careful and nuanced assessments of ideological thinking in the American electorate. Using a variety of more contemporary survey and experimental data, it shows that a substantial portion of Americans do hold coherent political beliefs and that these beliefs have important consequences for the American political system. Though partisanship still plays a powerful role, the electorate as this Element presents it is much more ideological than the literature too often assumes.
Voters face difficult choices in low-information local elections. Despite the concerns this raises for voter competence, there are virtually no studies of whether and when voters are able to choose candidates who best represent them ideologically in these contexts. We fill this gap by creating same-scale measures of candidate and voter ideology during a local election and examining how candidate ideology affects voters' decisions. We also conduct an exit poll in which we experimentally manipulate cues and examine their effects on voters' candidate preferences. Our results show that the ideological proximity of candidates has large effects on voters' decisions. However, exposing voters to endorsements made by political parties and newspapers with ideological reputations diminishes, rather than enhances, voters' propensity to prefer ideologically-similar candidates. These results challenge the notion that local elections are non-ideological and that citizens who have access to cues make “better” decisions than those who do not.
The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are the essential guide to the study of American political life in the 21st Century. With engaging contributions from the major figures in the field The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior provides the key point of reference for anyone working in American Politics today
A large class of theoretical models posits that voters choose candidates on the basis of issue congruence, but convincing empirical tests of this key claim remain elusive. The most persistent difficulty is obtaining comparable spatial estimates for winning and losing candidates, as well as voters. We address these issues using candidate surveys to characterize the electoral platforms for winners and losers, and large issue batteries in 2008 and 2010 to estimate voter preferences. Questions that were answered by both candidates and citizens allow us to jointly scale these estimates. We find robust evidence that vote choice in congressional elections is both strongly associated with spatial proximity and that individual-level and contextual variables commonly associated with congressional voting behavior condition the magnitude of its importance. Our results have important implications for theories of voter decision-making and electoral institutions.
Candidates and Voters extends our understanding of vote choice and representation, showing empirically that elections work better than is normally assumed through extensive analysis of US House races. The book will be of interest to political observers, political scientists, and others interested in elections and democratic representation.
In Ideology and Congress, authors Poole and Rosenthal have analyzed over 13 million individual roll call votes spanning the two centuries since Congress began recording votes in 1789. By tracing the voting patterns of Congress throughout the country's history, the authors find that, despite a wide array of issues facing legislators, over 81 percent of their voting decisions can be attributed to a consistent ideological position ranging from ultraconservatism to ultraliberalism. In their classic 1997 volume, Congress: A Political Economic History of Roll Call Voting, roll call voting became the framework for a novel interpretation of important episodes in American political and economic history. Congress demonstrated that roll call voting has a very simple structure and that, for most of American history, roll call voting patterns have maintained a core stability based on two great issues: the extent of government regulation of, and intervention in, the economy; and race. In this new, paperback volume, the authors include nineteen years of additional data, bringing in the period from 1986 through 2004.