Alternative models of issue voting: The case of the 1991 and 1995 elections in Belgium

Abstract

Previous research has indicated that the success of the directional model of issue voting depends on levels of political sophistication and how party position is measured. Using 1991 and 1995 Belgian Election Surveys, the predictive power of proximity and directional measures are compared controlling for both variables. It is shown that when one uses overall mean placements, instead of mean placements by level of political sophistication, the proximity effect declines most among the highly sophisticated voters. The article also compares the performance of the proximity and directional measures across party systems. Contrary to theoretical expectations, party-system differences between Flanders and Wallonia do not affect the explanatory power of either of these measures. It is only in the cases of the liberal, socialist and extreme right parties that the directional measure is clearly superior. A closer analysis of this result indicates that the relative success of the directional measure is due to the limited number of issues from which those parties draw support. The proximity versus the directional modelAlthough political scientists generally agree that the impact of issues on voting behaviour has increased since the 1960s, the way in which voters are influenced by issues remains a matter of considerable controversy. This debate is now mainly focused on the opposition between the traditional proximity approach to issue voting (Downs 1957) and the directional approach, proposed by Rabinowitz & Macdonald (1989) and Macdonald et al. (1991Macdonald et al. ( , 1995. The traditional proximity approach assumes that the issue stances of parties and voters can be presented as positions in a one or multi-dimensional space. The smaller the proximity between a voter and a party, the larger the utility of the party for the voter, the more positive the voter's evaluation of that party and hence the larger the odds that the voter will prefer that party to the others. Proponents of directional theory criticise those assumptions on two grounds. Firstly, they point to recent insights from cognitive psychology, which suggest that the largely uninformed voter does not grasp the overall issue picture, but makes a decision on the basis of the few issues that are salient at the moment of decision. Moreover, the voter is unable to think in terms of specific policy proposals, but has at best a general idea of the policy

The Making of the (Issues of the) Vlaams Blok

“…In 1999, the VB held by far the most issue ownerships of all Flemish parties . While for the electorate at large only 17.1% of motives referred to issues, this fraction was much higher at 48.8% among VB voters (figures not reported in table; Maddens & Hajnal, 2001). In sum, the VB is an outspoken issue party, which makes agenda setting by the mass media relevant for explaining its successes.…”

“…Less sophisticated voters, in contrast, only bother about a few issues. They do not relate to these issues; that is, they hold a fragmented view of politics (Maddens & Hajnal, 2001). Sophisticated voters also consider more difficult issues-technical, temporary, and less symbolic-than nonsophisticated voters (Carmines & Stimson, 1980).…”

Does Issue Voting Matter in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa? Empirical Evidence from 2002-2013 Elections

“…The founders of this theory were Anthony Downs and Black. This theory states that the voters vote that political party or candidate whose stance on an issue is closest to the stance of their own in a dimensional space ( Maddens &. Hajnal, 2001).…”

La competición espacial en Europa tras la Gran Recesión. Un análisis de las posiciones ideológicas ideales y reales en Italia, España y Francia

“…By contrast, the directional model developed by Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989 hypothesized that individuals would choose parties on the basis of the intensity with which they advocate a particular policy direction. Spatial analyses of voting and party competition have continued to use both proximity and directional models of voting (Blais et al 2001;Maddens and Hajnal 2001;Cho and Endersby 2003;Lacy and Paolino 2010;Meyer and Müller 2014;Henning, Hinich, and Shikano 2015;Kropko and Banda 2018) without reaching conclusive evidence favoring one of these models over the other (Lewis and King 1999). In fact, some analyses have shifted their focus to the study of the characteristics (individual, partisan and systemic) that favor the prevalence of either of these two models of voting (Maddens and Hajnal 2001;Kropko and Banda 2018).…”