Candidate Positioning and Voter Choice

Abstract

T his article examines a fundamental aspect of democracy: the relationship between the policy positions of candidates and the choices of voters. Researchers have suggested three criteria--proximity, direction, and discounting--by "A key characteristic of democracy," Dahl (1971, 1) noted, is the "responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens." Two mechanisms play central roles in promoting responsiveness, thereby fostering congruence between the preferences of voters and the policy positions of candidates. Voters in a democracy can select candidates that represent their views, and candidates can compete for votes by strategically taking positions that appeal to the electorate. Both mechanisms are important; each depends on the criteria voters use to judge politicians on the issues.A lively debate has focused on three theories about how voters judge the policy stances of candidates. The first, proximity theory, assumes that citizens prefer candidates whose positions are closest to their own. For example, a voter who favors a 5% increase in government spending on health care will be happiest with a candidate who advocates the same level of spending. The more a candidate's position diverges from the voter's, the less satisfied the voter will feel. The presumed positive relationship between proximity and satisfaction, Michael Tomz is Associate Professor,

Policy Considerations on Facebook: Agendas, Coherence, and Communication Patterns in the 2011 Danish Parliamentary Elections

“…Extant previous literature advocates the role of issues in electoral preference formation (Adams et al, 2005;Tomz and van Houweling, 2008) and these studies also shed light on the stronger effects by opinions on issues that are salient (Krosnick, 1988). Issues play an important role in off-line campaigning and on campaign websites (Druckman et al, 2010;Sulkin et al, 2007;Xenos and Foot, 2005).…”

How Ideology Fuels Affective Polarization

“…Our design closely parallels the experimental framework used in other research on how survey respondents evaluate candidates based on policy positions (Sniderman and Stiglitz 2012;Tomz and Van Houweling 2008). Specifically, we presented respondents with an eleven-point ideological scale, ranging from -5 (extremely liberal) to ?5 (extremely conservative).…”

Choosing sides: The genetics of why we go with the loudest

“…Previous behavior genetics research has found strong heritability in a multitude of political traits 1 including strength of party identification (Hatemi et al, 2009a;Settle et al, 2009), which is a highly relevant covariate of rational decision strategy (Tomz and Van Houweling, 2008). We also take a behavior genetic path to understand the sources of individual heterogeneity.…”