Turnout and the calculus of voting

Reassessing Downs: Testing the Influence of Voters’ Characteristics in a Chilean Presidential Election

“…Voting is the most central mode of participation in politics (van Deth, 2017; Gallego, 2015). Answering the question of why people vote has thus become, after the seminal book by Downs (1957), one of the most researched fields in political science (Aldrich and Jenke, 2017; Aldrich, 1993). It now contains numerous responses, a bewildering number of correlates, and a large list of factors associated with the decision to voting or abstaining (Smets and van Ham, 2013; Wass and Blais, 2017).…”

“…There are two main strands of research to account for the individuals’ decision to turn out or not: IVMs and CVMs . Instrumental voter models, as outlined in the classic book by Downs (1957) and elaborated by Riker and Ordeshook (1968), Tullock (1968), and more recently Aldrich and Jenke (2017), are an application of rational choice models to the voting decision. Rational choice accounts of political phenomena and, especially so, the IVMs are closely connected with the attempt to apply economic rationality to political science: thus, in his 1957 seminal book, Downs applied this logic not only to the voting decision but also to the concurrence amongst parties, the problem of the acquisition of political information by citizens, or the difficulties posed by retrospective and prospective voting approaches, amongst many others.…”