Donald M. Gooch
ELECTION MODELS, RETROSPECTIVE
VOTING, THE REASONING VOTER &
ISSUE OWNERSHIP
The American Voter
 The Funnel Model of Voting
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
First, you learn your party ID from parents and through socialization.
You form a psychological attachment to this party. As such, your
partisanship shapes the development of your attitudes.
 Your (underlying) attitudes are then reflected in your positions on the six
attitudinal dimensions:
 the personal attributes of the Democratic candidate (Stevenson),
 the personal attributes of the Republican (Eisenhower),
 the groups involved in politics and the questions of group interest
affecting them,
 the issues of domestic policy,
 the issues of foreign policy,
 and the comparative record of the two parties in managing the affairs of
government.

Finally, these issue positions are the proximal cause of your voting
decision. In fact, these six issue positions predict voting decisions with
87% accuracy--which is even better than asking voters who they intend
to vote for.
Party ID
 Party ID is seen as an "enduring psychological
attachment." The political attitudes it determines
are measured along six dimensions:
1. How you feel about the Democratic candidate
2. How you feel about the Republican candidate
3. How well each party manages the affairs of
government
4. Group interests ("he represents business owners" or
"little people": people like me vote for so-and-so).
5. Domestic policy issues
6. Foreign policy issues
Partisan Perception
 Feelings across these six dimensions tend to be highly
correlated. This correlation occurs because partisan feelings
are strongly shaped by party identification. (Party ID leads
to partisan feelings, not the reverse.)
 Party ID is treated as a psychological force or tie through
which voters interpret political issues (each of the
aforementioned dimensions).
 "Identification with a party raises a perceptual screen [i.e.
selective perception] through which the individual tends to
see what is favorable to his partisan orientation."
 In this sense, the party acts as a supplier of cues by which
the individual may evaluate the elements of politics.
Origins of Partisanship
 AV claims that individuals "inherit" a party ID
from their parents and the social milieu in
which they are raised and that this party ID is
characterized by stability and resistance to
contrary influence.
 They do recognize that objective events and
conditions can lead a voter to modify her
party ID or vote against it if her evaluation of
the current elements of politics does not
agree with her initial allegiances.
Issues Don’t Matter
 Campbell et al. find that policies and issues play a
small part in most voters' decisions, that only a small
fraction of the electorate (12%) displays anything
resembling an ideology.
 Most people when asked about their positions on
specific policy issues do not have a consistent
pattern of responses in terms of a liberalconservative dimension.
 Voters frequently do not know which party stands
for what.
 These findings cast doubt on the efficacy of voting
as a mechanism of democratic control of
government.
AV:
Issue Threshold is High
 Before an issue affects your vote, three things must happen:
1.
2.
3.
You must be aware of and know something about the issue. (It must
be "cognized.")
You must care about it, at least minimally. (Operationalized: You must
have an opinion about a specific piece of legislation. E.g. pg 172: Are
you in favor of or opposed to the Taft-Hartley Act?)
You must know what the parties say about the issue (does your party
support or oppose Taft-Hartley).
 In essence, you need to know a LOT about an issue in order for it
to affect your vote. You need to know the specific law, its
attributes, and what it does to policy.
 It’s not enough to simply know that there is a law called “No Child
Left Behind” or “The Patriot Act”…you have to know what that
legislation says and what policy it institutes in the law.
Changes in Partisanship
 Changes in party ID are possible.
 These changes result from either personal
forces (usually changes in an individual's
social milieu) or social forces
 They are usually the result of experiences
related to great national crises or those
experiences related to progress through the
life cycle older voters tend to be more
conservative.
Retrospective Voting
 The social psychological school saw party ID as a
simple, thoughtless attachment and challenged
rational choice theorists to explain this attachment.
 This attachment proved a puzzle for rational choice
theorists, who characterized it, at best, as a
“standing decision”…but the notion of a
commitment to one party over the other didn’t fid in
RC models.
 Fiorina takes the social psychologists head on, and
provides a rational choice theory that explains not
only why party ID is so stable, but also why it
changes.
Place in the Literature
 Key said that citizens are primarily concerned
with real policy outcomes (purely
retrospective).
 Downs said that citizens use the past only to
evalute what a party will do in the future;
retrospective voting is merely a cost-cutting
variant of prospective voting.
 Fiorina says that retrospective voting is based
on expectations about future welfare guided
by evaluations of past policy end-states.
Retrospective vs. Prospective
 Carrot or the Stick:
Reliance on retrospective voting vs prospective
voting could lead to differing electoral outcomes
2. Retrospective voting presumes that citizens are
more concerned with policy outcomes than
policy instruments
3. Retrospective voting presumes that public policy
formation is not constrained by the voters
1.
Why Retrospective?
 If we were dropped into a new democracy with
two parties, we might employ "simple issue
voting"--that is, we might look at each party's
issue platforms.
 But after some experience having one of the
parties in government for four years, we might
add to this calculus our estimation of how well
the party in power has performed.
 We might further add an estimate of how well
the other party would have performed if it had
been in power, weighted according to our
uncertainty about this estimate.
Why Retrospective?
 Then, we can use all this to predict which
party is more likely to serve our interests best
in the future.
 Over time, these evaluations are reflected in
our party identification, which is a "running
tally" of how each party is treating me.
 Thus, my evaluations of the governing party's
recent performance should elicit a change
(one way or the other) in my overall
evaluation of that party.
The Retrospective Model
 The model is based on a running tally of
retrospective evaluations of party
performances and promises.
 It looks at an individual's past experiences
with political parties plus secondary factors
such as parent's affiliation.
 His model allows party ID to change
continuously.
SRE & MRE
 SIMPLE RETROSPECTIVE EVALUATIONS (SRE): Based
mainly on personal finance, war, civil rights, and similar
things.
 These are things that voters have direct experience with, so their
retrospective evaluations are unmediated by the media or
anything.
 MEDIATED RETROSPECTIVE EVALUATIONS (MRE) are
those evaluations that depend on some intermediary; for
example, I need the media to provide me with information
about the macroeconomy, but I can also use my SREs to
make mediated judgments
 I can use my experience with personal finance to make
judgments about the national economy.
 MREs are mediated by a citizen's choice of information sources
and opinion leaders.
The Reasoning Voter
 Popkin relies on a theory of low information
rationality to explain how voters are able to make
rational choices between candidates.
 Voters do this by using information shortcuts that
they receive during campaigns, usually using
something like a "drunkard's search."
 Voters use small amounts of personal information to
construct a narrative about candidates.
 Essentially, they ask themselves this: "Based on
what I know about the candidate personally, what is
the probability that this presidential candidate was a
good governor? What is the probability that he will
be a good president?"
Political Knowledge
 Despite a more educated electorate, knowledge of
civics has not increased significantly in forty years.
 According to Popkin, theorists who argue that
political competence could be measured by
knowledge of "civics book" knowledge and names of
specific bills (i.e. the Michigan studies) have missed
the larger point that voters do manage to gain an
understanding of where candidates stand on
important issues.
 He argues that education has not changed how
people think, but it does allow us to better interpret
and connect different cues.
Information as a By-Product
 Popkin argues that most of the information
voters learn about politics is picked up as a byproduct of activities they pursue as a part of daily
life
 homeowners learn about interest rates, shoppers
learn about prices and inflation etc.--thus, people
know how the economy is doing.
 Media helps to explain what politicians are doing
and the relevance of those actions for
individuals, and campaigns help to clarify the
issues.
 Voters develop affinity towards like-minded opinion
leaders in media and in personal interactions.
Party ID as a Running Tally
 Popkin views party identification as a running
tally of party assessment and looks at party
identification of candidates as providing an
important default value which voters use to
evaluate them.
 He sees "a sophisticated pattern of
transmission from past elections and
interactions among and between people in
the current election"
Popkin’s Argument
 Popkin argues that voters often function as
clinicians (who gather limited information and
infer from it a broader narrative), in contrast to
statisticians (who weigh only facts in order to
make a decision).
 He illustrates a few concepts to explain this
relationship:
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Representativeness Heuristic
Gersham’s Law of Information
Framing
Pseudocertainty
Drunkard’s Search
Representation Heuristic
 Voters often compare a candidate to a preexisting stereotype of how certain people act.
 For instance, they may compare a presidential
candidate to their image of what a president
should be like, or compare a candidate to their
stereotype of how someone who "does the right
thing" would act.
 Essentially, we take our pre-existing idea of what
a president should be, then compare it with
personal information about the candidate using
a "goodness of fit" test.
Gersham’s Law of Information
 A small amount of personal information can drive
out a large amount of previous impersonal
information, because personal information is much
more helpful than political information in
constructing narratives.
 Because personal information is so important (much
more than a political record is), even new
challengers can rapidly catch up with incumbents in
the polls--though only the incumbent has a political
record, voters get personal information about both
candidates.
 Voters judge candidates more on how "presidential"
they look than on their actual record.
Framing
 Framing is the way that we look at the president.

For example, heavy media coverage of economic problems leads us to
not only update our evaluation of the president's handling of the
economy, but also to weight this issue-specific evaluation more heavily
when making a broader evaluation of the president's overall
performance.
 Popkin discusses five frames that matter.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Candidate vs president. When incumbents speak only from the Rose
Garden, they are seen as presidents. When they are seen on the
campaign trail, they are mere candidates.
Candidate's personality vs candidate's record (see above). Personality
matters more.
Candidate vs nominee. Political conventions can change the way you
are viewed (a candidate becomes a nominee).
Domestic vs international issues. Which one matters for this
campaign?
Inflation vs unemployment vs poverty. Which economic problem is
current affects how candidates are viewed.
Pseudocertainty
(Calculation Shortcuts)
 When we can use one of these shortcuts, we are
more confident in our evaluations (although,
ironically, our evaluations are probably more
likely to be incorrect):
When all our information is consistent (i.e. all
supports one candidate)
2. When probabilities are close to 0 or 1. We don't
understand finer probabilities well and are
uncomfortable with them.
3. A good sure thing vs a probabilistic better thing. We
like the sure thing better, even though the expected
value of the gamble is better.
1.
Drunkard's Search
 The term is based on the image of a drunk looking for his
lost car keys where the streetlight is shining, even though
that's not where he lost them; he looks there because that's
where the light is.
 People are more likely to use one-dimensional searches,
such as focusing on a single attribute about a candidate, or
using the front runner's characteristics as a measurement
of other candidates.
 Symbols are often drawn upon to represent issues (e.g. the
hostages representing Carter's incompetence in foreign
affairs.).
 Our decision about where to look for information (i.e.
which streetlight to use) determines which decicion we
make.
Campaigns & Issues
 Popkin also focuses significantly on the role
of the campaign in facilitating choice. He
argues that the campaign
 (1) increases the importance of (some) issues,
 (2) strengthens the connections between issues
and the office, and
 (3) increases the perceived differences between
candidates.
Campaigns & Issues
1.
2.
3.
Increasing importance of issues: In the Columbia studies,
the authors found that voters have varying degrees of
attachment to the parties--and that, if the campaign
demonstrates the importance of particular issues right
now, then crossover voting is most likely if you aren't
confident in your party's ability to handle those issues.
Strengthen connections between issues and office:
Though voters can imagine connections between certain
policies and certain offices, it's hard for them to know
which offices are responsible for certain things. News and
campaigns can remind voters that a particular office can
influence a particular policy area.
Increase perceived differences: Demonstrate to voters
that the candidates are likely to do different things about
the issues that are important.
Issue Ownership
 Discussion