Elections, voting behavior and public opinion are arguably among the most prominent and intensively researched sub-fields within political science. That said, each continues to evolve rapidly in theoretical and methodological terms. Each has also impacted on popular understanding of the core components of liberal democracies in terms of electoral systems and outcomes, changes in public opinion and the aggregation of interests. This handbook provides an up-to-date and authoritative “go to” guide for researchers looking to understand key developments in these important areas. It aims to provide an advanced level overview of each core area and also to engage in debate about the relative merits of differing approaches.
The handbook is edited by scholars who have served as past editors of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (JEPOP). As former editors, we were fortunate to be able to choose from a range of outstanding authors, reviewers and readers, who together provide the wealth of expertise and insights needed for such a handbook. Between them they provide wide-ranging, thoughtful, erudite, succinct and, above all, readable treatments of the major topics covered by JEPOP. Each chapter is written especially for the handbook with the objective of familiarizing political science scholars with core debates, past and present, in the areas of electoral and public opinion research. While its coverage is broad and we fully expect readers to approach it selectively, the chapters are designed to link together and reinforce one another to provide a comprehensive “360 degree” statement on the state of contemporary research in the field.
As we put the finishing touches to this handbook, democratic politics and political science is experiencing significant challenges. The largely unexpected outcome of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as US President have led some to challenge the utility of political science research. Yet, as this handbook will show, these criticisms are largely without foundation. Far from being a time when we are morosely looking inwards, this is an exciting time for political science; a time when rapid advances are being made across the discipline and especially in these sub-fields. Recent developments in causal analysis have put an end to a period where authors were spending much time re-inventing the wheel or (if you like) going around in circles, obtaining results that were treated as “findings,” only to be disproved by later new results. The adoption of new approaches, especially experimental methods, has led to a flood of findings that definitively confirm or disprove earlier contentions that many had found it hard to perceive as advances in knowledge. A recent pessimistic account of such advances in what we have learned about representation processes can be found in Achen and Bartels (2016). We take a very different view than the authors of that book, believing that what they describe is a world of political science now thankfully moving into our past. A decade or so ago it could indeed have at least been argued, as they do, that virtually nothing had been learned since the establishment of a social group basis for politics some sixty years ago. Partly we feel that their pessimistic view is due to their excessive focus on the United States, where their claimed lack of progress might seem perhaps more plausible than elsewhere, but mainly we feel that their view is so damning to the political science profession because they focus on topics that have been prominent both now and sixty years ago, largely ignoring competing approaches that have developed in the meantime. This handbook tries to avoid both these limitations, adopting a comparative view of new as well as classic topics that fall within its remit. The United States figures in its pages, but what we know about the United States is here illuminated by what we know about other countries as well as the other way around, quite in contrast to the prevailing norm. In our view, this makes the handbook both distinctive as well as comprehensive. We hope that readers agree.
The handbook is structured into six sections under which are grouped the individual chapters that address the state of play in each sub-field (though some sub-fields are addressed by more than one chapter). The book begins with a section on the different theoretical approaches that have been employed in recent years, starting with an approach based on political theory and moving on through the sociological, rational choice and institutionalist approaches, each of these giving rise to somewhat different research questions addressed by somewhat different methodologies. The strategy here is deliberate. Too often in the past, political scientists have approached topics such as electoral behavior from only one perspective, perhaps grudgingly accepting that an alternative theoretical approach is needed to deal with effects that have not yet been fitted into their preferred worldview. In our view, the modern student of elections and public opinion needs to adopt a multi-perspective position, especially in light of fundamental changes over time in the relative importance of different causal mechanisms. Political circumstances evolve, and the approaches taken by political scientists need to evolve in step. These chapters help illuminate what for many are a priori assumptions. Why, for example, might we consider that electoral systems would have an effect on voter behavior? And why might a person’s social circumstances be in any way relevant to their political opinions? What is the underlying theoretical position suggesting that parties are likely to compete for the much vaunted “center ground”?
From there the handbook dives straight into the question of why people vote and what determines how many of them do so, using each of the theoretical approaches already introduced in the first section. From there it moves in much the same fashion into the determinants of vote choice, with two sets of themes on this topic – the first focusing on long-term factors such as social cleavages and partisanship and the second focusing on short-term factors such as government performance, strategic voting and economic voting.
The handbook then moves on to considering the role of context, focusing on the institutional, systemic, social, technological and electoral context. We then look at public opinion: its nature, the problems involved in understanding its effects, and its impact. The handbook ends with a long section on methodological challenges and new developments. Again, the inclusion of this last section is quite deliberate. As the handbook shows, the discipline has made significant advances over the last seven decades. And there is no better indication of the intellectual health of the discipline than the recognition of what our data can and can’t tell us and how new methodological and technological developments can be harnessed to further enhance our – and the rest of the world’s – understanding. Political science must not stand still. What our authors show is that the methods that political scientists have adopted have shaped how people think about explanations. Political science has indeed not stood still. As this book shows, in response to criticism, it has significantly diversified the way we collect data, from cross-sectional survey, to longitudinal surveys; from big data to experimental methods. Far from political science being in crisis, this book is testament to its rude health in studies of public opinion, voting and elections more generally.
Scholars are increasingly expected to engage with non-academic audiences and we are confident that political science is well positioned to address this need. This is no more apparent than during election campaigns, when experts in voting behavior are often required to become on-hand media pundits. The challenge for political science is that while the media are keen on providing predictions, scientific findings tend not to be obtained before Election Day but rather in the months and years which follow (see, however, Chapter 39 by Stephen D. Fisher on election forecasting in this handbook). Elections are increasingly difficult to predict. What the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, however, is that research in elections, voting and public opinion has produced, and continues to produce, a strong base of knowledge which can inform the public debate in meaningful and important ways.
The handbook sets out to address the fundamental question of how elections serve as the instruments that enable public opinion to be channeled by parties into decisions as to who will constitute the government and what policies that government will pursue. But we hope the handbook will do more than that. When reading this book, either as selected chapters or as a whole, there are some important questions that will give pause for thought. We focus here on six key areas:
First, macro and micro level explanations do not speak with each other as frequently as they might, or perhaps, should. Neither the characteristics of individual citizens, nor the macro economic, social and political conditions alone can fully explain election outcomes. Yet many studies – including those described in this volume – have focused either on the social-psychological determinants of voter behavior, or on the role of (aggregate) national and institutional characteristics on election outcomes, without attempting to bridge the two. We need to feel much freer to move between levels of analysis and of conceptualization than has been customary in past political science research. This handbook perhaps does not constitute much of a corrective since it summarizes that past research, yet we try to ensure that its authors are transparent about limitations deriving from the approaches that they report. Recently we have seen an increase in “contextual” approaches to election studies which recognize the interplay between individual citizens on the one hand and the social, economic and political context on the other and these also feature in many of the chapters in this volume.
Second, the handbook covers a literature spanning more than fifty years and during that time some ideas have come and gone whilst others have remained remarkably persistent. To a large extent, these shifts in the dominant paradigm in the study of elections and voters have reflected more-or-less secular trends in some of the phenomena under study: for example, the increasing volatility of voters, the weakening of social cleavages in determining party support, and the decline of party identification. These fundamental changes in context have meant that the applicability of different theories and models has also changed. This does not mean some models are right and that others are wrong, but rather that there is no one-size-fits-all model. Citizens are heterogeneous across space and time and our theory and models of electoral behavior should reflect that.
Third, in some ways, change can be helpful, giving us leverage in determining the importance of the factors that change. But in other ways change creates much potential for confusion unless scholars are very clear about what period they are thinking of in regard to different research questions. This complication is made worse by the fact that political realities do not necessarily evolve at the same rates or in the same directions in different countries. In this handbook, we have taken especial care to ensure that different chapters, in which scholars may have different periods in mind, speak to each other across the potential gulfs involved. We have tried to do the same regarding divisions between different theoretical approaches (which often are coterminous with temporal gulfs), as mentioned earlier.
Fourth, public opinion is a powerful influence both on election outcomes and on government actions between elections. Parties look to public opinion when deciding what policies will be attractive to voters and governments look to public opinion for guidance regarding the generality (and often even the details) of public policy. Yet much doubt surrounds the question of whether the public is sufficiently sophisticated (in terms of both information and cognitive skills) to provide the guidance that party and government leaders look for.
Fifth, turnout is a vitally important contributor to election results, since levels of turnout can skew electoral outcomes – often in very unexpected ways. This was really well illustrated by one of the great political earthquakes of 2016, the Brexit referendum in the UK, which delivered a higher turnout than any general election since 1992 because the Leave campaign managed to mobilize so many citizens who would not normally cast a ballot. It is well established that some groups are normally under-represented among voters (see Eric Plutzer’s chapter, Chapter 6). Turnout has the potential to skew outcomes against clear sections of the population, particularly if politicians and parties adjust public policies accordingly. Age is a good example here. Because it takes time for younger voters to acquire habits of party support, older voters are commonly much more likely to vote and many governments as a partial consequence have struggled to confront future problems in pensions and health care. Such examples illustrate the potential for differential turnout to skew not only election results, but also public policy – often in favor of already privileged social groups. Such outcomes inevitably raise the question of whether voting should be a requirement of citizenship – not so much to compel citizens to act in a particular way, but to help ensure that election outcomes better reflect the average citizen’s preferences and that the benefits of public policies are less asymmetrically distributed.
Finally, the question raised regarding turnout reflects a broader issue, which we hope will stimulate thought and debate – the extent to which citizens have democratic obligations as well as democratic rights. For example, if turnout is low, or the quality of campaign debate sub-standard, the fault is assumed to lie with the parties, candidates or media messengers. From this perspective, it is the responsibility of parties, politicians and governments to set the parameters and tone of the debate and to ensure that citizens are adequately informed. But, there is a strong case that citizens should play less of a passive role, taking responsibility for being better informed and holding politicians to account, along lines implicit in Wlezien’s chapter (Chapter 32; cf. Bølstad’s chapter, Chapter 30). This has never been more the case than in the new era of so-called “post-truth” politics in which apparently false or “fake news” is spread by citizens or possibly even government agencies via social media. This tendency, as Semetko and Tworzecki’s chapter reveals (Chapter 24), may in fact point to an important new reverse trend and “fourth wave” in election campaigning whereby practices honed in the newer democracies are adopted by voters, parties and candidates in more established polities.
On the broader question of responsibility for the problems we now witness in contemporary democracies, it is clear that political scientists differ as to who they regard as the chief “culprits.” However, one consistent line of argument within scholarship on elections, voting behavior and public opinion (and one that is certainly present in the chapters comprising this edited volume) is that to understand election outcomes and their impact on social well-being one must look at both political supply and public demand. As our authors here and more generally in the field make clear, a two-way relationship exists between the choices made by citizens and what the parties offer. That is, the choice sets open to voters are constrained and shaped by the strategic decisions made by parties and candidates in terms of the amount of policy differentiation. At the same time, parties are hemmed in by the ideological preferences of their grass-roots and of the electorate at large, and by pressure to achieve electoral success. Thus, the professionalization of parties and increased focus on stylistic issues of image management, while no doubt driven by the understanding that voters do not respond well to divided parties, present a challenge to their credentials as authentic representatives committed to a core set of principles. As well as being interdependent, the opportunity structures and choices faced by both political parties and voters are shaped by systemic factors including electoral rules and systems. Our goal is to ensure this volume adequately reflects that tension, giving regard to parties, voters and the wider electoral context. In doing this, we hope that this handbook shows how political science makes a significant contribution to our understanding of these tensions, but also how it helps us arrive at some possible solutions.
Achen, C. H. and Bartels, L. M. (2016) Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Princeton: Princeton University Press.