This book addresses the questions: how do voters use their own issue positions and those of candidates to decide how to vote? Does a voter tend to choose the candidate who most closely shares the views of the voter or rather a candidate who holds more extreme views due to the fact that the voters discount the candidates' abilities to implement policy. The authors develop a unified model that incorporates these and other voter motivations and assess its empirical predictions - for both voter choice and candidate strategy - in the US, Norway, and France. The analyses show that a combination of proximity, direction, discounting, and party ID are compatible with the mildly but not extremely divergent policies that are characteristic of many two-party and multiparty electorates. All of these motivations are necessary to understand the linkage between candidate issue positions and voter preferences.
| ISBN: | 9780521665490 |
| Publication date: | 13th September 1999 |
| Author: | III, Samuel (Wilkes University, Pennsylvania) Merrill, Bernard (University of California, Irvine) Grofman |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 230 pages |
| Genres: |
Elections and referenda |