Issue Voting: An Introduction

In our poll-driven age, political attitude surveys have become something of an academic industry. Researchers have proposed numerous models to explain the relationship between a particular issue and voter behavior, but there is no consensus on which approaches work best. Issue Voting offers a welcome overview of the various models in use today, their strengths and their shortcomings. In the early days of democracy, issues played a leading role in shaping American and Western European party systems. Liberal parties were formed explicitly to combat privilege, conservative parties to defend the military or the monarchy, socialist parties to champion unions, agrarian parties to campaign for the redistribution of land. By the time the first election studies came out in the 1940s, however, issue voting was of minor importance. Instead, the vote of the ordinary citizen reflected group norms - class, ethnic, religious and geographical norms - and the main factor in voting behavior was party identification, followed by candidate identification. In the early 1970s, evidence emerged of a surge in issue voting, and since then, political writers have proposed many models to describe its mechanisms. Yet their suggestions tend to be found in either professional articles that focus on some isolated aspect of issue voting, or single-election studies, a chapter of which sets forth some ad hoc model for the occasion. This volume provides a sorely needed overview of the approaches available. Ole Borre shows how the different models highlight consistency, position and issue distance, salience, valence issues and performance. He keeps the statistics simple, illustrating the various approaches with recent British and Danish election data and favoring linear regression whenever possible. Issue Voting will be invaluable to political scientists and modern historians trying to make sense of this quintessential democratic phenomenon.