To make inferences and predictions about behavior concerning a voting decision, certain factors such as gender, race, culture or religion must be considered. Moreover, key public influences include the role of emotions, political socialization, tolerance of diversity of political views and the media. The effect of these influences on voting behavior is best understood through theories on the formation of attitudes, beliefs, schema, knowledge structures and the practice of information processing. For example, surveys from different countries indicate that people are generally happier in individualistic cultures where they have rights such as the right to vote. Additionally, social influence and peer effects, as originating from family and friends, also play an important role in elections and voting behavior. An important question in this context is how to disentangle the social contagion by peers from external influences. The degree to which voting decision is affected by internal processes and external influences alters the quality of making truly democratic decisions.
Voting behavior types
The existing literature does not provide an explicit classification of voting behavior types. However, research following the Cypriot referendum of 2004,
identified four distinct voting behaviors depending on the election
type. Citizens use different decision criteria if they are called to
exercise their right to vote in presidential, legislative, local elections or in a referendum.
In national elections it is usually the norm that people vote based on
their political beliefs. Local and regional elections differ, as people
tend to elect those who seem more capable to contribute to their area. A
referendum follows another logic as people are specifically asked to
vote for or against a clearly defined policy.
An older study in postwar Japan identified that urban citizens
were more likely to be supportive of socialist parties, while rural
citizens were favorable of conservative parties. Regardless of the
political preference, this is an interesting differentiation that can be
attributed to affective influence.
Electoral Ergonomics
It
is important to consider the ability of electoral arrangements
affecting the emotions of the voter and therefore their electoral
behaviour. In the week running up to elections, 20 to 30% of voters
either decide who they will vote for or change their initial decisions,
with around half of this amount on election day. One study has found people more likely to vote for Conservative candidates if polling stations are located in a Church.
Another study finds voters aged 18-24 are nearly twice as likely to
vote for extreme right parties if voting is done through the post.
Affective influence
A growing literature on the significance of affect
in politics finds that affective states play a role in public voting
behavior that can be both beneficial and biasing. Affect here refers to
the experience of emotion or feeling, which is often described in
contrast to cognition.
This work largely follows from findings in psychology regarding the
ways in which affective states are involved in human judgment and
decision-making.
Research in political science has traditionally ignored
non-rational considerations in its theories of mass political behavior,
but the incorporation of social psychology
has become increasingly common. In exploring the benefits of affect on
voting, researchers have argued that affective states such as anxiety
and enthusiasm encourage the evaluation of new political information and
thus benefit political behavior by leading to more considered choices.
Others, however, have discovered ways in which affect such as emotion
and mood can significantly bias the voting choices of the electorate.
For example, evidence has shown that a variety of events that are
irrelevant to the evaluation of candidates but can stir emotions, such
as the outcome of football matches and weather, can significantly affect voting decisions.
Several variables have been proposed that may moderate the
relationship between emotion and voting. Researchers have shown that one
such variable may be political sophistication, with higher
sophistication voters more likely to experience emotions in response to political stimuli and thus more prone to emotional biases in voting choice.
Affective intensity has also been shown to moderate the relationship
between affect and voting, with one study finding a doubling of
estimated effect for higher-intensity affective shocks.
Mechanisms of affective influence on voting
The differential effect of several specific emotions have been studied on voting behavior:
Surprise – Recent research suggests that the emotion of surprise may magnify the effect of emotions
on voting. In assessing the effect of home-team sports victories on
voting, Healy et al. showed that surprising victories provided close to
twice the benefit to the incumbent party compared to victories overall.
Anger – Affective theory would predict that anger increases the use of generalized knowledge and reliance upon stereotypes and other heuristics.
An experiment on students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
showed that people who had been primed with an anger condition relied
less upon issue-concordance when choosing between candidates than those
who had been primed with fear.
In a separate laboratory study, subjects primed with the anger emotion
were significantly less likely to seek information about a candidate and
spent less time reviewing a candidate's policy positions on the web.
Anxiety – Affective intelligence theory identifies anxiety
as an emotion that increases political attentiveness while decreasing
reliance on party identification when deciding between candidates, thus
improving decision-making
capabilities. Voters who report anxiety regarding an election are more
likely to vote for candidates whose policies they prefer, and party
members who report feeling anxious regarding a candidate are twice as
likely to defect and vote for the opposition candidate.
Others have denied that anxiety's indirect influence on voting behavior
has been proven to the exclusion of alternative explanations, such as
the possibility that less preferred candidates produce feelings of
anxiety, as opposed to the reverse.
Fear – Studies in psychology has shown that people experiencing fear rely on more detailed processing when making choices.
One study found that subjects primed with fear spent more time seeking
information on the web before a hypothetical voting exercise than those
primed with anger.
Pride – Results from the American National Elections Survey found that pride,
along with hope and fear, explained a significant amount of the
variance in peoples' 2008 voting choices. The size of the effect of
expressions of pride on voting for McCain was roughly one third of the
size of the effect of party identification, typically the strongest
predictor.
Appeals to pride were also found to be effective in motivating voter
turnout among high-propensity voters, though the effect was not as
strong as appeals to shame.
Effects of voting on emotion
The
act of voting itself can produce emotional responses that may bias the
choices voters make and potentially affect subsequent emotional states.
A recent study on voters in Israel found that voters' cortisol
levels, the so-called "stress hormone," were significantly higher
immediately before entering a polling place than personal baseline
levels measured on a similar, non-election day.
This may be significant for voting choices since cortisol is known to
affect memory consolidation, memory retrieval, and reward- and
risk-seeking behavior. Acute stress may disrupt decision making and affect cognition.
Additionally, research done on voters in Ann Arbor and Durham
after the US 2008 elections showed partial evidence that voting for the
losing candidate may lead to increased cortisol levels relative to
levels among voters who chose the winning candidate.
Practical implications
Political campaigns
The use of emotional appeals in political campaigns
to increase support for a candidate or decrease support for a
challenger is a widely recognized practice and a common element of any
campaign strategy.
Campaigns often seek to instill positive emotions such as enthusiasm
and hopefulness about their candidate among party bases to improve
turnout and political activism while seeking to raise fear and anxiety
about the challenger. Enthusiasm tends to reinforce preferences, whereas
fear and anxiety tends to interrupt behavioral patterns and leads
individuals to look for new sources of information.
Political surveys
Research
findings illustrate that it is possible to influence a persons'
attitudes toward a political candidate using carefully crafted survey
questions, which in turn may influence his or her voting behavior.
A laboratory study in the UK focused on participants' attitude toward
former Prime Minister Tony Blair during the 2001 pre-election period via
a telephone survey. After gauging participants' interest in politics,
the survey asked the participants to list either i) two positive
characteristics of the Prime Minister, ii) five positive characteristics
of the Prime Minister, iii) two negative characteristics of the Prime
Minister, or iv) five negative characteristics of the Prime Minister.
Participants were then asked to rate their attitude toward Blair on a
scale from 1 to 7 where higher values reflected higher favorability.
Listing five positive or negative characteristics for the Prime
Minister was challenging; especially for those with little or no
interest in politics. The ones asked to list five positive
characteristics were primed negatively towards the politicians because
it was too hard to name five good traits. On the contrary, following the
same logic, those who were to list five negative, came to like the
politician better than before. This conclusion was reflected in the
final survey stage when participants evaluated their attitude toward the
Prime Minister.
Military voting behavior
Recent
research into whether military personnel vote or behave politically
than the general population has challenged some long-held conventional
wisdom. The political behavior of officers has been extensively studied
by Holsti, Van Riper & Unwalla, and Feaver & Kohn
In the United States, particularly since the end of the Vietnam War,
officers are strongly conservative in nature and tend to identify with
the Republican Party in the United States.
Enlisted personnel political behavior has only been studied more recently, notably by Dempsey, and Inbody.
Enlisted personnel, often thought to behave and vote as did officers,
do not. They more nearly represent the general population. In general,
the usual demographic predictors of voting and other political behavior
apply to military personnel.
Loss aversion
The loss aversion theory by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
is often associated with voting behavior as people are more likely to
use their vote to avoid the effect of an unfavorable policy rather than
supporting a favorable policy. From a psychological perspective, value
references are crucial to determine individual preferences.
