Issue Voting

Abstract

If a political commentator or politician of the 1920s or 1930s were able to read the previous two chapters, he or she would be utterly amazed at the relative lack of attention paid to party policies or to topical events and political issues. Before survey studies of voting behaviour began, elections and voting were conceived of in terms of choices between competing sets of policy proposals. The voter was pictured as weighing up the policies of the different parties, and on that basis deciding which party to vote for. The party that won an election was thought to have a ‘mandate’ from the electorate for all of its policy proposals detailed in its election manifesto. In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill (1963, pp. 302–4) said this about the voter:

His vote is not a thing in which he has an option … he is bound to give it according to his best and his most conscientious opinion of the public good … the voter is under an absolute moral obligation to consider the interest of the public, not his private advantage, and give his vote to the best of his judgement exactly as he would be bound to do if he were the sole voter and the election depended upon him alone.