Abstract
How do candidate policy positions affect the citizen’s vote choice? From the Downsian tradition, a common response to this question is that voters identify where contending candidates are located on policy space and then select the candidate closest to them. A well-known finding in current models of political psychology, however, is that voters have biased perceptions of the ideological location of competing candidates in elections. In this chapter we offer a general approach to incorporate information effects into current spatial models of voting. The proposed heteroscedastic proximity model (HPM) of voting incorporates information effects in equilibrium models of voting to provide a solution to common attenuation biases observed in most equilibrium models of vote choice. We test the heteroscedastic proximity model of voting on three U.S. presidential elections in 1980, 1996, and 2008.
For helpful comments and suggestions, the authors thank Jim Adams, Johanna Birnir, Bernie Grofman, Dan Kselman, Noam Lupu, Sam Merrill, Richard Moore, Vicky Murillo, Bernhard Weßels, and participants at conferences at the Juan March Institute and the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).
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Notes
- 1.
The authors of The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960) laid out such criteria for voting according to issue position. These include the ability to cognicize the issue in some form (generally interpreted as have an opinion on the issue), to perceive where the candidates stand on it, and to see a difference between them. To this list, Abramson et al. (2009) add that voters must see the positions of the relevant parties or candidates (approximately) correctly if they are to make reasonable decisions.
- 2.
These biases are not strictly an American phenomenon. For example, British election studies data from 2005 show that when asked to place the Conservative Party on the left-right scale, a voter located on the far-right of the left-right scale identify the Party as very conservative, at approximately 9 (8.9) 0–10 point scale if she voted for one of its candidates. A similarly conservative voter will perceive the Tories as very liberal—at 2.2—if she voted against the party (see Calvo et al. 2012). See also Adams et al.’s (2005, Chap. 10) analysis of survey data from France, Norway, and Britain.
- 3.
A convex lens suffers from spherical aberration when light transmitted through the lens fails to converge to a single point. This is known in optics as hyperopia or, more commonly, as farsightedness.
- 4.
Recent research, however, has used experimental designs to get around previous measurement problems and finds stronger support for the proximity view (Tomz and van Houweling 2008; Lacy and Paolino 2010). We take this as instructive evidence for using direction extremity to modify ideological lensing arising from proximity models, rather than the other way around.
- 5.
- 6.
Something of an exception is Sanders et al. (2011) who model valence as a function of voter-party issue proximity, thus positing that spatial effects shape utility indirectly, through valence characteristics.
- 7.
- 8.
Specifically, the American National Election Studies surveys ask respondents to identify whether there is anything they like about the Democratic and Republican Parties. This is followed by an item asking whether there is anything they dislike about the two main parties. With responses to these two binary choice items, we construct a three-point scale scored −1 dislike only, 0 for neither like nor dislike, or both like and dislike, and +1 for like only.
- 9.
The measure is coded 1 = “don’t pay much attention,” 2 = “pay some attention,” 3 = “pay a great deal of attention.”
- 10.
In this illustration, the other candidate in the two-candidate race is placed at 5 on the 1–7 scale.
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Calvo, E., Hellwig, T., Chang, K. (2013). A Heteroscedastic Spatial Model of the Vote: A Model with Application to the United States. In: Schofield, N., Caballero, G., Kselman, D. (eds) Advances in Political Economy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35239-3_17
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