1. Voting behaviour Empirical questions What explains vote choices?
Socialisation/attachment
Social structure (class, religion etc.)
Electoral change (dealignment, realignment)
Electoral system (strategic voting)
Evaluations (issues, leaders, ideology, economy etc.)
What explains voting/non-voting?
Decline in turnout?
Paradox of turnout
Varying importance of elections
First/second-order; closeness; polarization

2. Voting Collective decision-making procedure
Deliberation
Unanimity
Voting
Majority
Plurality
Proportionality
Democratic meaning of elections
Manifestation of general will (Rousseau)
Elite replacement (Schumpeter)

3. Historical roots of voting studies
Extension of franchise (early 20th century)
Predictions/expectations about working class parties
Data limitations
Electoral geography
Census data vs. electoral data
George Gallup ( )
Founder of American Institute of Public Opinion (1935)
Predicting correctly Roosevelt victory in 1936
Literary digest poll (2 million respondents) predicting Landon win
Gallup poll (5,000 respondents, random sample) predicting FDR win
FDR landslide, establishing Gallup, and the use of scientific polling in general, as a quasi-institution in US electoral politics

4. Studying the electoral process
Columbia voting studies
Lazarsfeld & Berelson
The People’s Choice (1948)
Voting (1954)
“We were not interested in how people voted but in why they voted as they did.”
Preference formation
Six-wave panel design
Studying influence of campaign and media
“the social psychology of the voting decision”
Stable preferences
Little knowledge, interest, few direct short-term effects
Mutually reinforcing social networks vs. cross-pressures

5. Party identification The Michigan model Socio-psychological model
Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, The American Voter (1960)
Socio-psychological model
Party identification
Long-term stable psychological affinity with either party
Analogy with religion (party believers)
Emotional/affective attachment, developed during socialisation
Picking up values and attitudes from parents, peers
Explanatory value
Stability of voting patterns within individuals over time
Issue alignment (partisan cues for perceptions and choice)
Potentially tautological

6. Political sociology Social context Group membership Party mobilisation
Beliefs, values, attitudes
Political behaviour (vote choice)
Group membership
Collective experience, attitude formation
Party mobilisation
Social cleavages
Dominant dividing lines in society

7. Social cleavages and voting
Seymour Martin Lipset & Stein Rokkan
Party Systems and Voter Alignments (1967)
Historical macro-sociological approach
History of nation-building, industrialisation, democratisation
Varying traditional divisions across European societies
Center-periphery
Class
Religion
Language
Frozen party systems (1920s-1960s)
Stable patterns of party competition around salient primary cleavages
Class-voting (Britain, Germany), religious voting (France, Netherlands)