Abstract
The competing theories of proximity and directional voting have long been used to model voting behavior. Empirically evaluating these theories, however, requires knowledge of voters’ utilities, which are inherently unobserved. Empiricists have generally dealt with this by using self-reports of utility. Yet, self-reports are likely biased, leaving experimental predictions at odds with real-world election outcomes. We improve upon this method by constructing a discrete choice model which is able to measure the likelihood of any one voter exhibiting proximity voting behavior as opposed to directional voting behavior, without needing to know voters’ utilities. We subsequently conduct a voting experiment with over 1,800 participants to estimate the parameters of the model. Our results suggest that, among voters whose expected behavior differs across the two theories, there is an approximately even split between voting behaviors, and the probability of exhibiting proximity voting behavior decreases by roughly 10 percentage points for each step away from the midpoint of a (−10 to +10) political spectrum. Our results are robust across two measures of preferences and four candidate pairings. The outcomes of our experiment are also consistent with the results of the 2012 Presidential Election, which took place the day after our experiment closed.
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Notes
The scoring algorithm we use is slightly different from that developed by the Pew Research Center in that their algorithm adjusts extreme values, moving them toward the center of the distribution. We do not see any theoretical support for this adjustment procedure and thus do not incorporate it.
First, most experimental participants report that they either lie at the middle of the political spectrum, or that they lie at the middle of their own party’s spectrum. The distribution of self-reported scores is tri-modal. The scores obtained from the political opinions survey are distributed more smoothly, with positive skew.
The actual candidates are President Barack Obama (solid liberal), Senator Joseph Lieberman (moderate liberal), Senator John McCain (moderate conservative), and Governor Mitt Romney (solid conservative).
“Liberal” is used interchangeably with “Democrat”, and “conservative” is used interchangeably with “Republican”.
While this methodology introduces some subjectivity, it should not affect our results when candidates’ names are not disclosed to voters. To this end, we include an information set that provides voters with only candidates’ score, and does not reveal identity.
One potential criticism of this robustness check arises from the multi-dimensionality of voters’ preferences. While actual voters and the experimental sample voted similarly in the 2012 US Presidential Election, their motivations for doing so could have been quite different.
The subscript j represents the candidate paring (of which there are four) and C j ′ represents a vector of candidate pairing fixed effects.
We are unable to estimate models using self-reported preference scores when the two candidates running against each other are either both extreme or both moderate. This is because being a torn-voter would require an individual’s self-reported score to be 0⩾|score|>1 and self-reported scores were collected as integers.
The one exception to this is the series of elections in which only candidates’ political scores were given, and experimental participants’ political preferences were obtained using a self-report.
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Knight, T., Li, F. & Woodworth, L. It’s My Party and I’ll Vote How I Want to: Experimental Evidence of Directional Voting in Two-Candidate Elections. Eastern Econ J 43, 660–676 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2015.37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2015.37