Voting behavior refers to a form of electoral behavior. Understanding the behavior of a voter can explain why and how decisions were reached either by the electorate or the public decision-makers. This has been a great concern for political scientists.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this topic, you are expected to;
In order to understand voting behavior, both psychology expertise and political science were necessary. Therefore, the political psychology field emerged including electoral psychology. Researchers of political psychology study the ways in which affective influence helps voters in making voting choices that are more informed. Conversely, Harrison and Bruter suggested that electoral psychology involves ways in which emotions, memory, personality as well as other psychological factors affect the electoral experience of citizens and their behavior.
Making predictions and inferences about behavior with regard to a voting decision, several factors like gender, religion, culture or race must be considered. Moreover, major public influences include the role that media, emotions, tolerance of diversity of political views and political socialization play. The effect that these influences have on the voting behavior can be understood best through theories concerning the formation of knowledge structures, beliefs, attitudes, schema and the practice of information processing. For instance, surveys from different countries have shown that people are normally happier in individualistic cultures where they got rights like the right to vote.
TYPES OF VOTING BEHAVIOR
There are four distinct types of voting behavior with regard to the type of election. Citizens make use of different decision criteria when called upon to exercise their voting rights in a referendum, local elections, legislative or presidential elections. In national elections, it is usually the norm that people vote on the basis of their political beliefs. Local and regional elections are different as the people voting tend to elect those that they believe are capable of contributing positively to their area. A different logic is followed in a referendum as people are asked to vote for or against a policy that is clearly defined.
AFFECTIVE INFLUENCE
Affective states have been found to play a role in the voting behavior of the public that can be both biasing and beneficial. Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. A number of variables have been proposed to moderate the relationship between voting an emotion. An example of such a variable is the political sophistication; with higher sophistication, voters are more likely to experience emotions in response to political stimuli. This makes them more prone to emotional biases in voting choice.
MECHANISMS OF AFFECTIVE INFLUENCE ON VOTING
Surprise. Research has shown that the emotion of surprise has the ability to magnify the effect of emotions on voting. It was found that surprising victories provided almost twice the benefit to the incumbent party while compared to victories overall.
Anger. Affective theory predicts that anger increases the use of generalized knowledge and the reliance upon stereotypes and other heuristics.
Anxiety. Anxiety has been identified as an emotion that increases political attentiveness while decreasing reliance on party identification when choosing between candidates, therefore improving decision making.
Fear. Psychological studies have shown that people experiencing fear rely on more detailed processing during the choice making.
Pride. Appeals to pride were found to be very effective in motivating the turnout of voters among high propensity voters. However, appeals to shame were found to be stronger than the effect.
