VOTER CHOICE: THEORIES AND REGULARITIES

What is the object of voter choice? And what logic do voters employ in pursuit of this object? To answer these questions, we need to identify an underlying principle that can explain cross-national and crossinstitutional similarities and differences in the logic voters employ. In this chapter, I propose a theory of issue voting – compensatory vote – that rests on such a unifying principle. Different contexts call for different strategies, however. Once such an objective has been identified, the next step is to understand how voters living in different countries and under different institutional regimes vote to maximize it. This will allow me to account for regularities (and variations in them) along the lines of those I presented in Chapter 1, such as differences in behavior between British and Dutch voters, each participating in their respective parliamentary elections but under radically different electoral systems; between American and Brazilian voters, each participating in presidential and legislative elections but under different constitutional frameworks; and among German voters, participating in regional (federal) elections but under different federal (regional) governments.

Studies of elections in various polities suggest that issue voting has become increasingly important in explaining voter choice (Barnes, 1997). Nonetheless, political scientists to date have not reached a consensus over a theory of voting that accounts for cross-national regularities; disagreements about an underlying theoretical model, a desired methodological approach, and measurement are commonplace.