A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Spatial Models

Professors Merrill and Grofman develop a unified model that incorporates voter motivations and assesses its empirical predictions--for both voter choice and candidate strategy--in the United States, Norway, and France. The analyses show that a combination of proximity, direction, discounting, and party ID are compatible with the mildly but not extremely divergent policies that are characteristic of many two-party and multiparty electorates. All of these motivations are necessary to understand the linkage between candidate issue positions and voter preferences.

"This book addresses the questions: How do voters use their own issue positions and those of candidates to decide how to vote? How do candidates choose policy positions in response to the behavior of voters? Does a voter tend to choose the candidate who most nearly shares the views of the voter or rather a candidate who holds more extreme or intense views but in the same direction as the voter, perhaps because voters discount candidates' abilities to implement the policies they advocate? The authors develop a unified model that incorporates these and other voter motivations and, using conditional logit and other statistical methods, assess its empirical predictions - for both voter choice and candidate strategy - in the United States, Norway, and France."--BOOK JACKET.