Voting behavior

Voting behavior refers to how people decide how to vote. This decision is shaped by a complex interplay between an individual voter's attitudes as well as social factors. Voter attitudes include characteristics such as ideological predisposition, party identity, degree of satisfaction with the existing government, public policy leanings, and feelings about a candidate’s personality traits. Social factors include race, religion and degree of religiosity, social and economic class, educational level, regional characteristics, and gender. The degree to which a person identifies with a political party influences voting behavior, as does social identity. The voting behavior tendencies of different groups may shift over time; for example, in the United States, voters with college degrees have shifted significantly toward Democratic Party candidates over the past three decades. Voter decision-making is not a purely rational endeavor but rather is profoundly influenced by personal and social biases and deeply held beliefs as well as characteristics such as personality, memory, emotions, and other psychological factors.

In a Political Science and theoretical context, voting behavior is a form of electoral behavior. Understanding voters' behavior can explain how and why decisions were made either by public decision-makers, which has been a central concern for political scientists, or by the electorate. To interpret voting behavior both political science and psychology expertise were necessary and therefore the field of political psychology emerged including electoral psychology. Political psychology researchers study ways in which affective influence may help voters make more informed voting choices, with some proposing that affect may explain how the electorate makes informed political choices in spite of low overall levels of political attentiveness and sophistication. Conversely, Bruter and Harrison suggest that electoral psychology encompasses the ways in which personality, memory, emotions, and other psychological factors affect citizens' electoral experience and behavior.

Voting Behavior Types

Voter behavior is often influenced by voter loyalty. There is a mix of satisfaction and how issues are dealt with by the party. There is a correlation between how the voter finds the satisfaction of what the party has achieved and dealt with a situation, and then the intention of voting for the same party again. Something the author calls satisfaction and intention to purchase. Information is important to discuss when talking about voting in general. The information provided to the voter, not only influences who to vote for, but if they are intending to vote or not.

Influence of Cleavages on Voting Behavior

When speaking of voting behavior in relation to cleavages, there are some which are interesting factors to look into. The three cleavage-based voting factors focused on in research are class, gender and religion. Firstly, religion is often a factor which influences one's party choice. In recent years this voting cleavage has moved away from concerns of Protestant vs Catholic to having a larger focus on religious vs non-religious leanings. A second influential factor is class. Traditional conceptions of class voting dictate a working-class preference towards parties on the left and middle-class preference for parties on the right. The influences of class voting however are greatly reliant upon the political environment they are convinced, many nations observe the opposite preferences.

Many cleavage-based voting behaviors are interconnected and frequently build on each other. These factors also tend to hold different levels of weight depending on the country in question. There is no universal explanation for a voting cleavage, and there is no general answer which explains a cleavage of all democratic countries. Each factor will have a different level of importance and influence on one's vote dependent on the country one is voting in.

Election Dependency and Voting Behavior

Individuals use different criteria when voting, based on the type of election it is. Therefore, voting behavior is also conditional to the election which is held. Different factors are in play in a national election vs. a regional election based on the voter's preferred outcome. For each individual, the order of importance of factors like loyalty, satisfaction, employment, gender, religion and class may look very different in a national or regional elections, even when the elections occur with relatively similar candidates, issues and time frames. For example, religion may play a larger role in a national election than in regional one, or vice versa. The importance of the location in which these types of elections occur in an urban or rural environment is an additional factor to voter mindset.

The existing literature does not provide an explicit classification of voting behavior types. However, research following the Cypriot referendum of 2004 identified four distinct voting behaviors depending on the election type. Citizens use different decision criteria if they are called to exercise their right to vote in presidential, legislative, local elections or in a referendum. In national elections it is usually the norm for people to vote based on their political beliefs. In local and regional elections, people tend to elect those who seem more capable to contribute to their area. A referendum follows another logic as people are specifically asked to vote for or against a clearly defined policy.

It is important to consider how electoral arrangements affect the emotions of the voter and therefore their electoral behavior. In the week running up to elections, 20 to 30% of voters either decide who they will vote for or change their initial decisions, with around half of them on election day. One study has found that people are more likely to vote for conservative candidates if polling stations are located in a church, and another study finds voters aged 18–24 are nearly twice as likely to vote for parties on the extreme right if voting is done through the post.

Partisanship and Voting Behavior

Partisan (politics) voting is also an important motive behind an individual's vote and can influence voting behavior to some extent. In 2000, a research study on partisanship voting in the US found evidence that partisan voting has a large effect. However, partisan voting has a larger effect on national elections, such as a presidential election, than it does on congressional elections. Furthermore, there is also a distinction of partisan voting behavior relative to a voter's age and education. Those over 50 years old and those without a high school diploma are more likely to vote based on partisan loyalty. This research is based on the US and has not been confirmed to accurately predict voting patterns in other democracies.

A 1960 study of postwar Japan found that urban citizens were more likely to be supportive of socialist or progressive parties, while rural citizens were favorable of conservative parties. Regardless of the political preference, this is an interesting differentiation that can be attributed to effective influence.

Voters have also been seen to be affected by coalition and alliance politics, whether such coalitions form before or after the election. In these cases, voters can be swayed by feelings on coalition partners when considering their feelings toward their preferred party.

Gender Differences in Voting Behavior

In 2016, white women in the United States voted more for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton

Gender is an important factor to consider when making inferences regarding voting behavior. Gender often interacts with other factors such as region, race, occupational differences, age, and more to produce a distinct multiplicative effect on voting behavior. Much of the research on gender differences in voting behavior has centered on the gender gap and party realignment of women in the United States towards the Democratic Party in the 1980s. More recent research focusing on the partisan gender gap in the United States has reflected that this gender gap is actually a race gap, as white women in the U.S. are consistently supporters of the Republican Party and were more likely to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Election. More recent and forthcoming research expands this focus to a global perspective, utilizing cross-national perceptions of gender differences in voting behavior to make substantiated predictions considering the role gender plays in voting decisions.

Historical and Global Perspective

In the modern era, New Zealand was the first nation to grant women the legal right to vote, in 1893. The vast majority of nations officially granted women the right to vote over the past century, though many women were prevented from voting for decades, such as Black women in many regions of the U.S. prior to the 1960’s. As of 2023, virtually all nations other than Vatican City officially grant women the legal right to vote , though significant barriers exist to women’s suffrage in many places that make casting a ballot impossible. Examples include Afghanistan, where women are not allowed to travel more than 72 kilometers without a male chaperone , and parts of Kenya, where many women could not vote in recent elections due to election-related sexual violence .

Research on gender differences in voting has historically focused on economically advanced, western-style democracies, though there is a growing body of research on women’s voting preferences in lower income nations. Research has demonstrated that gender differences in voting exist worldwide. The cause of this gender gap often varies by country and region. Frequently utilized explanations for gender gaps in voting are socioeconomic factors, situational constraints for women, and differences in political priorities. Studies indicate that the way these factors interact with voting behavior depends on location, cultural norms, literacy level, lived experience, and other facets of identity including race, ethnicity, and age. It is thus important to employ an intersectional lens - meaning, one in which race, ethnicity, economic status, sexual identity, educational status, and other factors are considered -  and explore gender within the context of these other factors to understand voting behavior more fully.

Gendered Influence on Sources of Individual Voting Behavior

^{Influences on candidate choice have been linked to three main influences on voting behavior. These influences include, but are not limited to issue and public policy beliefs, perceptions of government performance, and personal evaluation of candidate characteristics. These factors are influenced by a range of compounding factors including gender.}

Issue and Public Policy Beliefs

Voters must hold opinions on the subject and recognize differences between the candidates on it in order for it to influence their choice of candidate. A large number of voters will fall short of these requirements, even on significant issues. Some will hold viewpoints that are too feeble and unstable to serve as a benchmark for comparing the candidates, while others won't detect any appreciable distinctions between them on the subject. Yet, some voters will have firm opinions and distinct perceptions of candidate differences, specifically when the candidates directly indicate their distinctions. The crucial point is not whether voters have a choice, but rather how much they differentiate between candidates on policy matters and decide who to vote for on that basis.

Partisan ideology influences these views on policy. In the United States, one way that ideology affects the vote is by how voters cast their ballots in presidential elections based on their beliefs on certain policy concerns. Another method of influence is party identification, which working with ideology may also shape the ways in which voters perceive policy.

The Gender Gap in Partisan Preferences

There is mixed research regarding whether or not a gender gap in partisan preferences exists, and if it does exist to what extent. Research that affirms the existence of this gap emphasizes that younger women in particular are more likely to support progressive left-leaning candidates than men. The cause of this shift is still being explored, but one prevalent theory holds that gendered differences in voting behavior can at least in part be attributed to the growing presence of women in the workforce due to structural reform, improved accessibility of women to the education system, the questioning of traditional gender roles, and the disproportionate amount of unpaid caregiving work that women perform.  These developments have led younger women to be more supportive of left-leaning political parties that tend to prioritize issues especially salient to women.

A relevant example to this point are right-leaning parties that have addressed relevant economic issues such as state-funded childcare, such as the U.K Conservative Party under David Cameron between 1997 and 2010, have since had more success winning votes from younger women.

Perceptions of Government Performance

^{Voting behavior is significantly influenced by retrospective assessments of government performance, which should be differentiated from the influence of policy issues. Different opinions on what the government ought to do are involved in policy concerns, which are prospective. Performance assessments, which are retrospective, contain differences regarding how effectively the government has performed.}

Gender interacts with perceptions of government performance in terms of legislator and voter gender. A 2019 study surveying a nationally representative sample of United States citizens, found that women's equal representation in political-decision making bodies builds trust and broad approval of these bodies across policy outcomes and areas.

Personal Evaluation of Candidate

Candidates are also evaluated on a personal level by voters. The candidates' experience, integrity, morals, compassion, competence, and leadership potential are some of the relevant qualities to consider.

These established opinions of candidates' traits are developed in addition to how they view them in terms of the issues, and these judgments have a significant impact on voting decisions. The candidates' perceived competence, concern, sincerity, dependability, and leadership ability have been found to be one crucial feature of their personal character. Which qualities matter and how these perceptions are formed is intertwined with a variety of identity factors including gender.

_{Gender Bias in Voting}

Historically, political power has been disproportionately held by men. This unrepresentative balance is still reflected today with the vast majority of the highest political offices occupied by men. This trend holds even in democracies where political positions are technically accessible to all genders. This disparity is a product of a multitude of factors, but some suggest that the gender bias of voters plays a role in maintaining this political gender gap.

Physical characteristics of political candidates impact voter bias in a uniquely gendered way. A study from 2008 found that men are more likely to vote for attractive female candidates whereas women are more likely to vote for approachable male candidates. This finding echoes the different standards women candidates are required to fulfill in contrast to male candidates to be taken seriously as contenders in political races.

Research also indicates that the gender of a political candidate changes the way voters evaluate political qualifications. What voters want to know about a candidate varies by the candidate's gender. For female candidates, voters seek out more competence-related information like education level and occupational experience than they do for male candidates. Thus, the information we seek about candidates is gendered in a way that indirectly impacts voting behavior.

There is also evidence that the presence of a female candidate encourages political engagement in voting. In this sense, the mere presence of a female candidate has been found to increase women’s voter turnout rate. This finding supports the idea that the descriptive representation of women in campaigns impacts the overall political attitudes and voting behavior of women.

Additional Considerations

Gender Differences in Political Engagement

Gender differences in voting behavior are components of gendered differences in political engagement. Political engagement refers to methods of individual involvement with political practices and can be broken down into conventional political engagement and unconventional political engagement. Conventional practices include voting, letter-writing, and signing petitions. Unconventional practices include participating in non-violent and violent protest, strikes, and picketing.

Numerous cross-national studies have found that women are less likely to engage in political engagement practices broadly. This means that women are less likely to engage in the practice of voting all together. Notable exceptions to this include voting engagement in the United States, where women have higher voter turnout rates in Presidential Elections, but are still less likely to participate in other forms of conventional and unconventional political engagement.

A study based in Unified Germany found that women with access to educational resources and who possess and live in societies that promote egalitarian values and practices are more likely to engage in politics than those without access to education and living in societies with more essentialist norms and practices.

Gender and Race

Black women in the United States are much more likely than white women and then Black men to vote for Democratic candidates, a trend that has persisted since the 1960’s, and are far more likely to vote than their income would predict. While income usually is associated with propensity to vote, this does not appear to hold true for Black women. Analyses of data from the U.S. Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a large survey that matches respondents to their voter file records, has found that low income Black women have a significantly higher predicted voting rate compared to Black men, white men, or white women in the same income category. While the researchers found that income did strongly predict voting participation among whites, it played less of a role in voter participation among Blacks. Some have theorized that this increased voter participation occurs because voting and other civic engagement are ways of coping with the stress of persistent racial discrimination.

Affective influence

A growing body of literature on the significance of affect in politics finds that affective states play a role in public voting behavior that can be both beneficial and biasing. Affect here refers to the experience of emotion or feeling, which is often described in contrast to cognition. This work largely follows from findings in psychology regarding the ways in which affective states are involved in human judgment and decision-making.

Research in political science has traditionally ignored non-rational considerations in its theories of mass political behavior, but the incorporation of social psychology has become increasingly common. In exploring the benefits of affect on voting, researchers have argued that affective states such as anxiety and enthusiasm encourage the evaluation of new political information and thus benefit political behavior by leading to more considered choices. Others, however, have discovered ways in which affect such as emotion and mood can significantly bias the voting choices of the electorate. For example, evidence has shown that a variety of events that are irrelevant to the evaluation of candidates but can stir emotions, such as the outcome of football matches and weather, can significantly affect voting decisions.

Mechanisms of Affective Influence on Voting

Several variables have been proposed that may moderate the relationship between emotion and voting. Researchers have shown that one such variable may be political sophistication, with higher sophistication voters more likely to experience emotions in response to political stimuli and thus more prone to emotional biases in voting choice. Affective intensity has also been shown to moderate the relationship between affect and voting, with one study finding a doubling of estimated effect for higher-intensity affective shocks.

Affects of Emotion on Voting Behavior

The differential effect of several specific emotions have been studied on voting behavior:

Surprise – Recent research suggests that the emotion of surprise may magnify the effect of emotions on voting. In assessing the effect of home-team sports victories on voting, Healy et al. showed that surprising victories provided close to twice the benefit to the incumbent party compared to victories overall.

Anger – Affective theory would predict that anger increases the use of generalized knowledge and reliance upon stereotypes and other heuristics. An experiment on students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst showed that people who had been primed with an anger condition relied less upon issue-concordance when choosing between candidates than those who had been primed with fear. In a separate laboratory study, subjects primed with the anger emotion were significantly less likely to seek information about a candidate and spent less time reviewing a candidate's policy positions on the web.

Anxiety – Affective intelligence theory identifies anxiety as an emotion that increases political attentiveness while decreasing reliance on party identification when deciding between candidates, thus improving decision-making capabilities. Voters who report anxiety regarding an election are more likely to vote for candidates whose policies they prefer, and party members who report feeling anxious regarding a candidate are twice as likely to defect and vote for the opposition candidate. Others have denied that anxiety's indirect influence on voting behavior has been proven to the exclusion of alternative explanations, such as the possibility that less preferred candidates produce feelings of anxiety, as opposed to the reverse.

Fear – Studies in psychology has shown that people experiencing fear rely on more detailed processing when making choices. One study found that subjects primed with fear spent more time seeking information on the web before a hypothetical voting exercise than those primed with anger.

Pride – Results from the American National Elections Survey found that pride, along with hope and fear, explained a significant amount of the variance in peoples' 2008 voting choices. The size of the effect of expressions of pride on voting for McCain was roughly one third of the size of the effect of party identification, typically the strongest predictor. Appeals to pride were also found to be effective in motivating voter turnout among high-propensity voters, though the effect was not as strong as appeals to shame.

Neuroticism- This is usually defined as emotional instability characterized by more extreme and maladaptive responses to stressors and a higher likelihood of negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, anger, and fear). This has become a big influencer in recent elections and referendums, like the 2016 EU referendum and 2016 Presidential Election, have been run from a populist standpoint, where they have played upon voters fears. This conception of neuroticism as a lowered threshold for detecting and responding to stimuli as threatening or dangerous suggests that individuals high on this trait will be more receptive to campaigns, such as populism, which specifically prey on fears of looming threats and dangers. Research shows that once these fears have been activated, they can affect decisions of all kinds, including voting behavior.

Effects of voting on emotion

The act of voting itself can produce emotional responses that may bias the choices voters make and potentially affect subsequent emotional states.

A recent study on voters in Israel found that voters' cortisol levels, the so-called "stress hormone," were significantly higher immediately before entering a polling place than personal baseline levels measured on a similar, non-election day. This may be significant for voting choices since cortisol is known to affect memory consolidation, memory retrieval, and reward- and risk-seeking behavior. Acute stress may disrupt decision making and affect cognition.

Additionally, research done on voters in Ann Arbor and Durham after the US 2008 elections showed partial evidence that voting for the losing candidate may lead to increased cortisol levels relative to levels among voters who chose the winning candidate.

Moreover, Rui Antunes indicated within a 2010 academic study that a personal relationship created with the political parties in America. This may be due to the strong influence in the USA of the development of this relationship through a socialization process which is somewhat caused by the nature of the individual's background.

Practical implications

Weather

Another variable which has been shown to influence voting behavior is the weather. Hot temperatures can have divergent effects on human behavior, due to the fact that it can lead to heightened arousal. As such, increases in arousal due to increases in temperature might impact the result of an election, because of its proposed impact on collective behaviors such as voter turnout. Previous studies have found that hot temperatures increase anger, which, in turn, motivates people to vote.

Political campaigns

The use of emotional appeals in political campaigns to increase support for a candidate or decrease support for a challenger is a widely recognized practice and a common element of any campaign strategy. Campaigns often seek to instill positive emotions such as enthusiasm and hopefulness about their candidate among party bases to improve turnout and political activism while seeking to raise fear and anxiety about the challenger. Enthusiasm tends to reinforce preferences, whereas fear and anxiety tends to interrupt behavioral patterns and leads individuals to look for new sources of information.

Political surveys

Research findings illustrate that it is possible to influence a person's attitudes toward a political candidate using carefully crafted survey questions, which in turn may influence his or her voting behavior. A laboratory study in the UK focused on participants' attitude toward former Prime Minister Tony Blair during the 2001 pre-election period via a telephone survey. After gauging participants' interest in politics, the survey asked the participants to list either i) two positive characteristics of the Prime Minister, ii) five positive characteristics of the Prime Minister, iii) two negative characteristics of the Prime Minister, or iv) five negative characteristics of the Prime Minister. Participants were then asked to rate their attitude toward Blair on a scale from 1 to 7 where higher values reflected higher favorability.

Listing five positive or negative characteristics for the Prime Minister was challenging; especially for those with little or no interest in politics. The ones asked to list five positive characteristics were primed negatively towards the politicians because it was too hard to name five good traits. On the contrary, following the same logic, those who were to list five negative, came to like the politician better than before. This conclusion was reflected in the final survey stage when participants evaluated their attitude toward the Prime Minister.

Military voting behavior

Recent research into whether military personnel vote or behave politically than the general population has challenged some long-held conventional wisdom. The political behavior of officers has been extensively studied by Holsti, Van Riper & Unwalla, and Feaver & Kohn In the United States, particularly since the end of the Vietnam War, officers are strongly conservative in nature and tend to identify with the Republican Party in the United States.

Enlisted personnel political behavior has only been studied more recently, notably by Dempsey, and Inbody. Enlisted personnel, often thought to behave and vote as did officers, do not. They more nearly represent the general population. In general, the usual demographic predictors of voting and other political behavior apply to military personnel.

Technological implications

Access to technology

In an era in which reliance upon technology has been increasing, many have become accustomed to using technology and therefore would find it very difficult to function and make decisions without it. As a result, voting behaviour has been changing significantly in recent years due to these advancements in technology and media, "tracing the rise of email, party websites, social media, online videos and gamification, scholars have shown, since the 1990s, parties have become heavily dependent on digital technology." This portrays just how important access to technology is, as many will alter their views on which political party to vote for, whether to vote at all and whether they encourage the next generation to vote based upon what they learn whilst using technology. Figures show that even in a country like India, ravaged with poverty, the high importance of technology in comparison to the importance of hygiene as: "far more people in India have access to a cell phone than to a toilet and improved sanitation." Evidently, access to technology is not only important, it will soon become essential to allow a voter to gain a full understanding of their voters rights as well as helping them to make the important decision of whom to vote for since "casting a vote is the main way in which people participate in the democratic process."

Impacts of social media

Research has shown that due to the advancements in technology over the last two decades, politicians and their political parties are becoming heavily reliant on technology and in particular social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Martin Moore supported this view in his book, "A survey conducted amongst British journalists that summer found that seventy per cent were using Twitter for reporting." Therefore voters are now accessing information from less conventional outlets; yet the ease allows for politicians to expand their reach from the eldest generations, right down to the younger generations. Although social media has many positive implications, the lack of monitoring and accessibility opens a gateway for foreign interference in elections and indoctrination of voters.

Loss aversion

The loss aversion theory by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman is often associated with voting behavior as people are more likely to use their vote to avoid the effect of an unfavorable policy rather than supporting a favorable policy. From a psychological perspective, value references are crucial to determine individual preferences. Furthermore, it could be argued that the fact that loss aversion is found only in high stakes serves as a validation of loss aversion, because it shows that even when people care much about the outcome of their decision they are still biased. This is evident when it comes to elections and referendums, as voters make their choices based on the cost benefit analysis. For instance, it has been suggested that the loss aversion theory can be used to explain why negativity bias played a crucial role in the 2014 campaign for the Scottish independence referendum.

See also

• Altruism theory of voting
• Emotion
• Emotional bias
• Emotions in decision making
• Role of networks in electoral behavior
• Voting correctly
• Voting gender gap
• Political Cognition