ABSTRACT
Comprehending how and why voters behave the way they do is an important aspect in understanding the outcomes of political campaigns and evaluating the health of a democracy. While decades of political science research have shed considerable light on this subject, there is still a great deal of controversy about the relative weight of specific influences and how widely applicable these findings are. In fact, as we argue in this chapter, the growing numbers of voters who do not always follow the standard patterns of presidential voting, such as African Americans, women, Latinos, and other minority groups, present a substantial challenge to existing models of presidential voting behavior and represent the new directions that scholars of voting must focus on in order to understand voting in the twenty-first century. One of the oldest and most widely accepted paradigms of voter behavior is the “Michigan model,” which holds that most voters form an attachment to a political party relatively early on in life, largely the result of familial influence. In the minds of most voters, this sense of affiliation, or “partisan identification,” has a greater influence on their vote decision than other factors such as ideology or a candidate’s stances on particular issues. While there have been a number of challenges to this model during the past half-century, most political scientists have agreed that the dominant influence in the decision-making process of the typical voter is party identification. However, the past decade has also produced a number of challengers to the Michigan model that will be reviewed in this chapter. Despite the model’s emphasis on partisan identification as opposed to ideology, a number of social and demographic factors such as race, religion, geographic region and gender all play an important role in shaping partisan affiliation and vote choice as well. These variables had an important impact in the elections of the past decade, especially in the 2008 presidential contest. In fact, it is very difficult to fully explain the outcome of the 2008 presidential election without also considering how these emerging groups make decisions and the ways in which they may differ from our popular paradigms.
