ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some of the promising avenues of voting research. It highlights the political significance of the scholarly agenda they would advance. It focuses on the political meaning of specific elections, both as a contribution to political science and as a contribution to public understanding of "decisions at the ballot box". The chapter also describes the impact of elections on the broader political system, including representation, policymaking, and public attitudes toward politics, government, and the national community. It discusses the effects of historical and contextual variation arising from the behavior of political elites, the technology of political communication, economic and social circumstances, and other factors. The chapter further considers the further development of voting research as an indispensable part of a broader and more important intellectual enterprise, namely, understanding the role of ordinary citizens in modern democratic politics.
