Hi, I'm Craig and this is Crash Course Government and Politics and today, I'm gonna get inside
the head of the American voter, and then we are going to win every election ever ahaha!
No. Not literally. That would require some sort of shrink ray technology that hasn't
been invented, although I understand there is an Antman movie. Today we're going to look
at how voters make decisions, and when it comes right down to it, we don't really know.
After all, voting is like any other decision. It results from a number of factors, only
some of which are conscious at the time, and the main way we can tell about what caused
someone to vote one way or another is to ask them, and human beings are notoriously unreliable
when it comes to knowing their own motivations. So when I say we're gonna try to figure out
how voters decide, really we'll be looking at what political scientists have decided
are the factors that influence voting decisions -- which is way less exciting than saying we'll
be inside the heads of voters. So we're gonna say we'll be inside the heads of voters!
[Theme Music]
Political scientists have identified three main factors that influence how a person will vote.
These are party loyalty, the issues involved in an election, and characteristics
of the candidates running for office. If you stop to think about it, this makes total sense
and may cause you to wonder whether we should be paying political scientists their exorbitant
salaries. Let's start with party loyalty since this is supposedly the single largest predictor
of how a person will vote. Many voters identify as members of a political party, usually democrat
or republican, although a large percentage of people call themselves independents too.
We'll discuss the makeup of these parties in another episode. Really we're gonna discuss makeup, Stan? Oh..
For now, we should acknowledge that party loyalty is very very important in predicting
voter behavior. In fact, it is usually in the range of 90%. People identify with a political
party for a number of reasons. Some develop a psychological attachment to their party,
often from youth. I've mentioned this before, but your parents can have a powerful effect
on whether you identify as a democrat or republican, although it's not always easy to predict how
this effect will work. I know plenty of staunch republicans who adopted their party in rebellion
against their parents, and vice versa, and there's some evidence that these political
parties - democrat and republican - are becoming more opposed to each other, which political
writers describe as "increasing polarization".
One piece of evidence for this polarization are polls showing a greater percentage of
Americans reporting that they'd be disappointed if their child married someone who was from
the opposing political party. Yikes. Many people identify with a particular party because
they believe that the party's ideals coincided with their personal ideology. This is where
we get the democrats are liberals and republicans are conservatives dichotomy. Past experience
with political leaders and representatives also contributes to an individual's party
identity. A good example on the democratic side is that people who grew up during the
Great Depression and formed a positive view of FDR tended to become, and to stay, democrat.
Something similar happened in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan who appealed to voters across
party lines. 'Cos he was just so jovial and folksy! Gibbity gibbity!
The second factor that influences voter decisions is candidate characteristics. Again, political scientists and
common sense are in agreement here. People often vote for candidates with characteristics that they like.
Which characteristics seem to matter? Well, the ones you'd expect. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
Voters may be attracted to, or repelled by, a candidate's race, ethnicity, religion, gender,
or beard. Sometimes these characteristics are more obvious than other times, and uninformed
voters may rely on stereotypes of candidates, especially when it comes to ethnicity or religion.
Another personal characteristic that seems important is geography, which in this case,
means the region that the candidate is identified as being from. Joe Biden, when he was a senator,
did a lot to identify himself with Delaware, including pointing out how he took Amtrak
home from Washington. Which, if you're familiar with U.S. geography, or have ridden in the
northeast corridor trains, you'll know is actually pretty close to Delaware. Sometimes
though, geography doesn't seem to matter at all. Hillary Clinton hadn't spent much time
in New York before voters in that state elected her to the senate. If anything, she was associated
more with Arkansas, but in that case her gender and probably more important her star power
were enough to overcome complaints that she was a carpet bagger. And she and Bill did
buy a sweet place in Chappaqua, mkay?
One characteristic that is supposed to make a difference to voters is social background.
The assumption here is that voters will choose candidates whom they believe are similar to
themselves in terms of social class. Candidates certainly strive to appear like regular Joes
and Janes, but I'm a bit skeptical on this one. That's not like me at all, my name is
Craig. A remarkably high number of congressmen and senators are millionaires, for example,
but most Americans decidedly are not. Same goes for college education. Most congressmen
and all presidents since Harry Truman have graduated from college, but only about 30%
of Americans have. Many voters are also influenced by a candidate's personality. These include
virtues like a reputation for honesty, energy, and decisiveness, but maybe all candidates
are decisive and that's why they ran in the first place. I don't know, I can't decide. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So the third factor that influences how voters make their choices is where the candidates
stand on issues. We would hope that this would be the voters' top priority, but in fact it's
pretty far down the list. There are two types of issue voting, retrospective and prospective,
and both add information costs to voters' decisions. Retrospective voting is when a
voter chooses a candidate based on that candidate's past performance. Like if your main issue
was eagle punching, you would know from my past experience that there is a whole lot
of eagle punching going on, [punches eagle off the desk] even my current experience.
But a common problem with this is that finding out how a candidate has performed does take some time and research.
Prospective voting, as you might have guessed, is voting based on the imagined future performance
of a candidate. Like let's imagine how I would perform in the future. [Craig imagines himself
punching eagle off the desk again.] Ahh, I love the future. [Reflecting] Oh yeah, I thought so.
Imagining what a candidate will do in the future seems like it will be easy, just
watch the debates, they will tell you what they're gonna do-- but is that really what
they're gonna do? I don't have a time machine, at least one that you know about.
If you'll allow me to indulge in some poli-sci jargon at this point, I'd like to mention
that there are at least two types of political issues. There are spatial issues and valence
issues. Spatial issues are those for which there is a range of possible options or choices.
Think of them as existing on a spectrum. Minimum wage is a good example of a spatial issue,
some voters want it to be higher, and some want it to be lowered. Some want it to be
basically infra-red, cause they don't want any of it at all. Abortion is sometimes considered
a spatial issue as well, although there are probably fewer points on the continuum for
it than something like minimum wage, or taxes, jeez, that's a crazy spectrum!
Valence issues are those for which all voters will prefer a higher value. One example here
might be government transparency, it's hard to find a voters who wants a candidate to
run against transparency, although I'm sure they're out there, maybe.
So there you have the basic idea of how voters make decisions. Much of this seems pretty
common sensical, but there's a couple things to point out. First, even though political
scientists have identified these three factors: party loyalty, candidate characteristics,
and issues, there are probably others that play a role and there are probably also factors
that interact with each other. For example, personal prejudices aren't really mentioned,
but I'm sure they matter and they interact with candidate characteristics. One example
of this is the so-called Bradley Effect, named after former L.A. mayor Tom Bradley. Bradley
was leading in all the polls for California governor in 1982, but he lost. Political scientists
surmise that the polls were off because white voters told pollsters that they were willing
to vote for Bradley, when they really weren't. The idea is that Bradley's race was more important
than his political party, even though voters claimed that it wouldn't be a factor in their decision.
So which of these factors is best at predicting election outcomes? Well, party loyalty is
probably your best bet, but as so-called Reagan Democrats show us, party loyalty might matter
less when a candidate is particularly charismatic, or if the issues line up in their favor. One
thing that political scientists have discovered is that the more informed the electorate is,
the more heavily issues and candidate characteristics matter. But since, as we've seen, Americans
are generally not well-informed voters, party affiliation looms particularly large in American
campaigns, and that's what we'll be looking at next time -- campaigns. Thanks for watching, see you next time.
Crash Course: Government and Politics is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios. Support
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at http://voqal.org. Crash Course was made with the help of these party loyalists, and
loyalists of parties. Thanks for watching.