Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Political Ideology
- 3 Measuring Political Ideology
- 4 Linking Theory and Empirics: Testing Spatial Voting Theory
- 5 Partisanship versus Proximity: The Effect of Party Identification on Spatial Voting
- 6 Political Information and Spatial Voting
- 7 The Political Perceptions of Citizens
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix A Survey Question Wordings
- Appendix B Survey Sample Characteristics
- Appendix C Simplified Analyses of Ideology and Spatial Voting
- Appendix D American National Election Studies Analyses
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Linking Theory and Empirics: Testing Spatial Voting Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Political Ideology
- 3 Measuring Political Ideology
- 4 Linking Theory and Empirics: Testing Spatial Voting Theory
- 5 Partisanship versus Proximity: The Effect of Party Identification on Spatial Voting
- 6 Political Information and Spatial Voting
- 7 The Political Perceptions of Citizens
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix A Survey Question Wordings
- Appendix B Survey Sample Characteristics
- Appendix C Simplified Analyses of Ideology and Spatial Voting
- Appendix D American National Election Studies Analyses
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
No matter how elegant or aesthetically pleasing, a model of politics must ultimately be tested against the real world. Otherwise, it remains, at best, an interesting set of abstractions.
(Enelow and Hinich 1984, 169)One of the main virtues of spatial voting theory is its high degree of both parsimony and precision relative to other theories of voting behavior. Spatial theory posits that a voter's ideological proximity to candidate positions is the sole (or at least the central) determinant of vote choice. Furthermore, most accounts of spatial voting assume a specific, often formally stated relationship between ideology and voting behavior. The clear and rigorous statement of theoretical axioms in the spatial voting framework generally yields strong and specific empirical predictions. Therefore, spatial theory presents more robust opportunities for falsification than do most other approaches to the study of voting as well as most political science theories more generally. To the extent that spatial voting survives these opportunities for falsification, the theory should be viewed as more promising.
Although spatial theory generates clear, testable hypotheses, obtaining the measurements necessary for testing these hypotheses – specifically estimates of the ideology of voters and the positions taken by candidates – generally has not been possible with existing measurement techniques. Previous work attempting to test the empirical implications of spatial voting models has relied on heroic assumptions or rough proxies in order to obtain estimates of the ideology of voters and candidates on the same scale.
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- Information
- Ideology and Spatial Voting in American Elections , pp. 66 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012