Why We Vote

by Andy Butcher

As the volume of snippy punditry and snap polling rises with the approach of the Nov. 4 elections, one online political commentator has confidently asserted: “voters are rational in midterm elections.”

He must know something that pretty much everyone else doesn’t — from candidates and campaigners to analysts and academics. For all the money that is poured into shaping people’s choices at the ballot, it’s widely acknowledged that the result is as much a lottery as it is an investment.

The P Team

In his 2012 book, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, political columnist Sasha Issenberg notes that the tools available to those in the $6 billion-a-year campaign industry “can do little to explain what makes someone vote…”

While it would be nice to believe that where we place our Xs is determined by a thoughtful and considered weighing of the issues and the candidates, the reality is rather different.

“There are plenty of reasons for voting,” says Paul J. Croce, Ph.D., professor of history and American studies at Stetson University, “and rationality is only one of them.”

A whole cluster of influences shape how we act at the ballot box. Call them the P team: they include parents (our background), peers (our friends and networks), the past (our previous choices), the press (including – increasingly — social media), and the propagandists (campaigners).

“Passions,” Croce adds to the list, noting the increasingly significant role in recent years of attack ads and other negative campaigning that “stoke people’s passions so they are mad enough to vote.” He dismisses the frequently heard idea that money buys elections, “but dollars buy attention, and attention is the traffic cop that directs people towards voting,” he says.

Negativity

People decry negative campaigning, “but at the end of the day, it’s used because it works, and of course because of the First Amendment candidates do not have to take an oath that what they are presenting is fair and truthful,” notes T. Wayne Bailey, Ph.D., professor of political science, and founder of Stetson’s Political Science Department. “One of the strongest impulses in politics is fear. The feeling is: ‘if I can create an aura of fear I can then deliver a message that might be in my favor.’”

It’s a concern: he sees the trend contributing towards a growing number of voters, especially among the young, who are opting out of political involvement because of all the unpleasantness. Some Stetson students have told him they are not voting “because the process is just too nasty,” he says.

But negativity has at least something of a plus side according to David Redlawsk, Ph.D., professor of political science at Rutgers University, a board member of American National Election Studies (ANES), and co-author of the forthcoming The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning.

The University of Chicago Press book will examine the way negative campaigning conveys “important information that would be absent if negativity was not allowed,” he says. “To put it really simply, no candidate is going to tell you bad things about themselves, and so to the extent that voters should have full information available to them, negative information is a part of that.”

Special Interests

It would seem that the more information people have available, the better they would be positioned to make considered decisions. But there is so much information available these days through multiple channels that some people get overwhelmed, and end up being more dependent on others they trust to help them make a decision.

“Voters are typically busy people,” says Kevin Winchell, Stetson’s assistant director of Community Engagement, and director of the university’s annual Politics 101 Conference. The one-day course on political campaigning, which this year drew around 70 participants, touches on issues of voter psychology with sessions on effective messaging.

“They have lives, they have families, they have jobs, and they have a lot of responsibilities,” says Winchell of the average voter, “so they don’t have a lot of time to read the newspaper or go to city council meetings, or join lots of civic organizations so they are able to be very informed about all the issues, and that’s a challenge.”

As a result, one place people turn for pointers is special interest groups.

“Then the member of the group, whatever it is, will tend to take a cue from that special interest without really looking into the issues or the candidates, and simply vote automatically,” says Bailey, who personally has fielded election-time calls from people asking him to advise them how to vote on certain issues.

Both Winchell and Croce see family background as a waning influence on voting. Winchell says that data from a national student voting study that Stetson participated in reveals students disaffiliating from political parties and organizations, and registering instead as independents or non-partisan.

“Young people are moving toward choice, personal identification, rather than family,” says Croce. “Affiliation with libertarianism is sky high among young people.”

Booths, Bleachers & Biology

Voter psychology has long fascinated researchers. ANES, which has studied national election voting since 1948, says that “at its core… voting is a psychological act.” The organization even hosted a conference on The Psychology of Voting and Election Campaigns at Duke University a few years ago.

Some of the seemingly arbitrary factors that have been found to influence voting behavior —beyond the press, past, peers, parents, and propagandists — range from the voting booth itself to the bleachers and biology.

Candidates whose names appear first on a ballot typically get around two percent more votes than the rest of the field, according to research by Jon Krosnick, professor of political science, communications, and psychology, and Frederic O. Glenn, professor in humanities and social studies at Stanford University, and others. The effect is more noticeable when voters don’t know much about any of the candidates.

Another Stanford study found that when the home college football team won, incumbents in senate, gubernatorial, and presidential elections garnered an additional 1.6 percent of the votes, “suggesting that voters reward and punish incumbents for changes in their well-being unrelated to government performance.”

Meanwhile, in June this year researchers from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), and Rice University reported finding lower levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in the saliva of subjects who went to the polls. Noted Jeff French, Varner professor of psychology and biology and director of UNO’s neuroscience program, and the lead author of the paper: “Politics and political participation is an inherently stressful activity.”

As political commentary goes, for once that’s not hard to swallow.

Andy Butcher is a freelance writer in Central Florida.