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Political Behavior

Erschienen in:

01.12.2011 | Original Paper

Turnout as a Habit

verfasst von: John H. Aldrich, Jacob M. Montgomery, Wendy Wood

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 4/2011

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Abstract

It is conventional to speak of voting as “habitual.” But what does this mean? In psychology, habits are cognitive associations between repeated responses and stable features of the performance context. Thus, “turnout habit” is best measured by an index of repeated behavior and a consistent performance setting. Once habit associations form, the response can be cued even in the absence of supporting beliefs and motivations. Therefore, variables that form part of the standard cognitive-based accounts of turnout should be more weakly related to turnout among those with a strong habit. We draw evidence from a large array of ANES surveys to test these hypotheses and find strong support.

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There is a subtle point here regarding the role of goals and motivations in the affective intelligence theory. This theory states that once habits form, the behavior may continue independent of the presence of the original motivations that encouraged habit formation. However, the emotional surveillance system constantly checks the degree to which automatic behavioral scripts are facilitating the achievement of desired goals. It is when behaviors no longer lead to expected outcomes that anxiety increases and habits are broken. Thus, unlike our theory, goals and motivations are still crucial in the affective intelligence theory, albeit one step removed from the kinds of direct cognitive reasoning in standard behavioral and rational-choice models of turnout.

It might be possible to hypothesize the existence of two kinds of non-voters. First, there may be individuals who make a conscious and deliberate decision every Election Day to abstain. It could be argued that such individuals could develop a habit of abstention. But there are also the second type of non-voters who are simply unaware and inattentive. These individuals would be only vaguely aware of the election, and their non-voting behavior would not be the result of any intentional decision. However, our current theoretical presentation and empirical analysis remains silent about the role of habitual non-voting because our measures do not allow us to discriminate between these two types of individuals. In any case, there is little, if any, evidence to suggest that a large amount of non-voting is a result of intentional abstention rather than passive inaction.

We have run our model on all available presidential election years, but only report the years with validated turnout. The results for other years are available on request.

Because of a concern for consistency in coding, we did not use the ANES cumulative file.

See Aldrich et al. (2007) for further analyses of some of these alternatives. Note that the choice among these various measures does not affect the results of the tests of our hypotheses.

See the online Appendix for a lengthier discussion of these issues.

Full model specifications for all years are available upon request. We note that this is not quite the exact hypothesis test for interactive hypotheses, but we will demonstrate that below.

Estimates were made using the Zelig program in R v2.9. All control variables were set at their actual data points, and the 95% CI represent the estimate of first differences averaged across all respondents in a given year. This method of examining an interactive model follows the suggestion of Brambor et al. (2006).

All results were conducted in MPLUS v4.2 using a WLSMV estimator and a probit link function. A full discussion of the SEM analysis used here is presented in the online Appendix.

We estimate a fixed effects model, that is, we include dummy variables to control for year effects. These results do not include the additional control variables in the Rosenstone–Hansen model. Those are included below.

It might be possible to take this idea even further and divide the population into four groups based on the two dichotomous indicators of context stability and repeated behavior. However, it is unclear what patterns we would expect to see amongst the intermediate categories (stable context but inconsistent voters versus unstable context and consistent voters). As a robustness check, this would seem to add more confusion than clarity. Moreover, the differences between coefficient estimates become increasingly difficult to discriminate as sample sizes in each group shrink and confidence intervals increase.

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Titel: Turnout as a Habit
verfasst von: John H. Aldrich
Jacob M. Montgomery
Wendy Wood
Publikationsdatum: 01.12.2011
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 4/2011
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9148-3

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