Voter heuristics in Spaina descriptive approach elector decision

Resumo

The normative focus of political behaviour assumes that voters are rational and apply the same method of reasoning when they choose how to vote. Given the restrictions of this canonical view of voting theory, some authors have decided to explain the voter’s decision from a prescriptive or descriptive perspective. In this paper, we develop an adaptive model that describes the different sequential decision-making processes that voters apply. The goal is ultimately to identify the heuristic rules that characterize the political behaviour of individuals. To do this, we use a classification technique from the field of automatic learning: decision trees. On the empirical level, we find that Spanish voters perform sequential reasoning. The first heuristic that guides their choice is the memory of the vote in the last general elections. Next, voters use a sequence of other arguments to decide how to vote.