Models of Voting Behavior

Picture one ballot with a governor's race on it. A voter using rational choice asks what each candidate will personally do for her: lower her taxes, protect her job. A voter using retrospective voting looks backward: has the incumbent's term left things better or worse, judging by jobs, crime, prices. A voter using prospective voting looks forward instead, weighing the promises and platforms candidates offer for next term. And a voter using party-line voting skips the research entirely and picks the candidate from the party she always backs. Four people, one ballot, four different logics, which is exactly why two neighbors staring at the same candidate can land in opposite places or reach the same vote for unrelated reasons.

Retrospective voting turns elections into referendums because it makes the sitting party's record the whole question. A bad economy, a war gone wrong, a scandal: all of it gets bundled into a verdict on whoever currently holds power, rewarded with another term or punished with removal, regardless of what challengers actually propose. Party identification works differently. It functions as a cognitive shortcut: a voter who has learned over years what her party generally stands for can reasonably predict that an unfamiliar candidate from that party will roughly share her priorities, without needing to study every position paper.

This matters for the unit because these models explain why turnout and persuasion efforts target different voters differently. Campaigns chase swing voters with prospective appeals and persuadable retrospective judgments, while parties mobilize their base through identification alone, a distinction that shapes how money, media, and get-out-the-vote strategy get spent later in the unit.