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Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
JACK LUCAS University of Calgary, Canada
LIOR SHEFFER Tel Aviv University, Israel
PETER JOHN LOEWEN Cornell University, United States
STEFAAN WALGRAVE University of Antwerp, Belgium
KAROLIN SOONTJENS University of Antwerp, Belgium
ERAN AMSALEM Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
STEFANIE BAILER University of Basel, Switzerland
NATHALIE BRACK Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
CHRISTIAN BREUNIG University of Konstanz, Germany
PIRMIN BUNDI University of Lausanne, Switzerland
LINDA COUFAL Charles University, Czechia
PATRICK DUMONT Australian National University, Australia
SARAH LACHANCE University of Calgary, Canada
MIGUEL M. PEREIRA London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom
MIKAEL PERSSON University of Gothenburg, Sweden
JEAN-BENOIT PILET Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
ANNE RASMUSSEN King’s College London, United Kingdom
MAJ-BRITT STERBA University of Konstanz, Germany
FRÉDÉRIC VARONE University of Geneva, Switzerland
While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting
behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting.
Here, we investigate politicians’positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of
elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using
data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with
corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly
hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist”theories of voting, while citizens’theories are more optimistic
and policy oriented. Politicians’theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from
citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important conse-
quences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and
represent their constituents.
“The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these
proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of
their own shadow and won’t get out of bed in the morning
unless they’ve had a focus group report to tell them which
side of bed to get out.”
—Paul Keating, 2007
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot
somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
—Donald Trump, 2016
INTRODUCTION
Do voters select parties that will implement their
desired policies, or are they largely concerned with
seeing their political team win and the other team lose?
When voters support a party, do they focus on the
character and competence of the party leader, or are
they primarily interested in the party’s policy commit-
ments? Are voters prospective, oriented to the future,
or are they retrospective and oriented to the past?
These kinds of questions are central to political science
research on elections and voting behavior. The theories
that researchers have developed to answer them are
among the most well-known and widely debated in
political science.
Received: November 09, 2023; revised: May 16, 2024; accepted:
August 27, 2024.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Elected politicians figure prominently in these the-
ories: their policy commitments, career aspirations,
and campaign tactics are central to many political
science accounts of how elections work. Yet, politi-
cians also have their own beliefs about elections and
voting. Sit with a politician as the room empties after a
town hall meeting, or accompany a politician as they
walk from door to door on the campaign trail, and you
will soon discern the outlines of their theories of why
citizens vote, how voters make their choices, and the
forces that shape citizens’political beliefs. When a
politician complains that their party is too obsessed
with focus groups, or brags that they could shoot a
person in the street without electoral consequence,
these comments tell us something not only about the
politician’s personality and values but also offer clues
about their working theories of elections and voting
behavior.
These working theories have often gone unnoticed
by political scientists, but there is good reason to expect
that they matter a great deal for politics. Political
science research on “lay theories”of politics, while
limited, has consistently found that these theories are
strongly related to political behavior and policy atti-
tudes among both citizens and political elites (Kertzer
and McGraw 2012; Rad and Ginges 2019); for instance,
politicians who think of their constituents as policy
oriented rather than identity oriented report spending
more time on policy-related tasks (Lucas, Sheffer, and
Loewen 2024), and politicians who think of constitu-
ents as oriented toward the long term are more likely to
take a long-term perspective when facing temporal
tradeoffs in policy choices (Sheffer, Loewen, and Lucas
2023). Moreover, recent work suggests that the more
politicians believe voters will retroactively hold them
accountable, the more time and effort they spend
gathering public opinion information (Soontjens and
Walgrave 2021). Hence, politicians’implicit theories
matter; they create “psychological worlds”(Dweck
2012, 39) that shape their expectations about others,
and how they themselves behave.
We can gain an especially clear picture of politicians’
theories of elections and voting behavior by comparing
politicians’beliefs to those of ordinary citizens.
Because citizens are unlikely to have reflected deeply
on the forces that shape elections and voting behavior,
their implicit theories are likely to be less well struc-
tured and reflect more top-of-mind assumptions. Com-
paring politicians’theories to those of their constituents
thus allows us to understand if politicians develop
distinctive theories. Moreover, theoretical misalign-
ment between politicians and citizens may have conse-
quences of its own for elite-mass communication and
even, in some cases, for political representation and
citizens’democratic satisfaction.
Here, we use data from face-to-face structured inter-
views with nearly one thousand elected national and
regional politicians in 11 countries, along with surveys
of over twelve thousand citizens, to provide a first-ever
systematic analysis of politicians’theories of elections
and voting behavior. We find that elected politicians
hold widely varying beliefs on central theoretical
debates in political science: debates about retrospective
versus prospective voting, policy-driven versus leader-
driven electoral selection, voter knowledge versus
ignorance, and more. To clarify these theories, we
estimate the latent theoretical types that lay beneath
politicians’responses and find that nearly three quar-
ters of politicians embrace a “thin”or “minimalist”
theory of voting behavior, one that broadly resembles
“democratic realism”(Achen and Bartels 2016). Com-
paring politicians’theories to ordinary citizens, we find
that politicians’beliefs differ dramatically from those of
the citizens they represent: in nearly every country we
study, politicians are more likely than citizens to see
voters as leader oriented rather than policy oriented,
retrospective rather than prospective, egocentric rather
than sociotropic, focused on single issues rather than
multiple issues, concerned about the short term rather
than the long term, and “blind”rather than “clear-
eyed”in their retrospection. While nearly three
Corresponding author: Jack Lucas , Professor, Department of Pol it-
ical Science, University of Calgary, Canada, jack.lucas@ucalgary.ca
Lior Sheffer , Associate Professor, School of Political Science,
Government, and International Affairs, Tel Aviv University, Israel,
liorsheffer@tauex.tau.ac.il
Peter John Loewen , Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences and Professor, Department of Government, Cornell
University, United States, pjl245@cornell.edu
Stefaan Walgrave , Professor, Department of Political Science,
University of Antwerp, Belgium, stefaan.walgrave@uantwerpen.be.
Karolin Soontjens, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Sci-
ence, University of Antwerp, Belgium, Karolin.soontjens@uantwer-
pen.be.
Eran Amsalem , Assistant Professor, Department of Communica-
tion, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, eran.amsalem@mail.
huji.ac.il.
Stefanie Bailer , Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Univer-
sity of Basel, Switzerland, stefanie.bailer@unibas.ch.
Nathalie Brack , Associate Professor, Department of Political Sci-
ence, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, Nathalie.Brack@ulb.be.
Christian Breunig , Professor, Department of Politics and Public
Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany, christian.
breunig@uni-konstanz.de.
Pirmin Bundi , Assistant Professor, Swiss Graduate School of Public
Administration, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, pirmin.bun-
di@unil.ch.
Linda Coufal , PhD Student, Institute of Sociological Studies,
Charles University, Czechia, linda.coufal@fsv.cuni.cz.
Patrick Dumont , Professor, School of Politics and International
Relations, Australian National University, Australia, patrick.dumon-
t@anu.edu.au.
Sarah Lachance , Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political
Science, University of Calgary, Canada, sarah.lachance@mail.utor-
onto.ca.
Miguel M. Pereira , Assistant Professor,European Institute, London
School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, M.M.
Pereira@lse.ac.uk.
Mikael Persson , Professor, Department of Political Science, Uni-
versity of Gothenburg, Sweden, mikael.persson.3@gu.se.
Jean-Benoit Pilet , Professor, Department of Political Science, Uni-
versité Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, Jean-Benoit.Pilet@ulb.be.
Anne Rasmussen , Professor, Department of Political Economy,
King’s College London, United Kingdom; Professor, Department of
Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, ar@ifs.ku.dk.
Maj-Britt Sterba , Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Politics and
Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany, maj-britt.
sterba@uni-konstanz.de.
Frédéric Varone , Professor, Department of Political Science and
International Relations, University of Geneva, Switzerland, frederic.
varone@unige.ch.
Jack Lucas et al.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
quarters of politicians embrace a “thin”and realist
theory of voting behavior, citizens are much more
evenly divided between the realist perspective and an
alternative theory in which voters are more policy
oriented, knowledgeable, and engaged.
POLITICIANS’THEORIES AND THEIR
CONSEQUENCES
Theories of elections and voting are empirical accounts
of election outcomes and the voting behavior that gen-
erates them. Theoretical beliefs are distinguished from
other beliefs in being conceptual, explanatory, and pre-
dictive (Gelman and Legare 2011; Gopnik and Meltzoff
1998). Theories are conceptual in the sense that they
provide concepts (e.g., “retrospective voting”)with
which to organize the world into meaningful categories
and explain empirical phenomena. Theories are explan-
atory in that they provide plausible causal accounts of
events and outcomes; explanatory statements like, “the
President lost because citizens were upset about the
economy”imply underlying theories of votingbehavior.
Finally, theories are predictive in that they enable indi-
viduals to develop expectations about the consequences
of their actions; statements like, “there is no way the
party machine will allow him to become the Presidential
nominee”are predictions grounded in implicit theories
(Lucas, Sheffer, and Loewen 2024).
To make this more concrete, an example may be
helpful. In spatial voting theory, each voter is typically
assumed to hold a bundle of policy preferences that can
be meaningfully summarized in some low-dimensional
latent space (often characterized as a left–right spec-
trum); this bundle is called an “ideal point.”Political
candidates and/or parties compete with one another by
proposing their own bundles of policy promises; voters
consider these promises and select the party or candi-
date whose proposed ideal point is closest to their ownin
latent space (Downs 1957). This theory provides a set of
concepts (ideal pointsand spatial proximity) withwhich
its users can provide explanations of electoral outcomes
(“Party A had become too extreme, allowing Party B to
build a new coalition of centrist and left-of-center
voters”) and make related predictions about the future.
A starkly contrasting theory of elections and voting is
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s(2016)demo-
cratic realism. Synthesizing decades of political science
research, together with their own original analysis,
Achen and Bartels argue that voters are decidedly
incapable of making choices based on calculations of
spatial proximity. Instead, most voters make choices
based on longstanding group identities and vague,
short-term assessments of their well-being. Democratic
realism not only provides theoretical concepts of its
own (e.g., “blind retrospection”), but also offers very
different explanations and predictions than those that
arise from, among others, spatial voting theory.
These competing theories offer very different organi-
zational, predictive, and explanatory perspectives on
politics. Importantly, to the extent that these or other
theories are held by politicians who are actively involved
in politics, they are likely to generate widely varying
behavior. In a study of Canadian local politicians, for
example, Sheffer, Loewen, and Lucas (2023) found that
politicians who believe voters focus on the shortterm are
significantly more likely to optfor short-term rather than
long-term solutions when facing temporal policy trade-
offs (Jacobs 2011). Politicians’theories of voters have
also been found to shape their responsiveness to public
opinion (Soontjens 2022) and their choices about how
they allocate their available working time, with “demo-
cratic realist”politicians spending less time on policy-
related activity and more time on communication with
constituents (Lucas, Sheffer, and Loewen 2024). These
theories thus appear tohave important consequences for
how politicians choose to do their jobs.
1
These consequences are likely to extend beyond how
politicians reason about policy or how they choose to
spend their time. In some circumstances, politicians’
theories may generate a form of self-fulfilling prophecy,
inadvertently creating the electorate that politicians’
theoretical beliefs lead them to expect. For example,
politicians who believe that voters are short-sighted
and retrospective may endorse excessive preelection
spending, exacerbating the patterns documented in
research on electoral business cycles (Alesina and
Roubini 1992) and signaling to citizens that elections
are indeed “about”short-term policy or material
rewards. Similarly, politicians who believe that voters
are oriented to identity-based appeals rather than
policy-based appeals are likely to spend more time
communicating with constituents about relevant
in-groups and out-groups than about policy, heighten-
ing the salience of group identities in election cam-
paigns and political debates. And if politicians see
voters as personalistic and leader-focused, rather than
focused on parties’policy promises, they may find it
more difficult to stand up to their own party leaders,
even when those leaders take norm-violating action in
power, believing that their own political survival is
strongly tied to their leader’s success (Matovski
2021). More broadly, then, politicians’theoretical
beliefs about what voters want—demand for personal-
ism, demand for identity-based appeals, demand for
short-term policy solutions, and so on—are likely not
only to shape politicians’own behavior, but may also
serve over the longer term to reorient voters’behavior
as well. For all of these reasons, understanding
1
These findings in the specific domain of political elites mirror
broader findings about the role of implicit theories for behavior,
including work in political science on implicit theories in international
relations (Kertzer and McGraw 2012) and the role of implicit theories
for policy attitudes (Rad and Ginges 2018). In one especially well-
developed area of research, for example, differences between indi-
viduals who hold “entity”versus “incremental”theories of human
intelligence (implicit theories about the extent to which people can
enhance their personal attributes or develop new traits) predict many
important outcomes in child development, career success, and inter-
group attitudes. On these “growth mindset”findings specifically, see
Dweck (2012), along with the nationally representative double-blind
RCT in Yeager et al. (2019) and the meta-analyses in Burnette et al.
(2023) and Tipton et al. (2023). See Gelman and Legare (2011) for a
general review.
Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
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politicians’theories of elections and voting behavior
should be an important and even central component of
our general understanding of political elites.
We can gain an especially clear understanding of
politicians’theories by comparing politicians’views to
those of ordinary citizens. As Joshua Kertzer (2022) has
argued, comparing political elites to ordinary citizens is
valuable for normative, theoretical, and methodologi-
cal reasons. At a normative level, most theories of
political representation assume that politicians resem-
ble constituents in ways that allow politicians to
respond to constituents’needs and allow constituents
to meaningfully assess their representatives’perfor-
mance (Mansbridge 2003; Pitkin 1967). Together with
decades of research on policy representation (Miller
and Stokes 1963; Soroka and Wlezien 2009), political
scientists have also explored other ways in which pol-
iticians might be expected to resemble their constitu-
ents, including personality traits (Dynes, Hassell, and
Miles 2022; Hanania 2017), reasoning and problem-
solving (Sheffer et al. 2018), and values and norms such
as altruism and cooperation (Enemark et al. 2016;
LeVeck et al. 2014). Identifying the respects in which
politicians do or do not resemble their constituents—
and then assessing the normative significance of this
alignment or misalignment—is a central feature of
contemporary theories of political representation
(Mansbridge 1999; Urbinati and Warren 2008).
Comparing political elites to ordinary citizens is also
crucial for theories of elite political behavior and elite-
mass divides. This is important not only for ongoing
debates about what it is that distinguishes politicians’
attitudes, characteristics, or decision-making processes
from those of ordinary citizens (Kertzer and Renshon
2022), but also for more specific theories of political
communication and democratic satisfaction. When cit-
izens say things like, “politicians think we’re stupid”or
“politicians think we don’t pay attention to what they
do,”researchers often interpret these statements as
indicators of political disengagement or cynicism. But
what if politicians are more likely than citizens to think
that voters are uninformed and ignorant? What if they
are more likely than citizens to think that voters pay no
attention to politicians’actions? These differences
between politicians and citizens, if they exist, would
reveal an important and overlooked individual-level
predictor of miscommunication, misunderstanding,
and even dissatisfaction among citizens with their rep-
resentatives—which would require very different solu-
tions than other sources of dissatisfaction, such as
ideological misalignment or poor performance in office.
Alignment or misalignment between elites and citi-
zens is also theoretically important because we have
good reason to suspect that elitesdo differ from ordinary
citizens intheir theories of elections and voting behavior.
Political elites differ from other citizens not only in their
demographic characteristics, such as age, wealth, and
education (Carnes and Lupu 2023), but also in their
personality traits (Hanania 2017), partisanship and polit-
ical engagement (Enders 2021), and in the way they
approach relevant decision-making processes, such as
bargaining (Sheffer, Loewen, and Lucas 2023). Relat-
edly, politicians have distinctive opportunities to interact
not only with voters but also with other politicians,
including more experienced elites and campaign strate-
gists who may socialize them into particular theories of
“how things really work”in politics (Esaiasson and
Holmberg 2017;Fenno1977).
2
These compositional,
social, and cultural factors give us good reasonto expect
politicians’beliefs about elections and voting to differ
from those of ordinary citizens.
Finally, elite-mass comparisons have methodological
implications. Studies of political elites—especially
active, elected politicians in major national or regional
executives and legislatures—are costly and time-
consuming. In some domains, differences between
political elites and the mass public (or between “top”
politicians and more accessible elites, such as municipal
politicians), are relatively small (Sheffer et al. 2018;
Teele, Kalla, and Rosenbluth 2018). Understanding
these differences allows researchers to pursue less
costly research strategies, where appropriate, while still
illuminating important features of elite political behav-
ior (Kertzer and Renshon 2022).
Importantly, these comparisons are valuable even if
citizens have reflected much less deeply than politicians
on elections or voting behavior. Because citizens’the-
ories are likely, on average, to be drawn from culturally
accessible and less well-structured narratives about
politics, they provide us with a baseline against which
to judge the distinctiveness of politicians’theories. As
long as citizens understand the questions being asked of
them—and we provide evidence that the overwhelming
majority of citizens do offer coherent responses to our
questions—then comparing politicians’theories to
those of citizens offers valuable insight into how poli-
ticians see politics. This is true even if, as we expect,
citizens’theories are likely to be less stable and less
predictive of behavior than those of political elites.
In sum, past research in political science, together
with a larger interdisciplinary research tradition, offers
good reason to expect that politicians’theories of
elections and voting behavior have important conse-
quences for politicians’behavior. These theories, how-
ever, have thus far gone largely unnoticed in political
science research.
3
Our purpose in this article is thus to
provide a comprehensive and comparative overview of
politicians’theories of elections and voting behavior.
MEASURING THEORIES OF ELECTIONS AND
VOTING
To measure politicians’theories of elections and voting
behavior, we developed eight novel survey questions,
2
In more general terms, this phenomenon has been known to
psychologists for decades. For instance, Nisbett and Wilson (1977)
argue that individuals explain their own and others’behavior by
developing causal accounts that align with their experience and/or
plausible causal narratives within their culture or subculture. We are
grateful to an anonymous reviewer for reminding us of this important
connection.
3
This absence is especially notable because politicians’theories
received early attention in the work of several foundational postwar
political scientists. See, for instance, Dahl (1961) and Kingdon (1967).
Jack Lucas et al.
4
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
each of which captures an enduring theoretical debate
in political science. To select these debates, we focused
on four criteria. First, we chose to focus on elections and
voting behavior because we expect politicians to have
developed theoretical beliefs in this area; this contrasts
with other theoretical debates in political science (such
as theories of the policy process or executive-
bureaucratic relations) in which politicians may have
had less opportunity to develop theories. Second, we
focus on enduring theoretical debates in the elections
and voting behavior field—debates that appear regu-
larly in handbooks, textbooks, and synthetic reviews.
Third, because our research is comparative and explor-
atory, we sought to cover a wide variety of theoretical
debates, rather than focusing on repeated measures of a
smaller number of debates. Finally, we focus on
debates about individual voting behavior, rather than
theories of system-level responsiveness or representa-
tion, such as theories of thermostatic responsiveness or
issue evolution (Soroka and Wlezien 2009). While
these macro debates are important, and political elites
may well have theoretical beliefs about them, we begin
by focusing our attention on a group about whom
politicians are likely to have invested a great deal of
thought: individual voters.
Based on these criteria, we selected eight debates to
include in our interviews with politicians and citizens.
The first of these is policy versus identity voting. As we
noted earlier, political scientists in the spatial voting
tradition argue that voters rely on their policy prefer-
ences to select their preferred candidates (Downs 1957;
Jessee 2012; Schonfeld and Winter-Levy 2021). More
generally, many theories of policy responsiveness
assume that citizens’policy preferences influence gov-
ernment policy in part through an electoral selection
mechanism (Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart 2001).
However, an equally longstanding tradition rejects the
notion that citizens even have coherent bundles of
policy preferences with which to make their voting
decisions (Converse 2006; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017),
arguing that these choices are instead driven by factors
such as citizens’longstanding group identities—espe-
cially partisanship (Achen and Bartels 2016; Mason
2018).
4
This remains an area of spirited debate.
The second theoretical debate we selected concerns
voters’short-term versus long-term orientations. Inter-
temporal choices are at the heart of policymaking, and it
iscommonlyarguedthatpoliciestendtobebiased
toward the short term, in part because representatives
have electoral incentives to cater to an impatient public
(Ashworth 2012;Jacobs2011). Research in psychology
and economics emphasizes people’stendencytobemyo-
pic in their preferences; citizens tend to be short-sighted
and focused on the near rather than far future (Streich
and Levy 2007; Urminsky and Zauberman 2015). How-
ever, empirical studies that corroborate this idea of
myopic citizens in the context of elections and voting is
more scattered in its conclusions. Healy and Malhotra
(2009) do find that voters, in the context of policies
dealing with natural disasters, support immediate relief
aid rather than future disaster prevention, which suggests
that voters tend to be averse to short-run costs that are
connected to long term responsible policymaking. Jacobs
and Matthews (2012;2017), in contrast, show that voters
are myopic in favoring secure short-term policy benefits,
but emphasize that this does not imply that voters are
fundamentally short-sighted. Voters are not impatient,
they argue, but focus more on the short term simply
because they are uncertain about the future. The char-
acter of voters’short-term or long-term orientations thus
remains an active scholarly debate.
Third, we ask if our respondents see voters as knowl-
edgeable or ignorant. Empirical scholarship has long
debated the degree of citizens’policy-specific knowl-
edge (Gilens 2001), general political knowledge (Delli
Carpini and Keeter 1996), or political sophistication
(Luskin 1987). While there is a broad consensus that
political knowledge is associated with positive out-
comes such as civic participation, correct voting (Lau
and Redlawsk 1997; Lupia 2006), and political activism
(Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995), the level of
knowledge that citizens bring to their voting choices
remains an area of debate (Achen and Bartels 2016;
Fowler 2020).
Fourth, we measure theories of single-issue versus
multiple-issue voting. Since Converse (2006) first pro-
posed the idea of “issue publics”—voters who pay close
attention to particular issues and who vote on the basis
of parties’stances on those issues—political scientists
have debated whether such voters actually exist. As we
already noted, many political scientists have suggested
that voters’policy beliefs are simply too weak and
unstable to genuinely shape their choices (Achen and
Bartels 2016; Cohen 2003; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017),
and even those who do believe policy attitudes are
important for voting tend to assume that bundles of
issue positions, rather than single issues, are what
matters (Fowler et al. 2023; Jessee 2012). Even so, a
new analysis by Ryan and Ehlinger (2023) used a novel
survey question and “bespoke”conjoint experiments
to show that a substantial fraction of the American
public does appear to belong to issue publics. This
new approach is likely to provoke considerable new
research—and debate—about the presence or absence
of genuine single-issue voters.
Fifth, we explore the debate between those who see
voters as motivated by political leaders versus those
who see voters as focused on parties and their substan-
tive ideas. There is a well-documented long-term pro-
cess of personalization in democratic politics, wherein
leaders’personal authority becomes increasingly sig-
nificant amidst weakening political parties (Rahat and
Kenig 2018). In contrast, others follow classic research
in spatial voting theory (Lau and Redlawsk 1997)by
providing evidence for voters’attention and respon-
siveness to changes in parties’policy positions
and ideology (Klüver and Spoon 2016; Seeberg,
Slothuus, and Stubager 2017; Serra 2010). The relative
4
Some political scientists see partisanship as a “policy reputation”or
a“running tally”of a party’s policy commitments and performance
(Fiorina 1981). We are referring here to the more specific social
identity theory of partisanship.
Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
importance of leadership competence (vs. policy and
ideas) in vote choice is a longstanding focus in electoral
research (Lanz 2020; Petrocik 1996), including work on
both presidential candidates (Miller, Wattenberg, and
Malanchuk 1986) and party leaders (Garzia 2011; Val-
garðsson et al. 2021). These studies have recently been
extended to voter support for political leaders who
violate democratic principles (Carey et al. 2022; Fre-
deriksen 2022) and the impact of competence on voting
preferences (Green and Jennings 2017). Although
some work suggests that the importance of leaders’
competence for vote choice has increased in recent
years, its influence relative to parties’substantive ideas
remains a subject of active debate.
Our sixth debate is retrospective versus prospective
voting. Classical theories of democratic representation
view voters as future-oriented individuals who are
driven largely by policy expectations (Downs 1957).
Under this “promissory”model (Mansbridge 2003),
voters make choices based on the match between their
own policy preferences and the policies that candidates
and parties offer (Naurin and Thomson 2020). In con-
trast, voting based on already implemented policies is
considered retrospective, and a distinguished theoreti-
cal literature argues that voters’decision-making is
based largely on evaluations of representatives’past
behavior (Ferejohn 1986; Fiorina 1981). While a great
deal of evidence indicates that citizens consider infor-
mation on past performance when making their elec-
toral choices (Healy and Malhotra 2013), prospective
theory continues to receive considerable attention
(Fowler et al. 2023; Jessee 2012).
5
Seventh, we measure egocentric versus sociotropic
theory. An important question about citizens’assess-
ment of their incumbents’performance is whether
voters are egocentric in their evaluations—so-called
“pocketbook”voting—or sociotropic, assessing the
overall state of the national economy or other broad
features (Healy, Persson, and Snowberg 2017; Lewis-
Beck and Lockerbie 1989; Lockerbie 2006). Early
rational choice models (Downs 1957) implied that
voters would be egocentric, focusing on personal well-
being, but considerable research has found that many
voters instead respond to the state of the national
economy and the incumbent government’s perfor-
mance on the national economy (Clarke et al. 2004;
Kinder and Kiewiet 1979;1981). Others have rein-
forced this view with a more general argument that
voters look beyond their own situation when casting
their vote, acting with “sociotropic”rather than
“egocentric”retrospection (Fiorina 1978; MacKuen
1983). Still, recent research has questioned the socio-
tropic consensus (De Benedictis-Kessner and Hankin-
son 2019; Healy, Persson, and Snowberg 2017), and it is
also possible that retrospective voters evaluate the state
of the nation and their own well-being—a distinction
that is methodologically challenging to disentangle
(Feldman 1982).
Finally, we explore the theoretical debate about citi-
zens’competence to assess their elected representatives’
performance. In classical retrospective voting theory,
citizens hold their elected representatives accountable
for their actions by considering indicators of their well-
being (whether egocentric or sociotropic) during the full
course of a government’s time in office (Fiorina 1981;
Key 1966). This “clear-eyed”retrospection—holding
governments accountable for what they can control,
but ignoring changes over which governments have no
control—incentivizes politicians to anticipate their con-
stituents’preferences and communicate the reasons for
their actions to citizens (Mansbridge 2003). However,
retrospective voting can secure this representational
connection only if voters’assessments are genuinely
linked to politicians’performance, and a prominent
tradition of political science research has argued that
voters’assessments are in fact based on considerations
that have nothing to do with politicians’actions, such as
the outcome of college football games (Healy and Mal-
hotra 2009), local shark attacks (Achen and Bartels
2016), and extremely short-term economic fluctuations
(Achen and Bartels 2016). These findings have
prompted new studies that seek to question the “irrele-
vant events”results or argue that such events in fact
provide voters with valuable information (Ashworth
2012; Ashworth, Bueno De Mesquita, and Friedenberg
2018; Fowler and Hall 2018).
Having selected these theoretical debates, we devel-
oped questions that describe each debate in accessible
language. We provide the full wording for each of our
questions in Table 1. In each question, we identify each
side of the debate and ask respondents to position
themselves within the debate on a 0–10 scale, with each
pole appropriately labeled. Further, we field-tested all
of these questions in surveys of local politicians in
Canada, the United States, and Belgium. In each case,
question response patterns and open-ended follow-up
questions confirmed that politicians understood
the questions, felt comfortable placing themselves in
the theoretical debates, and even, in many cases,
enjoyed the opportunity to express their views.
6
These
questions are designed to be accessible to politicians
and citizens alike; past elite-citizen comparisons sug-
gest that politicians and citizens tend to respond to
survey questions and prompts in similar ways, even
on quite technical and specialized tasks (Kertzer 2022).
Two additional features of these questions are worth
emphasising. First, the order of the questions in the
table carries no implied ranking—we consider all eight
5
Many retrospective theorists assumes that voters rely on retrospec-
tive judgments to make prospective assessments—that is, they use
past performance to predict future performance (Ashworth 2012).
For the purposes of measuring politicians’theories, however, we
focus on the simpler (and still interesting) distinction between prom-
issory prospection and accountability-oriented retrospection.
6
In one pilot study, we included “don’t know”options for all
questions and found that only a very small proportion (less than 1%
for most questions) selected the option, indicating good question
comprehension. Two other pilot studies included an opportunity for
open-ended feedback on the questions; responses did not reveal any
comprehension problems. Our final pilot study with Belgian local
politicians revealed no issues with extending the questions to a non-
majoritarian electoral setting.
Jack Lucas et al.
6
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questions equally important, and the order of presen-
tation of the items was randomized for both politicians
and citizens. Second, our setup—with distinct questions
for each theoretical debate—allows for but does not
require that respondents’positions on the theoretical
debates are strongly related to one another. Among
political scientists, we know that some combinations of
theoretical positions are more common, and even per-
haps more logically coherent, than others. However,
research on implicit theories outside political science
has demonstrated that lay theories are much more
flexible than those developed by scientific professionals
(Gelman and Legare 2011; Rad and Ginges 2018), and
our pilot studies indicated that respondents might com-
bine their theoretical positions in a wide variety of
ways. Our questions allow for many possible theoreti-
cal positions not only in terms of the respondent’s
answer to each theoretical item but also in terms of
their positions across the eight theoretical debates.
DATA: THEORIES OF ELECTIONS
AND VOTING IN 11 COUNTRIES
We examine politicians’and citizens’theories of elec-
tions and voting behavior in 11 countries: Australia,
Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Ger-
many, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and
Switzerland. In each country, our questions were part
of surveys fielded in the framework of the POLPOP
project.
7
While these countries are similar to one
TABLE 1. Overview of Question Wording and Short Labels
Theoretical debate Short name Question wording
Policy-based vs.
identity-based
voting
Policy v. identity Some say that voters make their decisions based on their policy preferences.
Others say that voters’choices have much more to do with their deeply held
partisan or other group identities. Where would you position yourself in this
debate? (0 = policy, 10 = identity)
Voters’short-term vs.
long-term
orientations
Short-term v.
long-term
Some say that voters are impatient and think about the short term when they
vote. Others say that voters focus on the long term. Where would you
position yourself in this debate? (0 = short term, 10 = long term)
Voters’knowledge
vs. ignorance
Knowledge v.
ignorance
Some say that when citizens vote they are by and large knowledgeable about
political issues, while others say they generally know very little. Where
would you position yourself in this debate? (0 = knowledge, 10 = ignorant)
Single-issue vs.
multiple-issue
voting
Single-issue v.
many-issue
Some say that voters make voting decisions based on one or two policy issues
they care strongly about. Others say voters decide based on a wide range of
policy issues. Where would you position yourself in this debate? (0 = single
issue, 10 = many issue)
Voters’focus on
leadership qualities
vs. policy
commitments
Ideas v. leaders Some say that voters care more about the ideas parties stand for than about
the party leader’s character and competence. Others say that voters care
about the leader’s qualities more than the party’s platform. Where would you
position yourself in this debate? (0 = ideas, 10 = leader)
Prospective vs.
retrospective
voting
Future v. past Some say that voters make decisions based on candidates’policy
commitments and promises for the next term. Others say that voters base
their decisions on rewarding or punishing their elected representatives for
how well they have performed in the previous term. Where would you
position yourself in this debate? (0 = future, 10 = past)
Sociotropic vs.
egocentric/
pocketbook voting
Sociotropic v.
egocentric
Some say that voters judge governments on whether they’ve improved
everyone’s lives. Others say that voters judge governments on whether
they’ve improved their own personal lives. Where would you position
yourself in this debate? (0 = everyone; 10 = personal)
“Blind”vs. “clear-
eyed”retrospective
voting
Unfair v. fair Some say that voters often blame or reward politicians for events that are
totally outside the politician’s control. Others say that voters are good at
knowing which events politicians are and are not responsible for. Where
would you position yourself in this debate? (0 = unfair, 10 = fair)
7
POLPOP is an international collaboration examining elected pol-
iticians’opinions, perceptions, and evaluations in 13 countries. The
project is led by Stefaan Walgrave (University of Antwerp) and
supported by an ERC Advanced Grant (POLEVPOP,
ID:101018105). In Australia, the project is led by Patrick Dumont
(Australian National University), in Belgium (Flanders) by Stefaan
Walgrave (University of Antwerp), in Francophone Belgium by
Jean-Benoit Pilet and Nathalie Brack (Université Libre de Bru-
xelles), in Canada by Peter Loewen (Cornell University) and Jack
Lucas (University of Calgary), in the Czech Republic by Ondrej Cisar
(Charles University Prague), in Denmark by Anne Rasmussen
(University of Copenhagen), in Germany by Christian Breunig
(University of Konstanz) and Stefanie Bailer (University of Basel),
in Israel by Lior Sheffer (Tel Aviv University) and Eran Amsalem
(Hebrew University of Jerusalem), in Luxembourg by Javier Olivera
(Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research), in the Neth-
erlands by Rens Vliegenthart (Wageningen University) and Marc
Van de Wardt (Free University of Amsterdam), in Norway by Yvette
Peters (University of Bergen), in Portugal by Miguel M. Pereira
(University of Southern California) and Jorge Fernandes
(University of Lisbon), in Sweden by Mikael Persson (University of
Gothenburg), and in Switzerland by Fréderic Varone (University of
Geneva) and Pirmin Bundi (University of Lausanne). Three country
Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
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another in being established Western democracies,
they are quite diverse in terms of electoral systems,
including majoritarian as well as proportional systems,
large and small district sizes, strong and weak party
systems, hybrid systems, and so on. These systemic
differences necessarily influence why and how voters
in those systems make their decisions. At a more
individual level, these 11 countries are also diverse in
terms of politicians’lived experiences: the role of polit-
ical parties in politicians’careers widely varies, as do
the lengths of their careers, the amount of turnover
expected at each election, the size and characteristics of
the constituencies they represent, the amount of staff
support they receive, the media and how they cover
politics and politicians, and so on. In the present article,
we focus primarily on describing and comparing politi-
cians’theories, with the institutional and other country-
level variation allowing us to check whether these
differences hold across contexts.
To study politicians’theories of elections and voting,
we draw on extensive face-to-face surveys collected from
982 elected national and regional politicians between
March 2022 and March 2023 (see Table 2)—an unprec-
edented dataset of elected political elites (Kertzer and
Renshon 2022). Moreover, our sample of participating
politicians is broadly representative of the full population
in terms of gender, seniority, and ideological position (for
more information on the sample, see Section 1 of the
Supplementary Material). While response rates vary
substantially across countries, the total number of com-
pleted surveys is exceptionally high for research with
active members of parliament. In most countries, all
national members of parliament were the target popula-
tion, and in federal countries like Belgium and Canada,
provincial or state parliamentarians were also asked to
participate. In Israel, Sweden, and Australia, an election
was called during the fieldwork period, and our target
population thus included politicians who were not
reelected as well as reelected and newly elected members
of parliament. Politicians were asked to participate by
local researchers, first via email and then, if contact
details were publicly available, also via telephone.
Concretely, a 30-minute Qualtrics-programmed sur-
vey was put to politicians by local researchers in each of
the participating countries. Politicians always com-
pleted the survey in the presence of a researcher—
who was either physically present or present in an
online meeting (see Section 1 of the Supplementary
Material for more information). This way, we ensured
that politicians themselves and not their staffers com-
pleted the questionnaire, and we could respond to
clarification questions as the politicians progressed
through the survey. Importantly, however, while the
interviews were conducted in face-to-face settings, pol-
iticians completed the survey portion of the interview,
which we use here, using identical questions and the
identical survey platform (Qualtrics) as citizens, and
researchers could not see politicians’responses as they
completed the survey.
8
Next, we fielded an online population survey in
March 2022 in each country to compare politicians’
theories of voting behavior and elections with those of
citizens. In collaboration with Dynata, around two
thousand citizens of voting age were targeted in each
country from existing online panels, with recruitment
quotas for age and gender (crossed), and education
level.
9
To adjust for remaining imbalances, we com-
puted post-estimation raking weights using age, gender,
education, and party choice in the most recent national
TABLE 2. Data Collection: Fieldwork Periods and Response Rates
Politician survey Public opinion survey
Fieldwork N(resp. %) Fieldwork N
Australia 11-22 - 03-23 58 (21%) 02-22 - 02-22 955
Belgium (Flanders) 02-22 - 08-22 215 (85%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,092
Canada 10-22 - 02-23 87 (12%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,107
Czechia 04-22 - 10-22 64 (32%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,098
Denmark 02-22 - 08-22 48 (27%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,123
Germany 05-22 - 03-23 178 (27%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,070
Israel 05-22 - 01-23 55 (32%) 02-22 - 05-22 1,355
Netherlands 05-22 - 09-22 38 (25%) 02-22 - 02-22 969
Portugal 07-22 - 02-23 70 (30%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,093
Sweden 10-22 - 02-23 67(19%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,108
Switzerland 05-22 - 12-22 103 (42%) 02-22 - 02-22 1,112
Total 982 12,082
teams (in Francophone Belgium, Norway, and Luxembourg) did not
include all eight questions tapping into voting theories in their survey.
Note, moreover, that each country team obtained approval from their
respective Research Ethics Boards to conduct the politician surveys.
Please see the Supplementary Material for detail on ethics approval
for each country.
8
This reduces concern that differences between politicians and
citizens might originate in the difference between monitored and
unmonitored survey completion. In Section 2.2 of the Supplementary
Material, we use pilot data from an earlier unmonitored politician
survey to further alleviate this concern.
9
For more information on Dynata’s panels and fieldwork approach,
see https://www.dynata.com.
Jack Lucas et al.
8
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election.
10
Due to the modular structure of the public
opinion survey, half of the respondents in the public
opinion survey were randomly assigned to complete our
questions on theories of elections and voting behavior;
hence, we have responses from about one thousand
citizens in each country (see Table 2).
11
In the question-
naire, citizens were shown the same eight statements on
elections and voting behavior and they too were asked
to indicate their position on each 11-point scale. The
phrasing for these questions was identical to the politi-
cian survey, and here, too, the item order was random-
ized.
POLITICIANS’THEORETICAL BELIEFS
We begin with Figure 1, which summarizes the distri-
bution of responses to our eight theoryquestions among
politicians (in purple) along with citizens (in green),
with pooled responses in panel A and country-specific
results in panel B. Several important results are imme-
diately visible. First, and most obviously, responses on
all of the theory questions vary—for all eight questions,
responses range widely across the available response
options. The theoretical items we have measured are
indeed debates, with a substantial proportion of respon-
dents on each side of every question.
A second important finding in Figure 1 is the simi-
larity of the citizen and politician distributions across
countries. In general, both the politician and citizen
distributions look quite similar within each question as
we scan from top to bottom in each column. This visual
pattern is strongly confirmed in statistical tests; in the
Supplementary Material, we show that in just two
cases (of twenty two) is more than 10% of the varia-
tion in theoretical positions explained by cross-
country rather than within-country variance.
12
Despite considerable institutional and political-
cultural variation across our case countries, the distri-
bution of theoretical beliefs among both politicians
and citizens is strikingly similar.
This cross-national similarity contrasts starkly with
the third and most important finding in Figure 1: clear
differences on most questions between the politician
and citizen distributions. In the first column (unfair
vs. fair blame), for example, the politicians’distribution
is shifted leftward and the citizens’distribution is
shifted rightward in all countries, suggesting that poli-
ticians tend to be more likely than citizens to see voters
as “blind”rather than “clear-eyed”when making ret-
rospective judgments about government performance.
Similarly, in the far-right column (short-term vs. long-
term focus), politicians once again skew left and citizens
skew right. In this case, it appears that politicians are
more likely than citizens to think voters focus on short-
term rather than long-term considerations.
To formalize this comparison, Figure 2 summarizes
estimates of expected differences between politicians
and citizens on each question. In the top panel, each
coefficient is drawn from a separate OLS model,
regressing survey responses for each item on a politi-
cian/citizen indicator variable along with country
fixed effects. In the figure’s remaining panels, we
provide country-specific coefficients. Full tables for
these models are available in the Supplementary
Material.
The coefficients in Figure 2 confirm that there are
substantively large differences between citizens’and
politicians’theories of elections and voting—differ-
ences that are generally consistent across countries.
In the top panel, the first two coefficients reveal that
politicians are more likely than citizens to think of
voters as leader-focused rather than ideas-focused
and to think of voters as egocentric rather than socio-
tropic. In both cases, the differences are substantively
important, approaching an expected within-country
difference of one point on a 0–10 scale. The smaller
panels illustrate that these findings are consistent in
direction in 10 of 11 countries for leadership vs. ideas
and in all 11 countries for sociotropic vs. egocentric
voting.
13
The next two coefficients in the top panel are not
statistically significant. Politicians are no more likely
than citizens to think of voters as identity oriented rather
than policy oriented, nor are politicians more likely than
citizens to think of voters asignorant rather than knowl-
edgeable. In both cases, the country-by-country break-
downs in the bottom panels indicate that these pooled
null findings are not merely the result of country-level
variation that is “canceled out”in a pooled model: the
policy vs. identity relationship is null in eight of eleven
countries and the knowledge vs. ignorance relationship
is null in seven of eleven countries. These null findings
are theoretically interesting because they suggest that
politicians do not simply take what we might think of as
more “cynical”theoretical positions than citizens across
the board. The null findings also help to confirm that
citizens are not more inclined than politicians to merely
provide socially desirable responses: if the citizen
responses were more contaminated by social desirabil-
ity, we would expect this to be especially visible in the
10
We cap weights at 5; in uncapped weights, fewer than 1.5% of
respondents receive weights above 5.
11
The other half were asked about how they themselves vote, pro-
viding strong experimental evidence (available in Section 3.1 of the
Supplementary Material) that citizens were able to at least partially
distance themselves from introspection, reflecting instead on how
voters in general behave.
12
The two exceptions are policy ideas vs. leaders among politicians,
for which 25% of the variance is explained by cross-country variation,
and policy vs. identity, for which 14% of the variance is explained by
cross-country variation, again among politicians. In a pooled model
containing both politicians and citizens, cross-country variation
explains a maximum of 6% of variance.
13
Two peculiarities of the Swiss political system might explain its
distinctiveness in the first theory question: first, a weak party system
at the national level (with strong local/cantonal chapters) and low-
profile party leaders (with the notable exception of the populist Swiss
People Party); second, frequent popular votes (due to direct democ-
racy) which make “votes (on specific policy issues)”probably more
important than “elections.”This also helps to explain the Swiss
findings on the knowledge vs. ignorance dimension.
Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
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FIGURE 1. Theory Questions: Distribution of Politician and Citizen Responses
Unfair (0) vs.
Fair (10)
Policy (0) vs.
Identity (10)
Future (0) vs.
Past (10)
Sociotropic (0) vs.
Egocentric (10)
Single−Issue (0) vs.
Many−Issue (10)
Ideas (0) vs.
Leaders (10)
Knowledge (0) vs.
Ignorance (10)
Short−term (0) vs.
Long−term (10)
Citizens Politicians
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
0%
10%
20%
30%
0%
10%
20%
30%
A. Pooled Data
Unfair (0) vs.
Fair (10)
Policy (0) vs.
Identity (10)
Future (0) vs.
Past (10)
Sociotropic (0) vs.
Egocentric (10)
Single−Issue (0) vs.
Many−Issue (10)
Ideas (0) vs.
Leaders (10)
Knowledge (0) vs.
Ignorance (10)
Short−term (0) vs.
Long−term (10)
Australia Belgium Canada Czechia Denmark Germany Israel Netherlands Portugal Sweden Switzerland
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
Citizens Politicians
B. Distributions by Country
Note: Summary of the distribution of citizen responses (in green) and politician responses (in purple) to eight questions about elections and
voting behavior. Pooled responses in panel A and country-specific responses in panel B. Columns are distinct questions (see Table 1 for full
wording), and rows in panel B are countries. Response options range from 0 to 10.
Jack Lucas et al.
10
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“knowledge vs. ignorance”question.
14
To be sure,
plenty of politicians and citizens believe that voters are
not especially knowledgeable in their voting decisions,
but this position is no stronger, on average, among
politicians than citizens. It is equally striking, in an
environment of strong elite polarization and debates
about “identity politics”in many democracies, that pol-
iticians are no more likely than citizens to think of voters
as motivated primarily by group identities rather than
policy commitments.
The remaining coefficients in the top panel of
Figure 2 are the questions for which politicians tend
to select lower values than citizens. For prospective and
retrospective voting, the difference is relatively modest
(about 0.5 points on the 10-point scale), with politicians
having a slightly higher overall tendency to hold
FIGURE 2. Differences between Politicians and Citizens
Single−Issue v. Many−Issue
Short−term v. Long−term
Unfair v. Fair
Future v. Past
Knowledge v. Ignorance
Policy v. Identity
Sociotropic v. Egocentric
Ideas v. Leaders
−1 0 1
Future v.
Past
Unfair v.
Fair
Short−Term v.
Long−Term
Single−issue v.
Many−issue
Ideas v.
Leaders
Sociotropic v.
Egocentric
Policy v.
Identity
Knowledge v.
Ignorance
−2 0 2 −2 0 2 −2 0 2 −2 0 2
Switzerland
Sweden
Portugal
Netherlands
Israel
Germany
Denmark
Czechia
Canada
Belgium
Australia
Switzerland
Sweden
Portugal
Netherlands
Israel
Germany
Denmark
Czechia
Canada
Belgium
Australia
Note: Summary of average difference between politicians and citizens for each item: black coefficients are statistically significant (p< 0.05),
gray coefficients are not. Top panel provides overall differences from models that include country fixed effects. Bottom panels provide
country-specific differences, by question. Full model tables are available in the Supplementary Material.
14
In general, we see little reason for citizens to be more susceptible
than politicians to social desirability bias in these responses: while
citizens may be tempted to select socially desirable responses because
the questions are about their fellow citizens, politicians may be
equally tempted to select socially desirable responses because the
questions are about the individuals who elected them to office. In any
case, the distributions in Figure 1 confirm that both politicians and
citizens are quite willing to express theoretical beliefs that reflect
poorly on voters. See also Section 3.1 of the Supplementary Material.
Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
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prospective theories. Notice, however, that this differ-
ence is statistically significant in just four countries. The
three remaining questions are much stronger and more
consistent: politicians are substantially more likely than
citizens to think that voters unfairly blame elected
representatives for events that are outside the govern-
ment’s control; more likely to think of voters as short
term rather than long term in their focus; and more
likely to think voters focus on single issues rather than
many issues when voting. In all three cases, these
differences are substantively large—well over one
point on the 0–10 scale—and, as the country-specific
breakdowns reveal, remarkably consistent in direction
and significance across countries.
Overall, then, we find that politicians differ quite
profoundly from citizens in their theoretical beliefs
about elections and voting behavior. These politician–
citizen differences are much more consistent in direc-
tion, statistical significance, and magnitude than the
cross-national differences. While theoretical beliefs
vary widely among both politicians and citizens—in
all eight cases, the theoretical debates we have identi-
fied are indeed debates, with many citizens and politi-
cians on both sides of each debate—we see remarkably
similar general tendencies across countries, despite
substantial differences in electoral institutions, party
systems, and political cultures.
FROM BELIEFS TO THEORIES: POLITICIANS’
THEORETICAL TYPES
At a glance, theoretical tendencies in Figure 1 and
Figure 2 appear to hang together in coherent bundles:
politicians tend to be more likely than citizens to think
of voters as leader oriented,egocentric, and oriented
toward short-term and single-issue considerations. Bor-
rowing from Achen and Bartels, we might say that
politicians appear to incline more strongly toward
“democratic realism,”whereas citizens incline toward
what we might call a “democratic optimist”theory of
elections and voting behavior. In other words, the
differences between politicians and citizens may be
differences not only in beliefs about specific theoretical
debates, but may also cohere into more differences in
deeper and more general theories of voting behavior.
To explore this possibility, we used a latent class
analysis (LCA) to organize politicians and citizens into
more general latent classes on the basis of their
responses to each of the eight theory questions
(Linzer and Lewis 2011). Our goal in this analysis was
to inductively identify the latent “theories”of elections
and voting beneath responses to the individual theory
items. We thus began by simplifying each question into
three categories: a position on one side of each theo-
retical debate (e.g., sociotropic voting), a position in the
exact center of the 0–10 response scale, and a position
on the other side of the theoretical debate (e.g., ego-
centric voting). We then used these simplified theoret-
ical positions in a LCA, fitting solutions ranging from
2 to 20 classes and recording class membership values
and fit statistics for each solution. We provide
additional detail on our class selection criteria and fit
statistics, as well as robustness tests using alternative
coding approaches and clustering solutions, in Sec-
tion 6.1 of the Supplementary Material.
Our analysis indicated that a four-class solution
struck an attractive balance between substantive inter-
pretability and statistical fit. We summarize this four-
class solution in Figure 3. In the top panels, we report
the proportion of citizens (left) and politicians (right)
who belong to each of the four classes. In the remaining
panels, we provide the full distribution of responses to
each question, organized by class membership. These
distributions allow us to interpret the results of the
LCA and help to justify the labels we have applied to
each of the four classes.
To interpret the distributions in the bottom of
Figure 3, notice the general tendency in responses
across the first row: based on the visible peaks in the
distributions, these respondents tend to think of voters
as fair in their retrospective assessments, policy ori-
ented, prospective, sociotropic, multiple-issue-
focused, interested in policy rather than political
leaders, knowledgeable, and oriented to the long
term. These respondents are democratic optimists,
expressing a confident view of voters as policy ori-
ented, knowledgeable, prospective decision makers.
More than a third of our citizen respondents belong to
this category, while far fewer politicians—just 16%—
belong to this latent class.
The second latent class contrasts starkly with the
first: individuals in this category tend to see voters as
unfair in their blame, identity oriented, retrospective,
egocentric, single-issue-focused, leader-driven, igno-
rant, and short-termist. These views largely correspond
to what Achen and Bartel’s describe as “democratic
realism,”where voters are seen as blindly retrospec-
tive, group oriented, and generally rather ignorant
about politics. Politicians are much more likely to be
democratic realists than democratic optimists—nearly
three quarters of the politicians in our sample (73%)
are democratic realists. Among non-elites, in contrast,
we see an even distribution across the democratic
optimist and democratic realist groups—about a third
belong to each class.
The two remaining classes in the LCA, while inter-
esting, are of less substantive importance. The third
class captures respondents who tend to choose the
middle value or very moderate values across the theory
questions. While these respondents do have views on
some questions, they are clearly uncertain in their
theoretical beliefs, and we therefore describe them as
the “undecided”theorists. This group is small, but by
no means insignificant, among both citizens (17%) and
politicians (10%).
Finally, a small but discernible fraction of citizens
appear to choose higher values (between 6 and 10)
across all eight issue items (11% of citizens, extremely
few politicians). These respondents may be especially
susceptible to acquiescence bias, choosing the second
theoretical position in each question, but the most
likely explanation is that these respondents are simply
inattentive and move through the questions too
Jack Lucas et al.
12
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
quickly.
15
We thus label this group “Inattentives.”
Notably, almost no politicians fall into this final class.
Taken together, the findings in Figure 3 indicate that
politicians and citizens have starkly different theories.
While citizens are quite evenly divided in their theories
between democratic optimists and democratic realists
(with the final third falling into the undecided or acqui-
escence camps), politicians are overwhelmingly demo-
cratic realist in their orientation. These differences are
substantively large and statistically significant in every
country in our study.
16
While these general politician–citizen differences are
consistent across countries, the proportion of politi-
cians who are democratic realists does vary. Figure 4,
which summarizes politicians’latent class membership
by country (focusing on the two most theoretically
important classes), confirms that a majority of politi-
cians are democratic realists in each country. However,
the figure also reveals striking variation across coun-
tries. In some countries, more than four in five politi-
cians are democratic realists (such as Czechia, Canada,
and Israel), whereas other countries have a substantial
minority of democratic optimists among elected repre-
sentatives (such as Switzerland, Australia, Sweden, and
Denmark).
FIGURE 3. Politician and Citizen Membership in Four Latent Theory Types
34%
11%
17%
38%
16%
1%
10%
73%
Citizens Politicians
Democratic
Optimism
Democratic
Realism
Undecided Inattentive Democratic
Optimism
Democratic
Realism
Undecided Inattentive
0%
25%
50%
75%
A. Class Membership, Citizens and Politicians
Unfair (0) vs.
Fair (10)
Policy (0) vs.
Identity (10)
Future (0) vs.
Past (10)
Sociotropic (0) vs.
Egocentric (10)
Single−Issue (0) vs.
Many−Issue (10)
Ideas (0) vs.
Leaders (10)
Knowledge (0) vs.
Ignorance (10)
Short−term (0) vs.
Long−term (10)
Democratic
Optimism
Democratic
Realism Undecided Inattentive
0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10
0
500
1000
1500
0
500
1000
1500
0
500
1000
1500
0
500
1000
1500
B. Distribution of Responses, by Class
Note: Summary of latent class analysis describing politicians’and citizens’membership in four latent theory types. Top panel summarizes
percentage of citizens (left) and politicians (right) belonging to each class. To aid in interpretation, bottom panels summarize the distribution
of responses to each theory question among members of each latent class.
15
Timing data confirm this interpretation; respondents in this group
spent statistically significantly less time answering the questions than
every other group (p< 0.01).
16
Multinomial logit and latent class regression models (Linzer and
Lewis 2011) confirm that politicians are significantly more likely than
citizens to be democratic realists overall and in each case country.
These models are available in the Supplementary Material.
Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
13
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
The patterns in Figure 4 are not intuitive, with insti-
tutionally and culturally similar countries (such as
Canada and Australia) at opposite ends of the spec-
trum and very different countries (such as Belgium and
Israel) closely resembling one another. However, the
results in Figure 4 are remarkably consistent, in that in
each of our 11 country cases, there is a clear majority of
politicians who we can identify as democratic realists.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This article has provided what is, to the best of our
knowledge, a first-ever analysis of politicians’theories
of voting behavior. Drawing on data from face-to-face
structured interviews with nearly one thousand politi-
cians, we found that elected politicians hold widely
varying views on central debates in elections and voting
but tend, on average, to think that voters are unfair in
their retrospective assessments of politicians’perfor-
mance, identity oriented rather than policy oriented,
retrospective, egocentric, single-issue-focused, leader
oriented, relatively uninformed, and oriented to the
short term. In each of the 11 countries we study, we
found that a majority of politicians belong to a latent
class that we call “democratic realism”—a thin, mini-
malist, relatively pessimistic view of voters’capacities.
Beyond these general findings, many particulars are
also notable. For instance, while politicians across our
11 countries tend to believe that voters place more
emphasis on the qualities of party leaders than on those
parties’principles, politicians do not differ from citizens
in their views about voters’orientation to identity
versus policy. This reflects a political elite that deviates
from ordinary citizens in their theories primarily in the
weight it gives to personalistic considerations. Politi-
cians may be motivated to adopt this view because it
makes their personal “brands”more consequential for
their own success or their party’s fortunes (and for
some politicians, such as those elected in single-
member districts, this may be a natural conclusion).
For others, however, it may be an expression of a
(potentially misguided) belief that voters have a strong
attachment to leaders, a phenomenon that is closely
associated with the weakening of party systems (Rahat
and Kenig 2018) and has more recently been argued to
be a facilitating factor in processes of democratic back-
sliding (Matovski 2021).
Politicians also differ strongly from citizens in their
beliefs about the prevalence of single-issue voters.
Some politicians may be motivated to adopt this belief
if they are themselves focused on a single major priority
as legislators, or if their party is a distinct issue-owner.
Whatever the individual motivations, politicians with
single-issue theories of voting may be more inclined to
develop (or perhaps more cautious about resisting)
single-issue and niche parties, including radical right
populist parties in Western democracy, who have
gained electorally from focusing on the single issue of
immigration (Dennison 2020; Mudde 1999).
More broadly, politicians’theories of voter demand
for single-issue focus, personalism, short-term policy,
or other representational behavior and policy outputs,
are important factors to consider when evaluating rep-
resentation gaps, elite political behavior, and concrete
policy outcomes in future research. That politicians’
views differ so strongly from those of citizens could also
have implications for existing theories of non-elite
political behavior, and in particular for models of vote
choice and policy responsiveness. Such models often
FIGURE 4. Politicians’LCA Types, by Country
60%78%82%83% 54%74%81% 76% 71% 59%67%
31%12%6%8% 28%16%12% 9% 8% 27%23%
Democratic
Optimism
Democratic
Realism
Czechia Canada Israel Belgium Netherlands Germany Portugal Switzerland Australia Sweden Denmark
0%
25%
50%
75%
100%
0%
25%
50%
75%
100%
Note: Breakdown of Democratic Realism and Democratic Optimism types by country.
Jack Lucas et al.
14
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
make similar assumptions on citizens and elites—for
example, that they are both myopic (e.g., in models of
the electoral business cycle) or are similarly interested/
disinterested in fulfilling policy goals (e.g., in models of
spatial voting). If politicians and voters have divergent
views, as we document here, then there is value in
reexamining these models and whether their predic-
tions hold in light of updated assumptions. We see this
as a priority for future work.
More generally, we hope that our findings will spark a
new interest in elite theories of politics and their con-
sequences. We see numerous opportunities to deepen
and clarify our findings. For example, while we found
that politicians are more likely than citizens to cluster
into a “democratic realist”theoretical perspective, the
results in Figure 1 also demonstrate that politicians are
quite variable in their theoretical beliefs. Future
research should explore this variation in more detail,
seeking to understand how politicians’individual char-
acteristics (their ideological positions, their personality
types, sociodemographic backgrounds, and leadership
positions) and career experiences (the parties into
which they were recruited, the length of their careers,
their electoral history) relate to their theoretical beliefs.
Related work could explore how these theories develop
throughout a politician’s career, along with the kinds of
experiences (e.g., electoral victory, electoral defeat,
prominent elections in other jurisdictions) that shape
this development. Going beyond individual politicians,
the cross-national differences we document (see
Figure 4) suggest that there is also promise in the
institutional and structural factors that affect how
elected officials in different polities develop their views.
Emerging methodological developments in LCA,
enabling computationally efficient multilevel LCA with
covariates (see Di Mari et al. 2023; Lyrvall et al. 2024),
offer a particularly promising path forward for explor-
ing heterogeneity in politicians’theories.
Future studies should also explore the implications of
politicians’theories for their behavior as representa-
tives. Evidence from past research suggests that politi-
cians’theoretical beliefs are importantly related to how
they think about public policy (Sheffer et al. 2023). This
work could be extended to studies of politicians’com-
munication strategies, policy prioritization, risk-taking
behavior, campaign tactics, and their cooperation with
other politicians. It could also be extended to important
behaviors among citizens, such as shifts in turnout
(Kostelka and Blais 2021) and citizens’more general
“participation repertoires”(Oser 2022). Much of this
work could be observational, connecting politicians’
survey responses to observed behavior. To enable
more precise causal inference, however, implicit theo-
ries could also be induced in experimental settings;
researchers in other disciplines have found that implicit
theories can be experimentally induced even in
instances when individuals hold strong beliefs, and
these experiments would be valuable for measuring
the consequences of politicians’theories for behavioral
tasks (Dweck 2012). Panel studies measuring how pol-
iticians’theories develop throughout their careers in
response to socialization and accumulated experience,
election outcomes, and changes to patterns of voting
behavior, will also help to clarify the causal mechanisms
that shape politicians’theories.
Finally, we see considerable potential for studies of
politicians’theories in other domains of politics. As we
noted earlier, we expect that all democratically elected
politicians possess quite well-developed theories of
voting behavior. But politicians may have other theo-
ries that are also consequential for their actions. For
instance, politicians’theories of the policy process—
how issues arise on the public agenda, how decision
makers allocate attention to problems, the role of the
public service, and so on—are also likely to be impor-
tant for politicians’engagement in the policy process
(Hall 1993; Stone 1989). Politicians’other theories—
ranging from implicit theories of the economy (Rubin
2003) to theories of the causes and consequences of
protest activity—are equally worthy of attention.
Understanding the “psychological worlds”that these
politicians inhabit will, we hope, ultimately clarify the
concrete worlds of political participation, representa-
tion, and public policy that their theories help to create.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
To view supplementary material for this article, please
visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Research documentation and data that support the
findings of this study are openly available at the Amer-
ican Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.
org/10.7910/DVN/QRAUDJ.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to Sophie Borwein, Love Christensen,
Joshua Kertzer, Daniel Rubenson, and audiences at the
2023 American Political Science Association Annual
Meeting, 2023 Nordic Workshop on Political Behavior,
2023 Toronto Political behavior Workshop, and Univer-
sity of British Columbia Department of Political Science
for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Data analysis: J.L., L.S.; Data collection: E.A., S.B., N.B.,
C.B., P.B., L.C., P.D., S.L., P.L., J.L., M.M.P., M.P., J.-B.
P., A.R., L.S., K.S., M.-B.S., F.V., S.W.; Funding and
project leadership: S.W.; Research design: P.L., J.L., L.S.,
S.W.; Writing: E.A., P.B., P.L., J.L., L.S., K.S., F.V.
FUNDING STATEMENT
This research was funded by a European Research
Council Advanced Grant (POLEVPOP, ID: 1010
18105). Support for the Danish data collection/research
Politicians’Theories of Voting Behavior
15
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001060 Published online by Cambridge University Press
was provided by the Danish Council for Independent
Research (DFF) (Project No. 0133-00034B). Research
in Germany was supported by Deutsche Forschungs-
gemeinschaft (DFG –German Research Foundation)
under Germany’s Excellence Strategy –EXC-2035/1 –
390681379. Research in Sweden was supported by
grants from the Swedish Research Council for Health,
Working Life and Welfare (Forte, grant no.
2017:00873) and the Swedish Research Council (VR,
grant no. 2017-03397).
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare no ethical issues or conflicts of
interest in this research.
ETHICAL STANDARDS
The authors declare the human subjects research in this
article was reviewed and approved by the University of
Calgary Research Ethics Board and certificate num-
bers are provided in the Supplementary Material. The
authors affirm that this article adheres to the principles
concerning research with human participants laid out in
APSA’s Principles and Guidance on Human Subject
Research (2020).
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