Do Voters Vote Ideologically?, Third Version

Arianna Degan and Antonio Merlo

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: In this paper we address the following question: To what extent is the hypothesis that voters vote “ideologically†(i.e., they always vote for the candidate who is ideologically “closest†to them) testable or falsifiable? We show that using data only on how individuals vote in a single election, the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is irrefutable, regardless of the number of candidates competing in the election. On the other hand, using data on how the same individuals vote in multiple elections, the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is potentially falsifiable, and we provide general conditions under which the hypothesis can be tested.

Keywords: voting; spatial models; falsifiability; testing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C63 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2007-01-01, Revised 2008-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/file ... ng-papers/08-034.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pen:papers:08-034

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Administrator ().