Electoral Behavior: From Classical Approaches to Cognitive Psychology

This course is organized around two broad questions. First, how do people form and express their political beliefs? Second, how do these beliefs influence their ballot choices? These questions will be discussed in turn, starting with a series of sessions on the origin and foundation of political attitudes followed by a series of session dealing with political behavior (turnout and electoral behavior). 

Elections are one of the most straightforward means with which people living in a democracy can bend government activity to their favor. Free, fair and frequent elections thus constitute the heart of representative democracy. In order to gain a full account of how “the public will” is transmitted to government and parliament, we must first comprehend what this “the public will” constitutes of and how it is formed. In particular, we need to know how people acquire political opinions, what influences they are subject to, and what their core values, beliefs, and preferences for public policy are. To do so we mostly rely on work in political psychology. In a next step, this course examines the role these political beliefs play in the decisions voters make, both in terms of whether or not they participate in elections, and what choice(s) they make in the voting booth.

As might be expected for questions as broad and complex as these, while there is much we currently know, many debates remain still open. The objective of this course is to weigh the latest available evidence - both descriptive and inferential - to arrive at the fullest possible understanding of the forces that shape contemporary mass politics. The focus is on the state-of-the art in research in political psychology and electoral behaviour and thus we will read mostly recent top journal articles that shape the current debates. Although many examples will come from the United States and Europe, we will aim to apply these different approaches to specific developments in Switzerland, and link them to Swiss current events, such as the upcoming popular votes.