Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Voter behaviour
• Attitudes are the relatively stable and consistent views we hold about people
and objects. These are often defined as evaluations combining emotions, beliefs,
knowledge and thoughts about something.
• Opinions are the expressions of attitudes, sometimes seen as narrower, more
specific and more consciously held (as opposed to unconscious attitudes we
may have formed without deliberation) than attitudes. The idea that opinions
are separate from attitudes is not universal, though.
Do voters hold meaningful political opinions?
Political science research was deeply influenced by the behavioural revolution that
occurred during the mid-20th century. Changes in approaches to investigation
permitted researchers to measure citizens’ preferences and behaviours, raising
questions about the capacity of citizens and challenging some of the normative
assumptions of representative democracy. Whether voters are competent political
agents and can be considered rational actors began to be studied.
Besides social psychology, theories of voter behaviour and public opinion have
been heavily influenced by the discipline of economics. Rational choice theory
has been one of the most consequential of these theories. It is a set of normative
standards and empirical models used to understand human decision making. These
operate on the assumption that aggregate social behaviour is the result of
independent decisions made by individual rational actors. These decisions are
informed by a set of defined preferences from among the available alternatives.
Preferences are assumed to be complete and transitive. Individuals with
complete preferences can always say which of two alternatives they prefer or that
neither is preferred. Transitive preferences are always internally consistent in their
order of desirability. If option A is preferred over option B and option B is preferred
over option C, then A must always be preferred over C. When preference order is
both transitive and complete, it is commonly called a ‘rational preference relation’,
andthosewhocomplywithit‘rationalagents’.Inthisframework,therational
agent can take available information, probabilities of events and potential costs and
benefits into account when determining preferences and will act consistently in
selecting the alternatives that maximise their interests. 3
Anthony Downs’ An economic theory of democracy is one of the most influential
political science works published after the Second World War. 4 InaDownsianview
of electoral democracy, voters are rational utility maximisers. They support the
party with policies closest to their own preferences (which are generally expected
3 For a general discussion on rational choice, see Hindmoor 2006. For specific discussions on
rational choice theory as a framework for understanding politics, see McGann 2016 and
Dowding 2009.
4 Downs 1957.
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