Ideology and spatial voting in American elections /

The central feature of democracy is that the will of the people determines the policies enacted by the government. In representative democracies such as the United States, citizens influence the government primarily through voting in elections. The success of democratic governance, therefore, rests...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jessee, Stephen A., 1980-
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Subjects:

MARC

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245 1 0 |a Ideology and spatial voting in American elections /  |c Stephen A. Jessee. 
264 1 |a Cambridge ;  |a New York :  |b Cambridge University Press,  |c 2012. 
300 |a xiii, 242 pages :  |b illustrations ;  |c 24 cm. 
336 |a text  |b txt  |2 rdacontent 
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504 |a Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-229) and index. 
505 0 |a 1. Introduction -- 2. Ideology -- 3. Measuring ideology -- 4. Linking theory and empirics: testing spatial voting theory -- 5. Partisanship vs. proximity -- 6. Political information and vote choice -- 7. The political perceptions of citizens -- 8. Conclusion. 
520 |a The central feature of democracy is that the will of the people determines the policies enacted by the government. In representative democracies such as the United States, citizens influence the government primarily through voting in elections. The success of democratic governance, therefore, rests in large part on the ability of citizens to select leaders who will act in accordance with their policy preferences. In the end, a government lives up to this democratic ideal (or doesn't) through the enactment of specific policies. How, then, do citizens' votes relate to their preferences over government policy outputs? What intervening factors either assist or interfere with voters' selection of candidates who espouse views closest to their own? Understanding the relationship between citizens' policy views and their voting behavior is central to the evaluation of elections and of democratic governance more generally. This book studies the opinions of ordinary citizens on specific policies and the relationships between these policy views and people's vote choices in presidential elections. Specifically, I focus on testing the empirical implications of spatial theories of voting, which, in their simplest form, assume that each citizen's policy views can be represented by a location on some liberal-conservative policy spectrum, with candidates in a given election each taking a position on this same dimension. Each voter then casts his or her ballot for the candidate whose position is closest to the voter's own ideological location. 
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