Politics have been offloaded to: Diggeracity. The following remains because it’s about social psychology.
Elections interest me mostly because they’re where the rubbery cognitive complexities hit the pavement. Voter behavior is intriguing. There are no competing social actions at the scale of elections. One way or the other everybody’s individual world view, meaning scheme, folk psychology, folk sociology, personal philosophy, idiosyncratic heuristics, and their version of rationality and/or emotionality are, for a moment, extruded from the sensibility so as to converge on a mark or a touch of the screen.
What are the various reasons voters vote the way they do?
It is a fascinating subject because there are so many different kinds of answers reported to researchers. Anybody who thinks there is a general class of answers into which fall the reports of a rational calculation of policy factors and conclusions, and that this class predominates in voter decision making, would be wrong. It’s much much more complicated and, at times, counter-intuitive than the reduction to a rational calculation of interest could encompass.
One of the consequences of this is that the variety of decision making regimes cannot generally be framed by the most common folk sociological scheme, ideology. This is to say the decision making rarely conforms to the instrumental propositions given by an ideological scheme. Most people are more pragmatic than ideological schemes warrant. (For example, most people haven’t thought about whether they are optimistic or pessimistic abut human nature. Or:they haven’t thought about whether knowing their right place in a natural order is important.) So, their decision making isn’t usually a case of referring to what an idealized conservative or liberal does or would do.
This is commonsense. Vote deciding is context-sensitive and deciders will be ‘plastic,’ flexible, oft able to diverge away from inflexible assumptions and converge upon the assumptions which fund their self-interest. This self-interest might only implicate the sense, for example, that the favored candidate is the ‘one I’d like to share a beer with.’ This same voter might report to a researcher, “I’m a Republican.” He or she might elaborate a rationale for voting for the Republican, this rationale might fit well with an ideological scheme, but, if the actual reason was a hunch about sharing a beer, it’s easy to see both the null role of ideology, and, the research challenge the eliciting of after-the-fact reasons supposes.
Whereas some people employ a lot of (their) cognitive complexity to decide, others do not. (Each of us carries different toolboxes, so-to-speak.) Yet, at the same time, ideological schemes exist in a “pre-psychological” domain in modern cognitive terms, so, their categorical and classification and constructive schemes do not correlate with actual cognitive constructive schemes, schemes which are instrumental and behavioral; behavioral in the general sense: having to do with an intentional act. Ideological schemes over-generalize and their implicit generalizations do not match with behavioral schemes. Well, they weren’t intended to, but, constantly, we are subject to the false assumption that holds they are one in the same, that ideology is, constructively, found at the core of decision making.
Voters are largely pragmatists and most aren’t concerned with what is either ideologically ‘true’ or subjectively ‘true’ for someone else.
