Do you already know who you will vote for on Thursday? Or are you one of the late-deciders, making your choice in the moment you see the ballot paper? No matter what voting type you are, you will probably be convinced that the decision you make is your own, and only influenced by your political views and personal principles.
But it turns out that view is rather naive. In fact, your choice of political party is also influenced by a set of external factors. How much influence those factors have on one individual is hard to predict. But if you take a broader look at the society, you can find a whole set of variables other than a voters’ own political orientation, which will affect the result of an election.
The influence of your friends
The impact of our friends and the conversations we have with them, is one of the main factors which influence the way people vote.
In ‘The people’s choice’, one of the pioneer studies about political communication, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues analysed how people made their voting decision for the 1940s presidential election in the USA. Researchers took seven monthly surveys between May and November 1940 with a representative sample from the population in Erie County, Ohio. Due to the focus on a local target group, the researchers were also able to factor in the local political situation and campaigns, into their analysis.They found that the biggest influence on voting decisions was the discussions voters had with their friends and families. Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers classified the voters into two groups: ‘Opinion-Leaders’ and ‘Opinion-Followers’. Both groups had the same socioeconomic background, but what told them apart was a higher interest in the election and in the media coverage by the opinion leaders.
Additionally, the opinion leaders also had a grounded knowledge on the political issues and were often equipped with a kind of formal authority towards their opinion followers.
Based on this, Lazarsfeld drafted his concept of the ‘Two-Step-Flow’: ‘Ideas often flow from radio and print to the opinion-leaders and from them to the less active sections of the population.’
This basically means, that if you belong to the roughly 80 per cent of opinion followers, then your choice is born out from information filtered by your opinion leader(s), not the news, media or other sources.
Of course ‘The people’s choice” is quite an old study, but it was the starting point for a whole new branch in political research focusing on the individual voters. Its findings are still being confirmed in more up-to-date publications: if you talk about politics with other people, their opinion is very likely to have some effect on you, although this doesn’t mean, that you definitely change your voting decision.
Media and horse racing
Today, most of the information you get about a candidate or party will come from the media – either by watching or reading it yourself, or by re-telling from your friends. Only very few people go to a question and answer session with their candidate or visit another election campaign event to get the information they want in a direct way. If you want to get controversial or critical views on the issue, the media will be your main source.
One trend in political journalism, which is believed to be particularly influential on the voter, is so-called horse race journalism. This term describes the kind of coverage, where the build up to the elections is no longer presented as a competition of political ideas and concepts, but as a race between two (or more) candidates. The crucial aspects in this form of political journalism are opinion surveys, which mostly only contain the ‘who would you vote for’ question.
In a study analysing the media coverage during the 2001 British general election campaign, scientists from Cardiff University revealed that horse race journalism tended to be the main reason opinions polls were used in the media. At the same time, surveys on particular topics and the public opinion about specific issues relevant for the election were not included in the coverage.
This trend might seem trivial at first glance, but it contains a worrying tendency: the public opinion becomes less and less important in the public debate, and all that matters is which candidate will get the most votes. And if you consider that politicians also use the media as an important source, not only to judge the success of their campaigns, but also about the public acceptance of their policies, the risks of this form of coverage become even more evident.
Supporting the winner or helping the underdog?
But how does horse race journalism influence the peoples voting behaviour? One phenomenon that was first identified in the US, the so-called bandwagon effect, describes people’s tendencies to vote for someone who is about to win, even if this contradicts their own political views. The reason why people behave like this is because they want to be on the winner’s side after the election, and not belong to the loser’s. In the United States, this effect is of particular importance because of the different time zones the voting takes place in - the first count results from the East Coast could influence how a person votes on the West Coast.
So with the growing trend of horse race journalism, there is a chance that this will affect British voters in their decisions. If a candidate is leading in the polls, making them a ‘clear winner’ even before the election in conjunction with people not wanting to stand on the loser’s side may influence which ballot box someone ticks.
The bandwagon effect can even occur when there are no surveys on a candidate, and so no one is able to tell the winner beforehand. Even if you just think that the majority holds a different opinion than you do, this can influence your voting decision – no matter whether it is the true majority opinion or not. This can be the result of the spiral of silence, an effect, in which a person is less likely to express their opinion if they feel that they are in the minority. The important point of this theory is, that it applies only for the perceived public opinion, not for the real one. So if, for example, everyone you talk to dislikes the candidate you intend to vote for, the so called ‘fear of isolation’ can make you express a different opinion to the one you actually hold.
Conversely, the underdog effect, makes people give their vote to the candidate who only seems to be supported by a minority. Whether a person is most influenced by the bandwagon or underdog effect is difficult, if not impossible to predict, and depends on a whole set of variables like the political situation and the candidates’ personalities.
So what does all this eventually mean for your very own voting decision on Thursday? Well, as outlined above, media and your acquaintances can have an impact on your voting decision – they don’t necessary have to. But would you even notice if you had been influenced? Would it really matter if you had been – after all, isn’t decision making all about finding your way through the maze of influencing factors?
Or is it all down to your biology?
Even if you know about these influences and are aware of them, this doesn’t provide any ‘protection’ from them. Two studies published in the journals Current Biology and the American Political Science Review have tried to find the reasons for our political views not in our social environment or our upbringing, but in our bodies. In the first paper, scientists from University College London showed that political liberalism and conservatism is correlated with the structure of our brain. Liberalism could be linked to a part of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex, whereas conservatism correlated with an increase in the size of the right amygdala. It would be premature to conclude that political views were the result of our brain structure, but this study does show an association between the two. However, this association does not necessarily imply that the difference in brain structure is also the cause. We simply cannot tell what was there first: our political view, which then influenced the structure of our brain, or vice versa.
The second study went even further and tried to investigate if political orientations can be genetically transmitted. By comparing the political views of twins in the United States and Australia, researchers found that genetics seem to influence the political attitude and ideologies of a person, but have a much smaller influence on the party identification of the twins. Party identification describes an affective, long term relationship to a political party. With a strong party identification, you are much more likely to vote for this specific party, even if you disagree with it on certain positions. Therefore, the party identification is a very influential factor in your voting decision. In the twin study, the party identification of the twins was mainly influenced by their environment, so the influence of genetics on our voting decisions seem to be rather small.
Nevertheless, these findings could be an important first step towards a whole new form of political and election research, linking biology and medicine with social scientific methods. Maybe one day, we’ll not vote with pen and paper, but with a brain scan or DNA sample? Who knows. But until then, stay focused on the important questions: Which candidate do you trust the most to tackle the upcoming difficulties in your constituency? Or which voting system do you prefer – alternative vote (AV) or first past the post (FPTP)?
McClung Lee, A. (1949). LAZARSFELD, PAUL F., BERNARD BERELSON, and HAZEL GAUDET. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. (Second edition.) Pp. xxxiii, 178. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. $2.75 The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261 (1), 194-194 DOI: 10.1177/000271624926100137
Brookes, R., Lewis, J., & Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2004). The Media Representation of Public Opinion: British Television News Coverage of the 2001 General Election Media, Culture & Society, 26 (1), 63-80 DOI: 10.1177/0163443704039493
Nadeau, R., Cloutier, E., & Guay, J. (1993). New Evidence About the Existence of a Bandwagon Effect in the Opinion Formation Process International Political Science Review, 14 (2), 203-213 DOI: 10.1177/019251219301400204
Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017
ALFORD, J., FUNK, C., & HIBBING, J. (2005). Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99 (02) DOI: 10.1017/S0003055405051579
Ballot box picture by Rama via WikiMedia Commons and polling station picture by picture by Andrew Dunn, via WikiMedia Commons.
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