Puzzle 0. Journalists have introduced the term "swing voters". (a) Can we make this notion rigorous? Who is a swing voter? Assuming this notion is well-defined, we have follow up queries: (b) Can we "model" swing voters (in some sense)? Is there some "psychological profile" for "swing voters"? (c) What correlates with the number of swing voters in a state?
William Mayer, in his book The Swing Voter in American Politics (2008, pg 2), describes a "swing voter" as a voter who is persuadable:
In simple terms, a swing voter is, as the name implies, a voter who could go either way: a voter who is not solidly committed to one candidate or the other as to make all the efforts at persuasion futile†As indicated in the text, among media articles that do provide an explicit definition of the swing voter, this is the most common approach. See, for example, Joseph Perkins, "Which candidate Can Get Things Done?" San Diego Union-Tribune, October 20, 2000, p. B-11; Saeed Ahmed, "Quick Hits from the Trail," Atlanta Constitution, October 26, 2000, p. 14A; and "Power of the Undecideds," New York Times, November 5, 2000, sec. IV, p. 14.. If some voters are firm, clear, dependable supporters of one candidate or the other, swing voters are the opposite: those whose final allegiance is in some doubt all the way up until Election Day. Put another way, swing voters are ambivalent or, to use a term with a somewhat better political science lineage, cross-pressured.‡Though it never employed the term “swing voter,” one antecedent to the analysis in this chapter is the discussion in most of the great early voting studies of social and attitudinal cross-pressures within the electorate. See, in particular, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet [The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign] (1948,pp. 56–64); Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee [Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign] (1954, pp. 128–32); Campbell, Gurin, and Miller [The Voter Decides] (1954, pp. 157–64); and Campbell and others [The American Voter] (1960, pp. 78–88). There was, however, never any agreement as to how to operationalize this concept (Lazarsfeld and his collaborators tended to look at demographic characteristics; the Michigan school used attitudinal data); and almost the only empirical finding of this work was that cross-pressured voters tended to be late deciders. For reasons that are not immediately clear, more recent voting studies have almost entirely ignored the concept. The term appears nowhere in Nie, Verba, and Petrocik [The Changing American Voter] (1976); Fiorina [Retrospective Voting in American National Elections] (1981); or Miller and Shanks [The New American Voter] (1996). Rather than seeing one party as the embodiment of all virtue and the other as the quintessence of vice, swing voters are pulled—or repulsed—in both directions.
The American National Election Studies have surveyed voters in every presidential election since 1972. We can use their so-called "feeling thermometer questions", which gives a value between 0 to 100 for each candidate. Mayer constructs a new statistic by taking the Republican's "feeling thermometer value" and subtract the Democrat's "feeling thermometer value". The voters around 0 degrees, Mayer suggests, are the swing voters.
Since Mayer's book was published, we have acquired more data about swing voters using ad-tracking technology. Quartz's Ashley Rodriguez reviewed findings for 2016 swing voters. While the minute details of these studies are fascinating, if true, they don't tell us any correlated "macro-statistics" correlated with "swing-iness".
After the 2018 midterm elections, Vox's Matthew Yglesias argues swing voters still exist, but his argument is uncompelling circumstantial evidence. There are voters who cast their 2012 vote for Obama yet 2016 vote for Trump (and similarly those who voted for Romney in 2012 and Clinton in 2016), but this data alone is insufficient to prove all such voters are "swing voters". We need more to establish such voters are "swingers".
Palfrey and Poole (1987) have shown low information voters tend to constitute the majority of swing voters, as Mayer has thus defined it.
Puzzle 1. Can we reproduce Palfrey and Poole's results? Has there been more modern work confirming this?
Here's the unintuitive thing: if we control for partisans masquerading as "independents", as Gelman et al. (2014) have done, then swing voters in 2012 are sample artifacts
whose effects are quite small
. Dr Gelman wrote a piece in the Washington Post explaining his findings, in simpler terms.
Puzzle 2. How does Gelman, et al., hold in light of Palfrey and Poole? Are uninformed voters no longer "swingable"? Or have uninformed voters vanished (or, at least, no longer vote)?
Happily, Mayer has a resolution for this puzzle. It's well-known (since at least Keith's work 1992, building upon many others's works from the '80s) that self-proclaimed "independents" are "hidden partisans". Indeed, using "political independent" as synonymous with "swing voter" is a Bad Idea.
The "undecided voter" is a much closer concept to a "swing voter". Although conceptually similar, it is harder to gauge if a voter is really "undecided" or not. It turns out people eagerly claim to be "undecided", more than matches reality.
Voter Model
There are a variety of voter models we could consider. I'm going to summarize the models as presented in R. Douglas Arnold's The Logic of Congressional Action, and they're really quite simply decision rules.
Party Performance Rule. A voter asks themselves, "Are things better off than they were at the last election? Which party is 'in charge' [of the White House]?" If things are deteriorating, the voter will cast their vote against the President's party. If conditions are improving, the voter will cast their vote supporting the President's party.
Incumbent Performance Rule. Voters, Douglas describe, first evaluate current conditions in society, decide how acceptable those conditions are, and then either reward or punish incumbent legislators for actions that they think contributed to the current state of affairs.
(pg. 44) Although very similar to the party performance rule, the difference lies in who is held responsible: the members of the President's party, or the legislators themselves.
Party Position Rule. A citizen first identifies the party offering the most pleasant package of policy positions, then votes for candidates belonging to that party.
Candidate Position Rule. A citizen first identifies the candidate offering the most pleasant package of policy positions, then votes for that candidate.
So...which rule is it? Arnold suggests, arguably, a fifth decision rule which resembles aspects of all these rules. Basically, a voter keeps four "accounts" (integers) in his brain, one for each party, another for the incumbent, and the fourth for the challenger. These values may be positive or negative.
The two accounts for the parties is given some initial values during childhood. As the voter acquires information about the parties achievements in office, the voter updates their "accounts" for the parties using something like the party position and party performance rules.
When the voter learns about the incumbent, our voter opens up a third account for that incumbent. As our voter learns about the incumbent's positions and accomplishments, the voter updates the incumbent's accounts using some amalgam of candidate position and candidate performance rules. Ancillary information (like extramarital affairs, hiking the Appalachian trail, etc.) nudge the account, one way or another.
Finally, a challenger appears, and the voter opens up a fourth account for that challenger. The value assigned to this fourth account is a variant of the candidate position rule, combined with extra-information adjustments. (Is the challenger's party responsible for a disastrous war? Did the economy collapse? Etc.)
On election day, the intrepid voter goes to the polls, combines these four values, then decides how to vote. The simplest model adds the four values together, then if the sum is positive votes for the incumbent (otherwise, the voter sides with the challenger).
How well does this "Impression-driven" model work? There's evidence this model is something along the lines of how people actually decide to vote, but that's a contentious point among academics. I will side-step arguments, and just note that cognitive heuristics probably account for most (all?) of the decision-making process, and some variant of this "impression-driven" model probably works "good enough".
Remark. I suspect something like a moving average formula is used to update these accounts. Doubtless there are countless variants of this model, depending on what formulas we want to use.
How do Swing Voters fit in this Model?
It seems there are multiple narratives one could generate to produce a swing voter. But the only ones which I can think of produce voters whose "accounts" are all "near zero" around election time.
There are some genuine "party switchers", like Reagan-Democrats or Obama-Trump voters. These voters seem to be dissatisfied with the Democratic party and/or their candidate, and update their "accounts" accordingly. This "swing" is a re-evaluation of party performance, or candidate performance, rather than "Starting uninformed and scrambling to form an opinion."
Swing voters seem to have their accounts return to "near zero" after the election, paying little attention to politics. Empirically, it is hard to find covariates correlating with this quality. Mayer's book discusses this in greater detail.
References
Swing Voters
- Gary Cox, "Swing voters, core voters, and distributive politics". In Political Representation (edited by Ian Shapiro, Susan C. Stokes, Elisabeth Jean Wood, Alexander S. Kirshner), Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp.342–357. Eprint.
- Timothy J. Feddersen, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, "The Swing Voter's Curse". The American Economic Review 86, no. 3 (1996) pp. 408–424. Provides a decision-theoretic model for voters abstaining from voting.
- Andrew Gelman, Sharad Goel, Douglas Rivers,,and David Rothschild, The Mythical Swing Voter. (2014)
- S. Kelley, Interpreting Elections. Princeton University Press, 1983.
- William G. Mayer (ed.), The Swing Voter in American Politics. Brookings Institute Press, 2008. See esp. ch 1
- Thomas R. Palfrey, Keith T. Poole, "The Relationship between Information, Ideology, and Voting Behavior". American Journal of Political Science 31, no. 3 (1987) pp. 511–530.
- Ashley Rodriguez, Undecided voters are as scared as the rest of us, and other insights from a trove of data on swing voters, Quartz, October 8, 2016.
- Nate Silver, The Invisible Undecided Voter, FiveThirtyEight, Jan. 23, 2017.
- Matthew Yglesias, Swing voters are extremely real, Vox, July 23, 2018.
Voter Model
- R. Douglas Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action. Yale University Press, 1990. See chapter 3.
- Richard Lau and David Redlawsk, "Advantages and disadvantages of cognitive heuristics in political decision making". American Journal of Political Science 45, No. 4 (2001): 951–971.
- Milton Lodge, Kathleen M. McGraw, Patrick Stroh, "An Impression-Driven Model of Candidate Evaluation". The American Political Science Review 83, No. 2 (1989), pp. 399–419.
- Milton Lodge, Marco R. Steenbergen, Shawn Brau, "The Responsive Voter: Campaign Information and the Dynamics of Candidate Evaluation". The American Political Science Review 89, No. 2. (1995), pp. 309–326.
Addendum (). FiveThirtyEight had published an article rehashing much the same, but skims on the references.
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