place; simply treating partisanship as if it has a separate effect on voting does not capture or account for this aspect.
The findings have not been satisfactorily adapted to the theoretical specification of spatial voting. One exception sticks out. In their article “Endogenous Preferences and the Study of Institutions”, (Gerber and Jackson, 1993) provide a conceptualization of preference that allows party position-taking to affect citizens’ beliefs and thereby their political choice(see also Jackson, 2014). They contest that voters’ preferences are endogenous to party position-taking, in that “voters perceive party positions and hear the debate surrounding the adoption of those positions and alter their own political attitudes in response” (Gerber and Jackson, 1993, p.639). Gerber and Jackson build their theoretical model on a notion of voters’ preference in terms of beliefs. This covers the ideas developed in the above section, in which citizens are uncertain about their ideal policy platform, because “people do not know how much they will like an outcome if and when it does occur” (Gerber and Jackson, 1993, p.640). Parties can provide guidance and shape beliefs about how political platforms best represent a voter’s interests.
I claim that persuasion is one mechanism how citizens’ policy beliefs can be shaped by party positions. Parties not only announce their positions, but also attempt to persuade voters to follow their lead. As individuals’ preferences rest on beliefs about how much better a certain political platform will be for them, party positions provide cues and can make policy preference endogenous to these positions.
2.5 Summary
In this chapter, I brought together research that contrasts with the spatial voting depiction of preferences. Conceptualizations in the literature share a common ground in understanding preference in terms of beliefs. What I refer to as ‘policy beliefs’
depicts an individual’s uncertainty whether the implementation of a certain policy platform will be more beneficial to that citizen personally. I showed that representing a citizen’s policy preference in terms of beliefs allows for an inconsistent, persuadable and endogenous preference.
• Inconsistent: Models of mass belief systems presume that the general public adopt ideological dimensions to a varying degree, when structuring their policy opinions. Policy beliefs can incorporate this idea by introducing different variance in beliefs about a citizen’s ideal platform. Some people are more certain that a specific policy platform represents their ideal political outcome, when compared to others.
• Persuadable: Through the ongoing evaluation of political arguments, citizens can form reliable opinions about political issues. In this view, citizens’ policy preferences are persuadable, because the deliberate use of arguments can make them change their standing opinions. Policy beliefs allow us to portray this idea, as evaluating political arguments can alter the belief that a specific platform is actually in a citizen’s best interest.
• Endogenous: Parties not only aim to inform citizens about their positions, but furthermore, they attempt to shape citizens’ opinions in their direction. If a
certain share of citizens has a predisposition to adjust their policy beliefs in line with party cues, these citizens’ preferences are endogenous to the party’s position-taking.
The next chapter discusses adaptive utility theory as a modeling approach, showing how policy beliefs as a depiction of preference can be integrated into a general spatial voting theory.
2.5. SUMMARY
An adaptive utility theory for spatial voting
3.1 Introduction
For the overall picture of electoral representation, it is crucial to know whether voting decisions are affected by a wider definition of policy preference. In attempting to comprehend the democratic representation of eligible citizens, theories focus on the connection between these citizens’ view-points and the electoral decisions they make.
Do voters elect candidates whose platforms coincide with their own view-points?
Spatial voting theory addresses this question. Central to it, is the idea that citizens form their opinions in terms of underlying ideological platforms and elect candidates who make corresponding offers. The proceeding chapter revealed that most spatial voting theories build on a narrow depiction of citizens’ policy preferences, which precludes the study of aspects that other approaches in the literature deem important for the electoral process.
In this dissertation, I offer a comprehensive extension to spatial voting that allows the study of a wider definition of policy preference. The proceeding chapter stressed that policy beliefs permit us to present exactly such a wider definition. In order to integrate policy beliefs into a spatial voting context, in this chapter I model them in an adaptive utility framework. This perspective ‘allows’ citizens to be uncertain about their ideal-policy platform. The standard utility specification of a spatial proximity voting model is also embedded in this perspective. If all citizens know exactly what platform constitutes their ideal outcome, the adaptive utility perspective approximates the classic spatial voting model. I discuss how the adaptive utility model can be extended to integrate policy beliefs and thereby citizens’ uncertainty about their own ideal platform.
Furthermore, this chapter outlines how the adaptive utility model can be used to study preferences that are inconsistent, persuadable and endogenous. This highlights that in this policy belief model, researchers are able to study aspects about policy views that a classic perspective did not permit.