Issue voting as a constrained choice problem

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12342

Prevalent models of issue voting view vote choice as a choice among party policies. Choice sets are implicitly assumed to be the same for all voters, and their composition is left to researchers’ discretion. This article aims to relax such assumptions by presenting a model with a varying probability of inclusion in the choice set. We apply the “constrained choice conditional logistic regression” to survey data from the 1989 parliamentary election in Norway to examine the effects of party identification of voters and electoral viability and policy extremity of parties on individual voters’ choice set compositions. Further, we look into the effect of parties’ policy positions on their electoral fates under alternative assumptions about the composition of voters’ choice sets. We find that voters’ choice set composition conditions both the effects of their policy considerations on vote choice and those of parties’ policy offerings on their electoral fates.