The Prediction and Explanation of Actual Voting Behavior in a Presidential Primary Election
Newman, Bruce Ira
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/70436
Description
Title
The Prediction and Explanation of Actual Voting Behavior in a Presidential Primary Election
Author(s)
Newman, Bruce Ira
Issue Date
1981
Department of Study
Business Administration
Discipline
Business Administration
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Business Administration, General
Abstract
Voting behavior has been studied from several different perspectives. Initially, voting behavior was predicted by asking respondents who they intended on voting for. Sociologists added on to prediction by using social characteristics of voters to explain their behavior. Political scientists added party affiliation along with other political characteristics of voters to explain their behavior. Social psychologists went beyond the prediction and explanation of voting behavior by surveying voters' beliefs and allowing for the control of them. Finally, consumer behaviorists have added an additional ability to control voting behavior by surveying their needs.
It is the intent of this dissertation to empirically test each of the above mentioned approaches to the study of voting behavior and present and test a model of voter choice behavior with the purpose of having more control power, a more thorough explanation and a better prediction rate of actual voting behavior than what is in the literature on this topic to date. Stepwise discriminant analysis and a classification procedure are used to carry the empirical tests.
It was found that the more naive approaches of the sociologists and political scientists did not predict or explain as well as the more realistic approaches of the social psychologists and consumer behaviorists, both of whom had very similar results. The model of voter choice behavior did as well as the more realistic approaches, with implications that are meaningful to researchers, policymakers, and candidates.
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