CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Dragusin, Ionut |
|---|---|
| Title | Being Part of the Club: A Synthesis Essay on Voter Turnout and Expressive Behavior |
| Summary | Expressive voting has been proposed as a solution towards resolving the paradox of voting. Often, it has been described by pitting it against an instrumentalist, consequence-oriented voting behavior. Yet, this does not fully answer what expressive behavior is. Rather, it shows what it isn’t. In my thesis, I have attempted to show that non-consequentialist voting behavior is linked to the individual perception of a group’s opinion homogeneity or its heterogeneity. To this end, I attempt to measure voter turnout by measuring between-group heterogeneity and homogeneity. To do this, I draw from survey data collected from a survey study on the 2016 Romanian parliamentary election. Using this body of data, I operationalize opinion homogeneity and heterogeneity as distances between expressed opinions on the similarity and dissimilarity of competing political parties in the 2016 parliamentary elections. In order to measure these similarities or dissimilarities between parties, I employ the method of multidimensional scaling through Euclidean distances. This is not an exhaustive study, but rather a proposed roadmap towards future studies on expressive behavior. Finally, I find that the survey instrument works well in conjunction with the method of multidimensional scaling. However, limitations remain in pinpointing the exact nature of expressive behavior and, consequently, developing effective hypotheses is still a problem. In this regard, though much work has gone into the examination of the theoretical concept of expressive voting, work still needs to be done in unifying different strands of interpretation of expressive behavior. |
| Supervisor | Toka Gabor |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/dragusin_ionut.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University