Democracy rests on the idea that citizens can influence the politics of government through elections. The usual way in which this is thought to occur is that voters and candidates for office have positions on political issues and voters choose the candidate whose position is closest to their own. This theory is called the proximity model because liking for candidates is based on "closeness" on the issues. Two important assumptions of the proximity model are (1) that people have specific positions on issues and (2) that the positions on each issue can be arrayed along a continuum. For example, on the issue of defense spending, each person has an exact level of spending he or she most prefers. But is this how voters think and behave? Observers of politics have stressed that many people do not care greatly about issues and their views are often vague. If this is the case, then the traditional proximity model may not be appropriate for understanding the way in which issues influence electoral choice. According to the proximity model, for example, candidates should take positions near the average voter in their district and the candidate that comes closest to the average voter should win the election. Yet in the U.S. Congress many representatives are more extreme than their districts and have defeated opponents who were closer to the average voter. The proximity model cannot explain these outcomes. The researchers for this investigation have developed a different theory about the way in which issues influence feelings toward candidates. They argue that most issues are presented to the mass public with two alternatives - - should defense spending be reduced or not, should there be a death penalty or not, should there be new taxes or not. While other possible alternatives surely exist, two alternatives usually capture the political dialogue at any given time. More formally, in this model voters choose the candidate who advocates the direction on the issue that they prefer and presents it most effectively. This project will extend the investigator's research that they have done in the United States to multiparty systems. The theoretical component of the project will involve deriving mathematically the consequences of the directional model for the behavior of multiparty systems. The empirical component will center on analyzing electoral competition in Norway. The researchers selected Norway because it is a fairly typical multiparty system and because appropriate questions to test the two theories will appear on the 1989 Norwegian election survey. The entire cost of the survey will be borne by the Norwegian government. To date, theories of issue voting have focused almost exclusively on two-party political systems. This is a serious limitation because most of the democracies of the world are multiparty proportional representation systems. This research will enhance our understanding of how parties attempt to position themselves strategically and what this means for the nature of political competition in democracies.
