Love and marriage in election times Inconsistency and types of floating voters
نویسندگان
چکیده
In the heat of an election campaign pollsters often warn us that nothing is sure yet: their poll results are only a snapshot and, more important, a large segment of the electorate has not made its mind up yet. The ballot will be decided, pollsters invariably say, by these undecided voters that tend to decide for which party to cast their vote in the very last moments before entering the polling booth. Apart from the fact that pollsters have every interest to state that the election game is not over yet – if not, who would care to devote attention to their next prediction the socalled floating voters are still poorly understood. There are different kinds of floating voters during an election campaign and the present approaches do not really grasp these nuanced differences. The central claim of this paper is that some voters who are usually considered to be completely volatile and floating are, in reality, less floating; at the same time, a considerable segment of the electorate is not considered as floating, yet they do float during the campaign. In other words: we contend that there are different types of floating voters during the campaign. The paper’s primary aim is to identify these types and to explain their behavior. The paper’s secondary aim is empirical: testing the classic theories about electoral volatility for the first time on Belgian campaign evidence, a country not really washed over with loads of campaign research.
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