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Voting and the Social Environment

Princeton University

This article develops a model of voting. A central tenet of this piece is that voting is a simple decision for most voters, and thus should be modeled simply. Working within the Kelley (1983) framework, I argue that to improve existing explanations of voting, we need to take account of the voter's social environment, that is, the views of friends and family. This new model better captures the process through which the voter decides and increases the explanatory power of the Kelley model. My model predicts 90.9% of the votes correctly—a 6.4% increase over the Kelley approach. The Center for Political Studies (CPS), however, only asked the appropriate questions in 1952. The lack of data shows the failure of students of voting to include the immediate social environment in their models.

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