You may have to explain what you mean by the concept of behaviour in the context of elections. 

Dear Aminu,

I would like to elaborate a complex comparison of recent local elections in some Post-Communist countries and electoral/voting behaviour is one of the issues I would like to deal with. However, I do not like to be satisfied with a pure description (i.e. "who tends to elect who?"). My intention is rather to provide explanatory conclusions (i.e. "why certain group tends to elect another group?" and "why this certain group tends to elect another group in environment A - e.g. urban areas - but not in environment B - e.g. sub-urban or rural areas?"). Therefore I am wondering whether there is any coherent model that could provide base for such comparison.

Daniel

I think most electoral models assume rational self interested behavior. voters will voter for any politician woh offers $1 more to their bottom line than any other politician.

While I think it is important to understand that people will have an easier time voting for people who boost their personal bottom line by at least $1 more than any other politician, I think questions such as fairness or support for systems which provide insurance (against job loss, accident / bad health, repeated crop failure, via limited liability, etc.) are also very important. I also think that people are generally more short sighted than a rational vote model would assume, but are also in many cases more sensitive to very long term things than some people would assume (for example, environment, security, etc.).

Basically, I don't think there are any models which deal effectively with how people internalize risk, morality/ethics, distributional questions, or the extent to which they vote as atomized individuals or as parts of communities/nations who they may support even when in cases where they may lose $1 compared to the alternative.

Probably there is literature on each of these, and surely you could draw up any model you want, but at the end of the day, I cannot overemphasize that every election is battled out in a particular time and place. Models can be interesting if you take lots of time to carefully compile lots of information from lots of places to ask questions like "I wonder if there is generally some connection between two things, because it sure seems like it where I'm from."

Studying a specific hypothesis across many cases can be interesting. This can lead us to conclusions like "hmmm... people aren't quite as rational as we thought. Just look at all the middle class and poor people who vote for right wing parties who probably do not promote their ability to access health, education, or negotiate for a decent share of their productivity". But then you probably already know that I'm talking about the USA more than other places. context matters.

Finally, local elections have very different issues. You're not usually voting about whether to go to war or change tax levels across the entire nation, and it is more likely that an educated voter can get a pretty good idea of what is going on in municipal government. I.e., they can find out where the money goes and can tangibly identify with what they get out of it (assuming that the services render them net benefit, which probably isn't the case for many black communities, for example, once considering how many black daddies do time for selling dime bags when unemployed and get arrested by local police).

I think I would be most interested to find if there are commonalities in jurisdiction in local elections, and then try to describe whether simple self interest is most likely at stake, or whether risk-management, altruism or ethics and/or ideologies may drive people's way of thinking.

If you mean simply "models that show/explain patterns across/between different local elections in different contexts," then I don't see why you can't use the same models used to compare countries. 

If I understand your question correctly (assuming you mean econometric models) and you simply want to compare behavior (how people vote) in local elections across different post communist countries, then I would simply use contextual and institutional variables. For example: ethnic diversity (either at national or sub national level, perhaps even calculating ethnic fractionalization), poverty rates, GDP per capita, HDI, year since regime transition, etc. You can also use standard institutional variables: type of electoral system, degree of autonomy enjoyed by local government, how the local subnational unit voted in the previous national election (i.e. did the current government party/parties win)?

Subnational politics is very popular recently in the study of Latin American politics. Perhaps you can look through some of that literature?

Daniel, this is an inspiring, but at the same time a very challenging task. I think that the creation of such a model is significantly complicated by the fact that in analyses of party systems in local politics traditional classifications of different political parties can’t be used. Classifications based on classical theories such as on political cleavages have only rarely relevance in local politics. The heterogeneity of local party systems, frequent changes of party affiliations of individual candidates and a huge number of independent groupings/lists crucially complicate the creation of such a model. I see basically three ways to overcome this complication: the first is not to concentrate on the issue of voting for a particular type of party, but to focus on electoral turnout. Turnout determinants may be similar to the national elections, with additional strong influence of municipal size. Second, to concentrate on the dichotomy between major political parties and independent groupings and to analyze the determinants of voting for one of these groups. Again, municipal size would probably play a crucial role. Third, analyze electoral volatility and the support for incumbent parties/candidates. This third proposal would allow the model to include contextual factors indicating the socio-economic development in the municipality and the impact of the local government. As for me, the third option seems the most interesting one.

In any case, I assume that in any model contextual factors should play a significant role at two levels - municipal (in particular municipal size and socio-economic situation) and national (institutional fetaures of local government).

Dear Nathan, Miguel and Josef,

Thank you very much for your comments, recommendations, and proposals. I will take them into account, and I hope I will be able to elaborate some acceptable comparison of the relevant electoral results.

Best regards, Daniel

I agree with Josef. I wasn't suggesting that the same ANSWERS would work, but only that the same models could be used. Some of that work has shown that similar models sometimes show OPPOSITE results when looking at different levels (local vs. national). This is where the theory needs contextual information, or different theories depending on different levels.

First, you have to see the degree of autonomy of local elections referring to the national elections, how much the voters are able to effectly distinguish between the two forms of competition, and how on the contrary is the attractive strength of national party system.

Then other factors and variables are important to be examined, such as the rilevance of parochial culture, the sense of local belonging, the prevalence of "exchange vote" or issue vote in the electoral behaviour.   

My colleague from the University of Manchester and I have recently done some work on this. It's in review at the moment (R&R)

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/epop2013/docs/Epop_Dejaeghere_Vanhoutte_2013.pdf

Dear Miguel, Raffaele, and Yves,

Thanks a lot for your additional comments and recommendations. I consider them interesting and helpful in terms of my research activities.

Best regards, Daniel