Loyalties, Mobilities, Abstentions

Abstract

An election is the result of both affiliation and disaffiliation processes. The former process confirms the classification of voters as being loyal and relatively stable individuals who stick to their party allegiances and reproduce their past choices. The latter sees reclassifications and even realignments coming into play, as well as abstention. Here voters are more mobile in their choices and, if not necessarily less assured in their beliefs and convictions, at least more open to the various options available to them, and more likely to take the political conjuncture into consideration when deciding how to vote. One of the biggest challenges for electoral sociologists is to attempt to understand what differentiates stable voters from mobile voters, and to evaluate their respective impacts on the outcome of elections, as well as the resulting balance of political power. Does stability or mobility have a bigger bearing on the result of an election? How can we track and interpret the diverse voting trajectories of increasingly indecisive and autonomousvoters?