Ideology and Evaluation in an Experimental Setting Comparing the Proximity and the Directional Models

The debate between which model, directional or proximity, better describes citizens' political behavior engages scholars because the former constitutes a serious challenge to long-standing, Downsian, spatial logic. Despite an engaging series of empirical tests, scholars comparing the two models continue to disagree about which model performs better. Noting experimental methods remain conspicuously absent from methods deployed to date, the author describes an experiment designed to settle key assumption debates and measure subjects' reactions to candidates in contexts in which the models make very different predictions. The author reports results vindicating Downs's assertion that proximity matters and direction does not. Keywords: proximity model; directional model; spatial model; candidate evaluation; experimental research; extremism; ideology (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes formulae omitted.) The body of literature attempting to distinguish proximity vs. directional voting ... has been confined to a relatively narrow methodological tradition, and scholars have analyzed only a few types of data sets. Unfortunately there exists essentially no evidence within this tradition and these data to distinguish between the two models. -Lewis and King (1999, 32) The debate over whether a directional or proximity model better describes mass-elite policy preference linkages remains unresolved. At stake are basic questions about the very nature of citizens' issue positions. For example, the proximity model suggests citizens arrive at issue preferences by selecting a position from an ordered set of policy alternatives. The directional model, in contrast, suggests citizens arrive at issue positions by selecting one of two sides in a simple, dichotomous, policy space. Also at stake are fundamental questions about democratic representation. For decades, the Downsian spatial model has defined the way political scientists conceive of democratic politics.1 Downs (1957, 99) argued citizens rationally compare their ideologies to those of parties contesting elections and support "the one most like [their] own." In other words proximity matters; and indeed, the Downsian spatial model has come to be known as the proximity model. The notion that elections validate the policy proposals of successful candidates depends upon the theory that citizens support likeminded candidates. In contrast, the directional model maintains that "the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed" (Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989, 93). The directional model draws on theories of symbolic politics claiming citizens prefer candidates who represent their side of political issues with stronger preferences for candidates who trigger stronger emotional reactions. If the directional model better represents citizens' political behavior, elections do not validate candidates' policy positions. Rather, the directional model posits elections provide only diffuse information about which side was more popular or, at least, better able to trigger the emotions of voters. Because the debate between the proximity model and the directional model is central to understanding elections and democratic politics, it occupies a prominent place in the literature. As a rough indicator of scholarly attention, consider that since its publication Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989) has been cited more than 139 times, according to the Social Science Citation Index. Yet no scholarly consensus about which model better describes the way citizens evaluate political candidates has emerged. Among recent contributions to the debate are studies demonstrating the empirical superiority of the directional model (Adams, Bishin, and Dow 2004; Macdonald, Listhaug, and Rabinowitz 1991; Macdonald and Rabinowitz 1993, 1998; Macdonald, Rabinowitz, and Listhaug 1995,1998, 2004; Todosijevic 2005), studies demonstrating the empirical superiority of the proximity model (Biais et al. …