Directional and Proximity Models of Voter Choice in Recent US Presidential Elections.

This note evaluates relative ability of the proximity and recently proposed directional variants of the spatial model of voter choice to account for candidate evaluations in U.S. presidential elections contested between 1980 and 1992. The author does this by estimating a statistical model that represents voter preference for a candidate as a weighted average of proximity and directional components. The analysis corroborates previous studies supporting the directional model, but illustrates that these results are sensitive to statistical specification. Alternative methodological specifications favor a mixed directional-proximity model and the traditional distance representation. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers