Factors Influencing Voting Decision: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have two comments for improvement and two critiques that need to be addressed before publication.

First, for clarification, I think it would be helpful for the author(s) to clarify that this review is not simply related to American politics but attempts to be a broad, cross-national or cross-cultural review. Personally, I would have encouraged the former, though the author chose the latter. There is nothing wrong with the latter approach, only that it becomes much more complex to handle the literature review (and results in a lot of qualifications related to variations across contexts).

Second, the author chose to review literature related to income, education, and social class. Within the American context, income and education are markers of social class, so I would have dropped the discussion related to social class if this were a literature review on American politics.  Income and education are more "objective" markers, while in survey research, social class is typically captured more in terms of an identity.  So maybe the difference becomes more "objective" versus "subjective" approaches. Within the European context, social class may represent something less well captured by income and education than within the American context. But, regardless, some of the discussion related to social class become somewhat repetitious with the discussion found within the sections on income and education.

Now the two critiques. First, the author all too frequently uses the word "identification" too broadly, as if any individual found within some kind of social group category necessarily identifies with that group. Hence, for example, the author talks about social group memberships in line 219, but then in the next line immediately shifts his/her discussion to state that "For example, research has shown that ...identities can shape voting behavior." Social group membership is a sociological variable; identity is a psychological variable. The presence of the first does not necessarily result in the latter. This confusion between group membership and group identity can be found in various portions of the present manuscript.

 

The second critique relates to the discussion of partisan identifications (as found on line 338). I would drop the word "loyalty" as part of the definition, in that "loyalty" suggest behavior. Partisan identifications are psychological, those who hold them may (or may not) exhibit the behavior of loyalty to the party (the two are analytically distinct, as some holding a party identification may defect to vote for the candidate of some other party than the one with which one identifies). Loyalty may be a typical behavior of someone who identifies with a political party, but it is not a universal or definitional basis of doing so.

Author Response

1. This paper focus on American politics.
2. Social class factor was removed according to the comment.
3. Revise the statement in lines 218-219.
4. Drop the word “loyalty”

Reviewer 2 Report

This review article provides a systematic overview of different determinants of voting decisions (individual-level, socio-cultural, political). A review like this is potentially valuable to serve as introduction to this field of research. However, it reads more like a textbook chapter or a literature review chapter of a PhD thesis. In my view, a review article for a journal should offer some new insights, for example by tracing the evolution of the field over time (rather than just enumerating the factors); by highlighting debates or controversies in the field; or by giving an overview of the most recent contributions. As it stands, this article feels more like an inventory of factors and reveals nothing about the authors' specific perspective or interest in the topic.

It is also very vague regarding the geographical scope of the literature reviewed. Is the main focus on voting decisions in Western societies (Europe, North America)? Is post-communist Europe included? What about other world regions such as Latin America?

There are a couple of other issues that would need clarification:

Regarding the observation that “working-class individuals have been found to have a higher propensity for supporting left-wing or populist parties” (p.3), it would be essential to clarify how these studies define populism. Populist parties can be both left-wing or right-wing, and in fact nowadays the bulk of the discussion about populism refers to populism on the right. Does this statement about working-class voting preferences then refer to right or left populism, or both?

The section on personality traits (p. 4) lacks references for several of the concepts mentioned (e.g. agreeableness). It might also be worthwhile to reflect on the fact that personality traits are much more difficult to measure than some of the other individual-level factors.

More importantly, however, I have my doubts whether this review reflects the current state of the field and makes a significant contribution to knowledge. The majority of studies the article cites are from the 1990s and 2000s. Even on hotly debated contemporary issues such as social networks (p. 6-7), the newest text the authors draw upon is from 2019. Overall, it is striking that the entire review cites just one article from the 2020s. This observation, as well as certain features of the writing style – enumeration of factors instead of development of a line of argument; the repetition of certain generic formulations throughout the text (such as “Research has shown…”,  “Research has consistently shown…”, “Numerous studies have found/demonstrated/ highlighted…”) or the repetition of very similar sentences summarizing each section – raises suspicions that the text might have been generated with support from AI tools (ChatGPT or the like).

Formal issues: Currently, the article misses a section 3.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

I have revised my manuscript in accordance with your comments as follows:

1. Add new insight factors influencing voting decisions.
2. Focus on American politics.
3. Social class was removed according to the comments of Reviewer 1.
4. Add in-text citations in some parts as recommended.
5. Section 3 is a typo. It has been revised already.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors give an overview of the different factors that may influence voting behavior:

1   1. factors at an individual level, such as income, education, social class, gender, age, personality and political ideology;

2   2. socio-cultural factors, such as social identity, ethnicity, religion, media influence and social networks;

3   3. political factors, such as party identification, candidate characteristics, policy positions, campaign strategies and economic conditions.

      On the one hand, I did not find any really new insight concerning factors that may influence voting behavior, and - as stressed repeatedly by the authors – typically multiple factors play a role and in addition the relations between the different factors and voting behavior are very complex.

     On the other hand, this paper gives a nice overview of the existing literature and has a list of 71 references, bringing together the literature on this topic. For that reason, I consider the paper worth to be published.

     One suggestion for improvement: the present paper jumps from section 2 to section 4; there is no section 3.

Author Response

Dear Sir,

I have revised my manuscript according to your recommendations as follows:

1. Add more new insight factors.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

This review article provides a systematic overview of different determinants of voting decisions (individual-level, socio-cultural, political), and the revised version addresses some of the reviewers' comments,

First, it includes an additional section titled "New Insight Factors" in response to this and one of the other reviewers' recommendations to include new insights. However, the new section is a random compilation of additional factors and somehow disrupts the otherwise clear structure of the text. More could be done to integrate the new insights into the structure of the review article and to demonstrate the authors' own take on the topic.  

Second, regarding geographical scope, while the author's response to reviewers clarifies that that the article focuses on American politics, this clarification was not included in the article itself. 

Finally, the author has not reacted in any way to my concern that the text might have been generated with support from AI tools (ChatGPT or the like). In addition to my earlier observations in this respect, it strikes me that the English in the article is fine, while the author's (short) responses to me and other reviewers come with a number of errors - this might be another hint that the text is not an original creation by the author.

 

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

This review article provides a systematic overview of different determinants of voting decisions (individual-level, socio-cultural, political), and the second revision has done a good job answering this reviewer's queries. While I am still struggling to understand how much of the text actually is an original creation of the authors, it seems that neither the other reviewers nor the journal's editors see any problems with it.