Mahieux, Emmanuel; (2024) An investigation into the psychological, cognitive and neural correlates of swing voting. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Swing voters are crucial to the health of democracies. Thanks to them, political parties and leaders in power alternate. This thesis addresses the question of whether swing voters present distinct psychological, cognitive and neurological characteristics compared to other voters. Its primary contribution to the literature is to show that what sets swing voters apart is differences in adherence to social attitudes known as authoritarianism rather than cognitive or neural differences. The first study explored whether swing voters present distinct psychological characteristics using a large dataset containing political, demographic and psychological variables. It looked at voters who switched parties between the 2010 and 2015 UK general elections, with a focus on those who switched from the mainstream parties to UKIP. Results indicated that these voters were more authoritarian and had lower trust in MPs and that models with psychological predictors were better at predicting switching behaviour than those with demographic predictors. This echoes findings of the importance of authoritarianism as a predictor in recent US and UK elections, which could be specific to the recent electoral dynamics that have focused on forms of “cultural threat” salient to authoritarian values. The second study tested whether swing voters change their mind because of a greater ability to reflect on one’s own decisions and mistakes known as metacognition. It experimentally tested whether vote switchers have a distinct cognitive style from other voters marked by lower levels of confirmation bias, a bias which is known to cement voters in their political beliefs. It compared 2016 Trump voters who switched to Biden in 2020 and voters who voted Trump at both elections. Results indicated that swing voters had similar levels of confirmation bias and metacognitive ability as other voters. What set them apart was their lower levels of authoritarianism compared to voters who stuck with Trump. The third study tested whether swing voters’ brains showed distinct patterns of neural activity. It employed an implicit neural measure of personal preference -the N400 event-related potential- of undecided and decided voters before the 2022 mid-term elections in Texas. The study compared the predictive ability of implicit measures of political preference to that of explicit measures in predicting voting choice. It found that swing voters presented similar neural patterns to those of decided Democratic voters although explicit measures of political preference and authoritarianism accounted for more variance in voting behaviour.

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