ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Participation
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1640408
Rationality, Affect and Vote Choice
Provisionally accepted
Costas Panagopoulos1*
Ching-Hsing Wang2- 1Northeastern University Library, Northeastern University, Boston, United States
- 2National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan
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This study examines the effects of rationality and emotions on vote choice. Our findings clearly demonstrate that voters take competing parties’ policy positions as well as their emotional responses to competing candidates into consideration to make their voting decisions. Our analyses reveal that individual voting decisions are guided by both affect and rationality. We also find that affective orientations appear to exert a larger impact on vote choice compared to rational considerations. Given the dominance of rational choice models in the study of voting behavior, our results call greater attention to the affective underpinnings of voting decisions and suggest that models that exclude or otherwise minimize the influence of emotional considerations on vote choice are incomplete or underspecified.
Keywords: Vote choice, Voting behavior, rationality, Affect, emotion
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Panagopoulos and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Costas Panagopoulos, Northeastern University Library, Northeastern University, Boston, United States
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