Sociology of the vote

The sociology of the vote is the branch of the political Sociologie which studies in particular the Vote and its sociological determinants . One can confuse it with the electoral sociology insofar as the main part of the polls considered take place within the framework of the election people.

Objects

Orientation of the votes

Historically, the sociology of the vote especially concentrated on the study of the sociological determinants of the orientation of the votes and political sympathies, of the determinants which appeared very many to him. Among those which were analyzed, one finds the age, the social class or the kind. With regard to this last, this reveals that the tendency of the Femme S to vote a little on the right than the men during the first decades which followed their access to the ballot boxes is blurred, in any case in France, because of the passive entry of the women on the job market and the homogenization of the living conditions which were followed from there. Thus, the kind is not there any more one important index of political sympathies.

Other very studied criteria also are the principal criteria religious, indicators being the assistance with the offices or the pronunciation of a Prière of the evening. In France, those are favorable to the right-hand side whatever the worship considered. For the remainder, there also exists of very many studies on the importance of the Patrimoine and the family network . Each time, the results show only very light tendencies less anchored than those which one could provide.

It will be noted that one of the most original criteria ever proposed by an political economist is that of the composition of the ground in the zone where reside the studied people. In Country of the West , it is one of the criteria which Paul Bois uses (following André Siegfried, in the political table of France of the West, 1913). A thorough study of the vote in the the Sarthe enables him to show that certain grounds are likely to cause votes opposed in the Isoloir, the Végétation and the Paysage S which they allow differently structuring the human reports/ratios on the surface.

Since the end of the Years 1980, the research undertaken in sociology of the vote in France tried to undervalue the influence of the social determinants to prefer to them the vision of a voter " libre" of very forced, only mû by the programs, the way in which the media arbitrate the competition interpartisane or personality of the candidates. But they thus built a fictitious voter starting from data resulting from the surveys carried out by commercial private companies, the survey institutes, by neglecting the limits of the reliability of these data. Their conclusions are often décriées as being more ideological than scientific. The researchers who go in contact with the voters and do not sub-contract their investigations show that the citizen-voters continue to be socially, in particular determined by their generation, their socioprofessional category, their diploma, their area or their incomes.

The participation

Recently, the rise of the Abstention in the democratic companies led the sociology of the vote to lean more on the reasons of the participation in the vote, which was held up to now for normal. This reveals that there exists a true “hidden taxable quota” (to take again an expression of Daniel Gaxie) which leads voters to be excluded from themselves from the polling stations.

Like it also Pierre Bourdieu, the citizens shows who abstain from going to vote because of a weak feeling competence in political matters are the least best equipped in cultural capital (measured by the Diplôme), more often the women than the men, the precarious workers that stable and easy people. The report of the abstention should not thus result in making feel guilty the judged voters " apathiques" since this phenomenon results from two foreign factors to the voters: the monopolization of the payment of the businesses of the city by the professionals of the Political and the degree of intensity of the work of mobilization of the voters at the time of campaigns (cover of the media, money spent, many meetings, etc).

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