Risky Decisions? Conceptualizing Electoral Behavior in Terms of Uncertainty Management

Electoral support for unconventional candidates and parties who break with established norms and/or represent extreme positions is growing. Increasingly, voters choose to abandon the status quo and opt for new political forces outside the “mainstream”, despite the fact that the consequences of these choices are often difficult to predict. In this paper, I explore whether it is possible to explain this behavior using economic theories on decision-making under uncertainty. Drawing on expected utility theory, prospect theory, and comparative ignorance theory, I offer a set of potential explanations why and under which conditions voters may prefer the riskier or more ambiguous political alternative to the safer and less ambiguous choice. An empirical analysis of these explanations offers support for voting behavior being affected by loss aversion as stipulated by prospect theory. However, the study also indicates that uncertainty-perception of voters, i.e. the extent to which they indeed compare the alternatives in regard to entailed risks or ambiguousness, is a crucial factor behind voting decisions.