Ideology and Evaluation in an Experimental Setting: Comparing the Proximity and the Directional Models

In: Political research quarterly: PRQ ; official journal of the Western Political Science Association and other associations, Volume 60, Issue 2, p. 263-273

Abstract

The debate between which model, directional or proximity, better describes citizens' political behavior engages scholars because the former constitutes a serious challenge to long-standing, Downsian, spatial logic. Despite an engaging series of empirical tests, scholars comparing the two models continue to disagree about which model performs better. Noting experimental methods remain conspicuously absent from methods deployed to date, the author describes an experiment designed to settle key assumption debates and measure subjects' reactions to candidates in contexts in which the models make very different predictions. The author reports results vindicating Downs's assertion that proximity matters and direction does not.