The funnel of causality: Key concept

The funnel of causality.

The funnel of causality is used to explain voting behavior. It represents how many different factors influence which party you vote for, from big general things like region and income to smaller and smaller things like the opinions of your friends and family. These are all “funneled” (a better metaphor, perhaps, would be “shoveled”) into an individual voter and determine how he or she votes.

Rational choice theory. This is used to represent how political choices are made. The idea is that individuals, if rational, will choose the course of action that best accords with their preferences. You wouldn’t have thought rational choice plays a big role in politics, but some political scientists insist that it does. (There’s a debate over whether it describes the way people really do make political choices or whether it just models behavior in a way that makes it possible to explain and predict it.) Rational choice usually involves game theory, and in politics the desired game-theoretic strategy is one that yields equilibrium – an outcome such that each agent is satisfied with his or her preferred course of action.

Cleavage.

The separation of voters into opposed voting blocs. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, modern European politics (he’s writing in the 1960s) is explained by cleavages: central versus regional, religious versus non-religious, rich versus poor (or owners versus workers), and agricultural versus industrial. You can also imagine racial, generational, gender, and cultural cleavages.

Most Different Systems Method. 

An approach in comparative politics in which you compare political systems that are very different from one another. If there are any common features in systems that are as different as can be, such features are candidate properties of the “ideal” political system, i.e. the abstract model of politics that various actually existing polities instantiate.

 The funnel of causality.