In contrast to party voting, issue voting is when voters base their election decisions on political issues. These issues can relate to any questions of public policy that are a source of debate between political parties. The process of issue voting involves voters comparing their opinions about how certain issues should be addressed against candidates' stances on these issues. Individuals vote for the candidate that best matches their own views.
Voting Booth
Issue voting has affected the decisions Americans make at the voting booth.
Issue voting has become prominent in recent elections. The in issue voting rise can be traced to increasing polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties. Moderates, who account for a large segment of the American population, become more alienated as each party adopts more extreme viewpoints. Subsequently, this alienation has led to an increase in the amount of people who identify as independents in order to escape the constraints of a polarized party. The loss of party identification affiliated with being an independent generates the greater issue voting.
While issue voting has risen in recent years, many factors can complicate it. For instance, many stances can be taken on issues and voters must settle for the candidate whose views most closely match their own. This becomes difficult when the available candidates have viewpoints that are vastly different from a voter's views. Issue voting is also challenging when candidates possess similar views on issues and there is no clear distinction between the candidates' views and the voter's own. When the aforementioned situations take place, a voter may revert to party voting or may base their decision off of the individual personalities of the candidates. Similarly, issue salience is when people vote on the basis of how relevant an issue is to their lives.
Most issues that are part of the national agenda can sometimes be a consequence of media agenda-setting and agenda-building. In a commercialized media context, the media can often not afford to ignore an important issue which another television station, newspaper, or radio station is willing to pick up. The media may be able to create new issues by reporting and should that should be considered seriously. Also, they can obscure issues by reporting through negligence and distraction. If persons are affected by high crime rates, or unemployment, for instance, the media can reduce the time they report on potential solutions, the nature of class-based society or other related issues. They can reduce the direct awareness of these problems in the lives of the public. The media can make the problem in essence "go away" by obfuscating it. The public can go away to another media source, so it is in the media's commercial interest to try to find an agenda which corresponds as closely as possible to peoples' desires. They may not be entirely successful, but the agenda-setting potential of the media is considerably limited by the competition for the viewers' interest, readers and listeners. It is difficult to see, for instance, how an issue which is a major story to one television station could be ignored by other television stations.