A UTILITY FUNCTION-ANALYSIS OF COMPETING MODELS OF PARTY SUPPORT - KEY ASSUMPTIONS RECONSIDERED

V. O. Key's reward-punishment model has long dominated scholarly think ing about the political economy of party support. The model's populari ty persists despite anomalous empirical evidence and challenges by iss ue-priority theorists who criticize the model for ignoring differences in the policy choices offered by competing parties. This paper argues that the reward-punishment and issue-priority perspectives are encomp assed by utility function models of voter decision-making. Such models account for party support dynamics that are perverse according to rew ard-punishment assumptions. They also provide a theoretical rationale for specifying lagged economic effects in party support functions, whi le suggesting difficulties in doing so. The performance of utility fun ction models is illustrated under varying assumptions about economic c onditions and a voter's knowledge of them.