POLITICS IN MULTIPARTY CONTEXT - MULTIPLICATIVE SPECIFICATIONS, SOCIAL-INFLUENCE, AND ELECTORAL CHOICE

Explanations of electoral choice most frequently focus on the isolated characteristics of voters and examine those characteristics using lin ear, additive formulations. We explore two alternatives. We first argu e that in a multiparty electoral context, the structuring influence of ideology on the vote often will be best represented with a multiplica tive specification. Second, we contend that the impact of individual-l evel traits such as ideology will be moderated by the political climat e of the voter's social context. We test these alternative formulation s using data concerning the 1989 elections in Honduras, where two majo r parties and two minor parties vied for support. Multinomial logistic regression results demonstrate that a multiplicative and contextual s pecification substantially outperforms a more conventional modeling st rategy.