Electoral Memory

This chapter examines psychological models of visual, auditory, and haptic memory, in order to derive new hypotheses regarding what one could expect citizens to remember from past elections, and how one can imagine those memories to influence their future behaviour. Reliable recollections of how people have voted in the past is the least likely component of electoral memory. Even when this is absent, voters may rather be crucially influenced by a whole range of memories of their interaction with the system and with others. In many ways, this reinforces the centrality of electoral experience in the model, because it shows that while institution-centric academic expectations of electoral memory have been disappointed, their absence does not mean that citizens have no memory at all, but instead that it is precisely the accumulation of their electoral experiences over time which builds up into a memorial collage. The chapter thus reframes the concept of electoral memory by posing questions pertaining to what type and which aspects of elections voters remember, and how that cumulative memory influences their future electoral experiences, perceptions, and behaviour.