exedra • nº 4 • 2010
organizations or entities, heuristics for reasoning about the interest of the electoral proposals. What we are talking about is not, however, information about political issues and electoral proposals, but the trust that voters have in sources of heuristic reasoning. Lacking information on the issues and electoral proposals, voters believe the position of a candidate is favorable or unfavorable to their interests according to the trust they place in a medium of mass communication, in an organization, an entity or a personality. That is, voters decide, in fact, based on trust, not based on the information. Then we returned to the proposals of the sociological model — that people vote according to their social group —, and psychosocial — that people vote according to their partisanship. This brief presentation of the main explanatory models of electoral behavior allows us to identify a complementarity between them. The sociological models value the contribution of social and historical contexts that gave rise to the emergence of political parties and that, according to this view, justify the party political divisions and the resulting behavior of voters; the rational or economic models that considers the crucial role in shaping the voting behavior is played by the evaluation of political and economic factors that characterize each election per se; the psychosocial models put emphasis on the relationship between these two types of factors (distal and proximal), a relationship that is mediated and moderated by the psychological link established between voters and political parties, ie, partisanship. Antunes (2008), in a study into the reasons that lead individuals to change their vote from one election to another, argues that studies which take as a theoretical reference to the sociological model (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954; Lazarsfeld , Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944; Lipset & Rokkan, 1967) or psychosocial approach (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960, Miller & Shanks, 1996) provide a consistent explanation for the stability of electoral choices, but show to be quite fragile in clarifying the reasons why some voters to vote differently in consecutive elections. In turn, the approaches in the framework of rational choice theory (Buchanan & Tullock, 2001; Downs, 1957), although they provide interesting clues for understanding the fluctuations in voting behavior, are insufficient when it comes to explain the fact that a considerable majority of voters vote with a remarkable stability. To bridge this gap and integrate the contributions of all these approaches Antunes (2008) proposes a revision of the central concept of the psychosocial approach ― partisanship ― in the light of current studies of social identity, trying to show, theoretically and empirically, that the reconceptualization of the concept of partisanship helps to explain situations where changes in electoral behaviour occur, maintaining the potential of the psychosocial model in understanding the stability of voting options. As we have seen, in its traditional sense, the concept of partisanship was modelled 164