Idiosyncratic Issue Salience in Probabilistic Voting Models: The Cases of

We test the spatial voting model under the hypothesis that the voter preferences are of a more general class than Eucledian. In particular, we allow the spatial metric to be elliptic, and the paratemers of that metric to depend on the idiosyncratic characteristics of voters. We use datasets from Israel, Netherlands, and the UK. We find that for Nehter-lands and, to a lesser degree, UK, education increases the weight that the voter puts on the spatial distance between her ideal point and the policy platform of a party. Thus, for a more educated voter, the policy platform of a party is more important than the party’s identity. For Israel, the importance of spatial distance is decreasing with the degree to which the respondent observes religious tradition. At the same time we find little evidence that different policy dimensions, as reconstructed from the datasets via factor analysis, are of different salience.