The use of aggregate data in the study of voting behaviour: ecological inference, ecological fallacy and other applications.

A large part of the most prominent and seminal applied works in the field of voting behavior in political science is based on three major research schools: the School of Columbia, which focuses on the importance of social factors, the School of Michigan, which mainly focuses on party identification, and the rational choice theory, which stresses the importance of rationality, uncertainty and economic voting. After all, voting is an individual act, as individual as the decision-making process connected to it. The purpose of ecological inference is to infer the behavior of individuals by using aggregate data. There is a widespread skepticism in the academic world about results obtained through ecological inference techniques. This distrustful attitude is due to the fact that these results may be affected by an ecological fallacy. Turnout is one of the most investigated topics in political science. The phenomenon of turnout can obviously be studied from both an individual perspective and an aggregate one.