FLOATING VOTER

Abstract

The floating voter has always been important to politicians as the most difficult audience to understand and connect with among voter profiles. Since the beginning of the 20th century, representative democracy has been an indispensable form of governance for many countries of the world, and voter behaviour and profiles have also been investigated, but precise and detailed studies on floating voters have been limited. One of the most important factors in this situation is that even in modern times, the electorate consists of large groups and the proportion of those who are seen as undecided is ignored. Despite being considered as indecisive, the floating voter, whose proportion has become expanding over time since the middle of the 21st century, began to be seen as a decisive variable for election results and thus have become the subject of various research. With the use of new qualitative and quantitative research methods in the interdisciplinary field that emerged with the development of political psychology, it has become easier to understand and explain floating voters. Efforts to understand the view of undecided voters in politics and to solve the psychology of elections first classified the undecided electorate by subcategories, and then paved the way for the preparation of political communication campaigns for each group of voters. In this context, the article will first deal with the questions of who the undecided voter is and why he or she is undecided in his voting preference, and then will address the political communication routes used to understand and convince the undecided voter.