A valence issue is an issue where there is a broad amount of consensus among voters. As valence issues are representative of a goal or quality, voters use valence issues to evaluate a political party’s effectiveness in producing this particular goal or quality. The valence issue concept is a way of theorizing about how voters are motivated to vote for competing parties in an election. The concept was developed by Donald Stokes’s critique of voting behavior theories which Stokes foresaw as being too confined to ideas about a voter’s rationality and ideological impulses, as with spatial models of party competition. Since Stokes noticed during an overview of historical U.S elections that voters sometimes were not be bound by self-interest or ideology. Valence issues can be contrasted and opposed to position issues, as position issues are organised by a voter’s ideology and their inclination for a selection of competing interests, rather than organised by the feelings of consensus found within valence issues. As valence issues can shape the outcome of an election and therefore a future government, voters and politicians both adjust their behavior according to valence issues. History of the concept The valence issue concept originates from Donald Stokes’s critical review of Anthony Downs’s theory of voting behavior which analogues supply and demand market logic. Downs concluded that voters, when determining their voting preferences, and political parties, when determining which policies to supply, made economical and rational strategic choices within an ideological space. Stokes’s main problem with Downs’s model of voting behavior was that empirical reality, specifically the most recent U.S elections in Stokes’s time, did not fit with Downs’s theoretical assumptions. Thus, Stokes's conceptualisation of valence issues emerged from his focused critique on one of Downs’s assumptions about voters making decisions on their vote based on a set of ordered alternative policy preferences. Stokes believed this way of imagining the voter may work with position issues but not valence issues, since valence issues were political issues that competing parties could not take an alternative position on, as parties ordinarily would with position issues. In an election fought over position issues, an individual party can differentiate themselves from other competing parties by advocating different policy positions, so as to gain a greater amount of support from the voter than other rivaling parties and therefore win the election. For example, three competing parties may altogether each present to voters separate ideas