The responsible electorate revisited
Date Issued
August 1, 1980
Author(s)
Wattier, Mark James
Advisor(s)
Dan Nimmo
Additional Advisor(s)
Tom Ungs
Bill Lyons
Tom Hood
Abstract
The research reported in this study was concerned primarily with the role of issues in the act of voting. Do voters select candidates on the basis of their issue concerns, or do they merely vote their party affiliations? Previous research has supported each of these perspectives, yielding alternative and competing portraits of the electorate. The dependent voter portrait emphasized the enduring influence of party identification upon voter perceptions and vote choices. Because of the stability of party identification, voters usually supported the same party from one election to the next. When they lacked strong attachments to one of the major political parties, they changed party support between elections, floating between the parties between elections. On the other hand, the responsive voter portrait placed more emphasis upon the dynamic and fluid nature of vote choices, since voters were responsive to new stimuli in their political environments. Responsive voters looked to the issue positions of the candidates rather than simply their party labels, switching party support when the issue positions of the other party's candidate were more attractive. Clearly, then, a study designed to investigate these alternative portraits must focus upon patterns of interelection change: a perspective first employed by V. O. Key, Jr. in The Responsible Electorate. Returning to that focus in this study, a panel design, with interviews with the same respondents in the presidential elections of 1972 and 1976, was employed to identify standpatters, those voters who supported the same party in both elections, and switchers, those voters who changed party support between elections. A variety of analytical techniques were employed to investigate these alternative portraits, ranging from cross-tabular analysis to factor analysis and multiple regression. Generally speaking, the conclusions supported neither perspective; rather, cross-sectional analyses supported the dependent portrait and longitudinal analyses supported the responsive portrait. Given these disparate findings, it was necessary to formulate a theory of interelection change that synthesized these two perspectives.
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
Political Science
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