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Comment: The Assessment of Policy Voting*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Richard A. Brody  and
Benjamin I. Page
Richard A. Brody
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Benjamin I. Page
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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American Political Science Review , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 450 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1972

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Footnotes

*

Research drawn upon in this commentary was supported by National Science Foundation Grant GS NSF #2855. Data on the 1968 election were made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research; the authors are solely responsible for analysis and interpretation.

References

1 Stokes, Donald, “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” American Political Science 60 (03, 1966), 19–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, for example, Converse, Philip, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. Apter, David, (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–261 Google Scholar and Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (New York: St. Martins, 1969)Google Scholar.

3 Pomper, Gerald, “From Confusion to Clarity: Issues and American Voters, 1956–1968,” American Political Science Review, 66 (06, 1972), 415–428 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Key, V. O., Politics Parties and Pressure Groups, 4th ed. (New York: Crowell, 1958), p. 238 Google Scholar.

5 RePass, David, “Issue Salience and Party Choice,” American Political Science Review, 65 (06, 1971), 389–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Key, V. O. and Munger, Frank, “Social Determinism and Electoral Decision: The Case of Indiana,” in Public Opinion and Politics, ed. Crotty, William J. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 253 Google Scholar.

7 Barber, James A. Jr., Social Mobility and Voting Behavior (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), p. 114 Google Scholar.

8 Not all conceptions of partisanship reflect this point of view: See, for example, Goldberg's, Arthur “Model V”, “Discerning a Causal Pattern among Data on Voting Behavior,” American Political Science Review, 60 (12, 1966), 920–921 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this model Goldberg shows partisanship to be affected by partisan attitudes which include issue orientations. Sundquist, James L. (Politics and Policy [Washington: Brookings, 1968])Google Scholar finds the “[p]arty allegiances of some voters changing” in response to presidential performance (p. 438).

9 Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1961), pp. 472 ffGoogle Scholar.

10 See, for example, Key's, V. O. Tables 18.4 and 18.5. Public Opinion …, p. 473 and p. 475 Google Scholar.

11 Converse, Philip, “The Concept of a Normal Vote,” in Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip, Miller, Warren, and Stokes, Donald, Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966) pp. 9–39 Google Scholar.

12 Boyd, Richard, “Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, 66 (06, 1972), Appendix IICrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 It might be thought that there is a necessarily negative relationship between the magnitude of short and long-term effects. On the contrary, across the fifteen issues examined by Richard Boyd, the sizes of these two components are highly positively correlated (rs = .58; p < .025). This suggests that, with some notable exceptions, previously politicized issues are the ones that get activated for and used by the voter during the campaign.

14 David RePass, “Issue Salience.…”

15 In the case of each of the three most important problems, the respondent was asked which party, if either, would carry out the policy he favored. The Partisan Issue Alignment Index sums the responses to these probes with weights 5, 3, and 1 attached to the first, second, and third most important problems, respectively. Thus, if a voter named the Democrats on all three probes, his weighted score would be +9; if he named the Republicans or Wallace, his score would be −9. On each probe, the “Democrats” response was scored +1, the “Both/Either” response was scored 0, and the “Republicans” or “Wallace” response was scored −1. It is these scores which are weighted and summed to form the index.

16 The Expectation of Policy Satisfaction Index expresses the degree to which the respondent, on eleven policy questions, saw the Democrats carrying out policies which he favored or associated the Republicans with policies of which he disapproved. The eleven policies covered: Aid to education, the growth of governmental power, federal medical programs, aid to employment, fair employment practices, integration, public accommodations, foreign aid, negotiations with Communist nations, trade with Communist nations, and Vietnam policy. On each issue, if the respondent favored a point of view and associated the Democrats with that point of view or if he expressed opposition to a policy and associated the Republicans with that policy position, he received a score of +1; if the opposite conditions obtained, he received a score of −1; if he did not respond to the policy or if he did not identify a party with one stand or the other, his score on that item was 0. The index sums these scores over the eleven issue areas.

17 RePass, David, “Issue Salience …,” pp. 399–400 Google Scholar.

18 Boyd, Richard, “Popular Control …” p. 432 Google Scholar.

19 Boyd, Richard, “Popular Control …” p. 432 Google Scholar.

20 See: Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change …, “The Analysis of Issues,” pp. 173–92Google Scholar and Davis, Otto, Hinich, Melvin, and Ordeshook, Peter, “An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process,” American Political Science Review, 64 (06, 1970), pp. 426–428 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change…, p. 174 Google Scholar.

22 Davis, Otto, Hinich, Melvin, and Ordeshook, Peter, “An Expository Development …,” p. 429 Google Scholar.

23 Those familiar with the Davis et al., “An Expository Development …” article, will recognize that in singling out the policy or issue component of these elements, we have made policy voting a special case of their broader class of “rational voting.”

24 See: Items 16 through 16p on the SRC/ICPR 1968 Pre-Election Questionnaire.

25 Richard A. Brody and Sidney Verba, “Hawk and Dove: The Search for an Explanation of Vietnam Policy Preferences,” Acta Politica, forthcoming.

26 Davis, Otto, Hinich, Melvin, and Ordeshook, Peter, “An Expository Development …,” p. 431 Google Scholar, emphasis in the original.

27 See, for example, Berelson, Bernard, Lazarsfeld, Paul, and McPhee, William, Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar and Page, Benjamin I. and Brody, Richard A., “Policy Voting and the Electoral Process: The Vietnam War Issue,” American Political Science Review, 66 (09, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, forthcoming.

28 Davis, Otto, Hinich, Melvin, and Ordeshook, Peter, “An Expository Development …,” p. 432 Google Scholar.

29 The 1968 election was the occasion for at least three independent efforts to relate psychological distance/proximity to voting behavior. Michael Shapiro's study of voters in Hawaii, is reported in “Rational Political Man: A Synthesis of Economic and Social-Psychological Perspectives,” American Political Science Review. 63 (12, 1969), 1106–1119 Google Scholar. The two based on national samples are represented in preliminary reports in convention papers: See: Brody, Richard A., Page, Benjamin I., Verba, Sidney, and Laulicht, Jerome, “Vietnam, The Urban Crisis, and the 1968 Presidential Election: A Preliminary Analysis,” paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, California, 09, 1969 Google Scholar; and Kovenock, David M., Beardsley, Philip L., and Prothro, James W., “Status, Party, Ideology, Issues, and Candidate Choice: A Preliminary Theory-Relevant Analysis of the 1968 American Presidential Election,” paper delivered at the Eighth World Congress, International Political Science Association, Munich, Germany, 08 31-09 5, 1970 Google Scholar.

30 See: SRC/ICPR, 1968 Post-Election Questionnaire, questions 67, 67b, 67c, and 67e.

31 Compared with the fifteen issues examined by Richard Boyd (“Popular Control …,” Appendix II), comparative distance on Vietnam policy, with L = 7.91 and S = 8.65, ranks fifth on long-term effect and third on its short-term component.

32 Our composite measure is the Partisan Issue Alignment Index (see Footnote 15). We interpret the response to “which party do you think would be most likely to do what you want on this …?” as a dichotomous (near, not near) distance measure. In this graph, the abscissa values are a grouping of the +9 to −9 index; −9 to −6 = −2; −5 to −1 = −1; 0 = 0; 1 to 5 = 1; and 6 to 9 = 2.

33 Berelson, Bernard, Lazarsfeld, Paul, McPhee, William, Voting, pp, 220–222 Google Scholar.

34 Benjamin I. Page and Richard A. Brody, “Policy Voting.…”

35 Kovenock, David M., Beardsley, Philip L., and Prothro, James W., “Status, Party …,” pp. 29–31 Google Scholar, discuss this problem and refer to reasons for believing it not to be important. Their reasoning is based on the number of issues examined, the nature of their data gathering procedures, the fact that the items most clearly associated with the several candidates are different for each of them, and the fact that on some issues those who vote for one candidate are closer to another. Such plausible evidence encourages rather than satisfies the search for estimates of the three proximity processes.

36 Those acquainted with econometric approaches to nonrecursive causal modeling will recognize these causal sets as the exogenous variables required to “identify” a system of simultaneous equations. See, for example, Fisher, Franklin, “Statistical Identifiability,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume 15, ed. Sills, David, (New York: The Macmillan Co. and Free Press, 1968), pp. 201–206 Google Scholar.

37 For example, see: Michael Shapiro, “Rational Political Man …” and Jackson, John, “The Importance of Issues and Issue Importance in Presidential Elections,” Discussion Paper #3, Program of Quantitative Analysis in Political Science, Government Department, Harvard University, 01, 1972 Google Scholar.

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