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Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Richard W. Boyd
Richard W. Boyd*
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
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Abstract

The importance of issues in deciding elections changes from one election to the next. As Key has shown, the issues of the role of the federal government in social life helped create the New Deal Democratic majority. In contrast, issues had only a marginal impact on the apolitical elections of the 1950s. Converse's technique of normal vote analysis reveals that issues were again highly related to the vote in 1968. This was particularly true of attitudes toward Vietnam, urban unrest and race, social welfare, and Johnson's performance as president.

Yet, even in an election in which issues appear important, some can have very different consequences for popular control of policy than others. On some issues, the electorate exercises no effective constraints on leaders' policy choices. On others (e.g., the escalation in Vietnam), the electorate permits leaders a wide array of options when a policy is adopted and passes a retrospective judgment on such choices in subsequent elections. Finally, on still other issues, the public may limit the options of leaders at the time a policy is adopted. The paper suggests the stringent conditions necessary for this type of popular control to exist.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 429 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1972

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Footnotes

*

Fred I. Greenstein, Herbert H. Hyman, and J. Donald Moon of Wesleyan University, C. Richard Hofstetter of Ohio State University, and Robert D. McClure of Syracuse University criticized an earlier draft of this paper. Charles S. Hyneman of Indiana University first stimulated my interest in popular control of public policy; his books and his conversation have formed my ideas on the subject. Without committing these people to a defense of the product, I would like to acknowledge and thank them. The data utilized in this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research. The data were originally collected by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. Neither the Center nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

References

1 Key, V. O. Jr., The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), Chap. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), Chaps. 8–10Google Scholar. Converse, Philip E., “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. Apter, David, (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–61Google Scholar. Converse, Philip E., “Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue,” in Tufte, Edward R., ed., The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970), pp. 168–89Google Scholar. McClosky, Herbert, Hoffman, Paul J., and O'Hara, Rosemary, “Issue Conflict and Consensus Among Party Leaders and Followers,” American Political Science Review, 54 (06, 1960), 406–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For analyses of issues in the 1964 election, see Stokes, Donald E., “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” American Political Science Review, 60 (03, 1966), 19–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kessel, John H., The Goldwater Coalition (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), Chap. 9Google Scholar; Converse, Philip E., Clausen, Aage R., and Miller, Warren E., “Electoral Myth and Reality: The 1964 Election,” American Political Science Review, 59 (06, 1965), 321–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burnham, Walter Dean, “American Voting Behavior and the 1964 Election,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 12 (02., 1968), 1–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and RePass, David E., “Issue Salience and Party Choice,” American Political Science Review, 65 (06, 1971), 389–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For 1968 see Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., Rusk, Jerrold G., and Wolfe, Arthur C., “Continuity and Change in American Politics: Parties and Issues in the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, 63 (12., 1969), 1083–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weisburg, Herbert F. and Rusk, Jerrold G., “Dimensions of Candidate Evaluation,” American Political Science Review 64 (12., 1970), 1167–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin and Raab, Earl, “The Wallace Whitelash,” Transaction, 7 (12., 1969), 23–35 Google Scholar; Kirkpatrick, Samuel A. and Jones, Melvin E., “Vote Direction and Issue Cleavage in 1968,” Social Science Quarterly, 51 (12., 1970), 689–705 Google Scholar; and Pomper, Gerald M., “Controls and Influence in American Elections (Even 1968),” American Behavioral Scientist, 13 (11./12., 1969), 215–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Converse, Philip E., “The Concept of a Normal Vote,” in Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp. 9–39 Google Scholar. Aside from this seminal article, which utilizes the normal vote to estimate the importance of the religious issue in 1960, the normal vote technique has seen limited application. Two exceptions are Shanks, J. Merrill, “The Impact of Voters' Political Information on Electoral Change: A Reexamination of the Quality of American Electoral Decisions,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1970)Google Scholar, which presents an extension of Converse's work; and Kessel, John H., Goldwater Coalition, p. 294–97Google Scholar. Two other articles have used the intuitive notion of the normal vote, though the authors estimated the normal vote with aggregate data. See Kabaker, Harvey M., “Estimating the Normal Vote in Congressional Elections,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 23 (02., 1969), 58–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hinckley, Barbara, “Incumbency and the Presidential Vote in Senate Elections: Defining the Parameters of Subpresidential Voting,” American Political Science Review, 64 (Sept., 1970), 836–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Though Republicans vote at higher rates than Democrats, the effect of the total turnout rate on the two-party vote division is slight. Converse, , “The Concept of a Normal Vote,” pp. 28–30 Google Scholar. Kabaker, , “Estimating the Normal Vote …,” pp. 78 and 83 Google Scholar. Therefore, the assumption that Converse must make regarding the level of turnout underlying the normal party division is not critical.

6 Converse, , “The Concept of a Normal Vote,” pp. 34–39 Google Scholar. A normal vote analysis for a particular issue requires only simple arithmetic and two cross-classification tables (one to compute the expected party vote and another to determine the actual party vote). Therefore the technique is particularly suitable for undergraduate research exercises.

7 Shanks, , “Impact of Voters' Political Information …,” p. 149 Google Scholar. Converse and Shanks define a normal vote differently. Converse defines a normal vote empirically, by averaging the results of several elections and by assuming that short-term forces are averaged out in the process. Shanks treats a normal election as a pure, hypothetical concept and obtains estimates of the propensity of individuals to vote for a party by a technique of simulation. Shanks's results are strongly affected by the constraints he places upon the simulation (a fact he is well aware of). An important consideration in my use of Converse's equations is that one of Shanks's constraints is that the simulation must produce results comparable to those of Converse.

8 The careful reader will note that I am defining the concept of a partisan component differently than Converse does. In my usage the partisan component of an issue is simply its relation to party identification. Converse defines “partisan forces” as short-term stimuli, which are pro-Democratic or pro-Republican in varying degrees of strength and which induce defections from the normal party vote. Converse, , “The Concept of a Normal Vote,” p. 15 Google Scholar.

9 Campbell et al., The American Voter, Chaps. 6–7.

10 Stokes, Donald E., “Spatial Models of Party Competition,” in Campbell, et al., Elections and the Political Order, p. 170 Google Scholar. The opposite of a valence issue is a position issue.

11 On the basis of the five presidential and congressional elections from 1952 to 1960, Converse estimates the normal vote for the whole population to be 54 percent Democratic. By 1968 the balance of party identification has become slightly more Democratic. Applying Converse's equation, V = .483 + .268M, to the 1968 sample gives an expected Democratic vote in 1968 of 57 per cent Democratic. Having recomputed the normal vote for the 1968 sample, I do not have to assume that the distribution of party identification was unchanged from the 1952–1960 period, i.e., that partisan realignment was not taking place in 1968. I am assuming that the probability of an individual party identifier voting for the candidate of his own party remained basically unchanged from the earlier period.

The use of normal vote analysis does present two problems of interpretation. The first problem is that short-term political factors slightly influence responses to the party identification measure. (See footnote 28, Kessel, , Goldwater Coalition, pp. 295–96.Google Scholar) As a result some short-term political influences will be submerged in the expected party vote. The effect of this result is to make the short-term relationships of issues to votes slightly conservative underestimates of the true relationships. A second, more difficult problem is the Wallace candidacy in 1968. The estimates of the normal vote assume only two major candidates, not three. With Wallace in the race, the normal vote analyses can be interpreted as follows: The normal vote projects the expected vote in 1968 if short-term forces had been in balance and if only two major candidates had run. The Wallace candidacy is then interpretable as a short-term force responsible for deviations from the expected Democratic and Republican votes. In justification of this interpretation, there is scant evidence that many voters identified themselves as members of the American Independent Party of Wallace. On the 1968 party identification measure, only 0.2 per cent of the sample falls into the category reserved for people who think of themselves as members of a minor party.

12 Campbell et al., The American Voter, Chap. 8; Key, V. O. Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1964), Chap. 7Google Scholar.

13 The average of the deviations of the expected Democratic vote in the response categories from the grand expected Democratic vote is only 1.18 per cent. This small average deviation puts this item in last place among the 15 items when ranked according to the magnitude of their partisan components. See Appendix II for a fuller explanation.

14 Rosenburg, , Verba, , and Converse, argue, “… Vietnam as an issue played little role in deciding the election between Nixon and Humphrey … because voters perceived little difference between the candidates.” Rosenburg, Milton J., Verba, Sidney, and Converse, Philip E., Vietnam and the Silent Majority (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 50 Google Scholar. Even though the voters saw little difference between the two candidates on Vietnam, the normal vote analysis shows that people at odds with the war policy still punished Humphrey at the polls. For an analysis of the relationship of views on the war to modes of political participation, see Verba, Sidney and Brody, Richard, “Participation, Policy Preferences, and the War in Vietnam,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 34 (Fall, 1970), 325–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Two caveats about the item, itself. One is that it poses alternatives that may not stand as such in the minds of the voters. People may distinguish between long- and short-run solutions to riots, advocating use of force as an immediate measure and alleviation of poverty as a longer-run solution. A second difficulty with the item is its penumbra of social welfare content. It clearly presumes that poverty and unemployment are causes of riots and that solving these problems will still them. As anyone knows who has plunged into the ballooning literature on urban violence, competing explanations abound. The gamut ranges from the riff-raff theories of everyman to the exotic aggression theories of the animal behaviorists.

One case for the validity of the item is the pattern of the Wallace vote. The smooth, curvilinear increase in the Wallace vote in Figure 5 indicates that his supporters had no difficulty in interpreting the item. Second, as Figure 6 demonstrates, the vote on this item is quite similar to the vote on the other four items in this set of urban unrest and race issues. Appendix I presents the inter-item associations of this item with others in the race and urban unrest set.

16 Converse, et al., “Continuity and Change in American Politics,” p. 1091 Google Scholar. Utilizing sample surveys conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation, Brody and his associates analyzed the effect on evaluations of the candidates in 1968 of urban unrest and immediate withdrawal vs. military victory items identical to those in Figures 3 and 5. Their findings are quite consistent with my own. 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 American Sociological Association Meeting, 1969, pp. 1–32 Google Scholar. Other analyses of race and the 1968 elections include Weisburg and Rusk, “Dimensions of Candidate Evaluation”; Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, “The Wallace Whitelash”; and Wolfe, Arthur G., “Challenge from the Right: The Basis of Voter Support for Wallace in 1968,” paper delivered at the American Psychological Association Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1969, pp. 1–20 Google Scholar.

17 The reader might wonder about contaminating interaction effects of sectionalism on many of these issues. Separate normal vote analyses were run for the South and non-South on every item. While the magnitude of the partisan and short-term components differed between the regions somewhat, the basic pattern of the components was remarkably similar on all the issues. That is, issues that were partisan in the non-South were also partisan in the South; defection from the normal vote occurred among the same attitude groups in both regions. This is further evidence for the contention of V. O. Key that, racial attitudes aside, the political attitudes of Southerners are very similar to those of people outside the South. Key, , Public Opinion and American Democracy, pp. 99–105 Google Scholar.

18 White, Theodore H., The Making of the President 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), Chaps. 4 and 9Google Scholar.

19 Robinson, John P., “Public Reaction to Political Protest: Chicago 1968,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 24 (Spring, 1970), 1–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Converse, et al., “Continuity and Change in American Politics,” p. 1087 Google Scholar.

20 Campbell, Angus, Gurin, Gerald, and Miller, Warren E., The Voter Decides (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1954), p. 52 Google Scholar.

21 Stouffer, Samuel A., Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), p. 59 Google Scholar.

22 Bean, Louis H., Influences in the 1954 Mid-Term Elections (Washington: Public Affairs Institute, 1954), p. 22 Google Scholar. This conclusion is supported by Polsby, Nelson W., “Towards an Explanation of McCarthyism,” Political Studies, 8 (10., 1960), 250–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 McClosky, et al., “Issue Conflict and Consensus Among Party Leaders and Followers,” pp. 418–19Google Scholar. McClosky did find some differences between the party followings on “bread and butter” issues such as farm prices, business regulation, taxes, and minimum wages. These differences are minor compared to the differences presented in Figure 8, however.

24 See Figures 1, 5, 2, and 9 respectively for the exact wordings of the items.

25 White, , Making of the President, 1968, p. 371 Google Scholar.

26 White, p. 365.

27 Kevin Phillips's view is the same. “Fears that a Republican administration would undermine Social Security, Medicare, collective bargaining, and aid to education played a major part in keeping socially conservative blue-collar workers and senior citizens loyal to the 1968 Democratic candidate.” Phillips, Kevin P., The Emerging Republican Majority (Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1969), p. 464 Google Scholar.

28 Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954), Chap. 12Google Scholar.

29 The correlation is between evaluations of Johnson and Humphrey on the SRC “feeling thermometer.” Weisburg, and Rusk, , “Dimensions of Candidate Evaluation,” p. 1173 Google Scholar.

30 We might call this the Barkley Effect, after Alben Barkley's tale of a constituent he had befriended many times who expressed to Barkley an intention to vote against Barkley in a forthcoming election. When Barkley reminded him of the many favors he had given the man in the past, the constituent responded, “Yeah, but what in hell have you done for me lately?” The story is quoted in Matthews, Donald, U.S. Senators and Their World (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 218 Google Scholar.

31 Campbell, et al., The American Voter, pp. 554–55Google Scholar.

32 For further empirical evidence of party equilibrium, see the list compiled by Stokes, and Iverson, , “On the Existence of Forces Restoring Party Competition,” in Campbell, et al., Elections and the Political Order, pp. 180–93Google Scholar. For other explanations of party equilibrium, see the list compiled by Stokes and Iverson, p. 181. See also the discussion of Schattschneider, E. E., Party Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1942) pp. 93–98 Google Scholar. Schattschneider explains the recuperative powers of the second major party in terms of its monopoly of opposition and the disadvantages for the party in power of a large majority. This latter point is one of the early statements of the size principle derived by Riker, William H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 32–76 Google Scholar.

33 Key, V. O. Jr., “Public Opinion and the Decay of Democracy.” Virginia Quarterly Review, 37 (Autumn, 1961), 481–94Google Scholar. A shorter presentation of the argument appears in his book, Public Opinion and American Democracy, pp. 555–58. One might wonder what Key means by the failure of public policy: is failure defined by some objective standard or is it subjectively defined by people? This raises all the thorny problems of an interpersonal comparison of utilities and a social welfare function. Key seems to have some objective standard in mind, although he does not suggest who determines failure in any particular instance. I am more interested here in the issue of who influences policy making than the evaluation of the merits of policy. For the purposes of this discussion, evaluation is presumed to be the prerogative of each voter.

34 This presentation owes much to a lucid discussion by Pomper, Gerald M., Elections in America: Control and Influence in Democratic Politics (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968), Chap. 10Google Scholar. To use Tingsten's phrase (if not all of the rationale that produced it), “The public … [is a] consumer rather than [a] producer of political demands and candidates.” Tingsten, Herbert, The Problem of Democracy (Totowa, N.J.: The Bedminster Press, 1965), p. 198 Google Scholar. See also, Key, , Public Opinion and American Democracy, pp. 472–78Google Scholar; Sorauf, Frank J., Political Parties in the American System (Boston: Little, Brown 1964), Chap. 7Google Scholar; Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), Chap. 3Google Scholar; and Benewick, R. J., Birch, A. H., Blumler, J. G., and Ewbank, Alison, “The Floating Voter and the Liberal View of Representation,” Political Studies, 17 (06, 1969), 177–195 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Friedrich's Rule of Anticipated Reactions. Freidrich, Carl J., Man and His Government (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 199–215 Google Scholar.

36 Key, V. O. Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 5th ed. (New York: Crowell, 1964), p. 544 Google Scholar. The quote also appears in Pomper, , Elections in America, p. 252 Google Scholar.

37 A party could win an electoral majority by systematically taking positions favored by a minority. Dahl, Robert A., A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 124–31Google Scholar. This situation Downs calls a “coalition of minorities.” It stands as a contrast to a “passionate majority,” which occurs only when there is a consensus on which issues are important as well as a consensus of preferences on the issues. Downs, , Economic Theory of Democracy, pp. 64–69 Google Scholar.

38 Pomper, , Elections in America, p. 252 Google Scholar.

39 See the discussion of the electoral impact of the War, Korean by Miller, Warren E., “Voting and Foreign Policy,” in Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy, ed. Rosenau, James, (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 213–30Google Scholar.

40 Key, , Public Opinion and American Democracy, p. 261 Google Scholar; Kahn, Herman, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 418 Google Scholar; Brzezinski, Zbigniew and Huntington, Samuel P., Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 414 Google Scholar. These and other writers are discussed in a good article on this issue, Waltz, Kenneth N., “Electoral Punishment and Foreign Policy Crises,” in Rosenau, , pp. 263–294 Google Scholar. Waltz does not agree with the general conclusion that the public will not support a limited war. Rather, he blames the lack of broad-based support for the Korean War on the failure of the Truman administration to explain its policy adequately to the public because of his administration's own uncertainty over its goals (pp. 279–80). Waltz does not, however, either have any direct evidence about the impact of opinion on votes or any indirect evidence about the intensity of opinion on these issues. Lacking this type of information, one cannot easily judge how governmental policy will affect votes or how votes will affect policy. This same problem confronts those who have found permissive majorities supporting the Vietnam war. See, for example, Verba, Sidney, Brody, Richard A., Parker, Edwin B., Nie, Norman H., Polsby, Nelson W., Ekman, Paul, and Black, Gordon S., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” American Political Science Review, 61 (06, 1967), 321 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Caspary, William R., “The ‘Mood Theory’: A Study of Public Opinion and Foreign Policy,” American Political Science Review, 64 (06, 1970), 546 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a sobering discussion of the difficulties of interpreting the significance of opinion polls and support for the Vietnam War, see Converse, Philip E. and Schuman, Howard, “’Silent Majorities’ and the Vietnam War,” Scientific American, 222 (06, 1970), 17–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Rosenburg, , Converse, , and Verba, , Vietnam and the Silent Majority, p. 38 Google Scholar.

42 Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., “Constituency Influence in Congress,” in Campbell, et al., Elections and the Political Order, p. 359 Google Scholar.

43 Actually, the 1964 SRC sample does not include a single Negro Goldwater voter. Greenstein, Fred I., The American Party System and the American People, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 26 Google Scholar. In France, religion has been an issue having a similar degree of crystallization and polarization. See Converse, Philip E. and Dupeux, Georges, “Politicization of the Electorate in France and the United States,” in Campbell, et al., Elections and the Political Order, pp. 289–90Google Scholar.

44 Sources of platform and campaign positions are White, Making of the President 1968, Chester, Lewis, Hodgson, Godfrey, and Page, Bruce, An American Melodrama (New York: Viking Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Congressional Quarterly Almanac, pp. 942–1046; and The Presidential Nominating Convention: 1968 (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1968)Google Scholar.

45 Klapper, Joseph T., The Effects of Mass Communications (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

46 The literature on this subject is mammoth. See Westie, Frank R., “Race and Ethnic Relations,” in Handbook of Modern Sociology, ed. Faris, Robert E. L., (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 576–618 Google Scholar.

47 Downs, , Economic Theory of Democracy, pp. 64–69 Google Scholar.

48 A pioneering attempt to measure the impact of issue positions on votes is found in Pool, Ithiel de Sola, Abelson, Robert P., and Popkin, Samuel, Candidates, Issues, and Strategies: A Computer Simulation of the 1960 and 1964 Presidential Elections (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1965)Google Scholar. No one has completed a rigorous development of the technique, however.

49 Converse, et al., “Continuity and Change in American Politics,” p. 1086 Google Scholar; Hyman, Herbert H. and Sheatsley, Paul B., “Attitudes Toward Desegregation,” Scientific American, 211 (07, 1964), 16–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sheatsley, Paul B., “White Attitudes Towards the Negro,” Daedalus, 95 (Winter, 1966), 217–38Google Scholar. Perhaps a proper interpretation of the backlash is that racial opinions have become increasingly salient for the declining numbers of people holding prejudiced attitudes.

50 Congressional Quarterly Almanac, pp. 152–68. This report contains a good description of the act and an account of the politics of its enactment.

51 Gallup Opinion Index (07, 1968), 19–20 Google Scholar.

52 See, for example, Sheatsley, , “White Attitudes Towards the Negro,” p. 221 Google Scholar. This position is rarely stated explicitly in the literature, but it is implicit in much of the evidence that political, business, and social leaders are more liberal than the public on civil rights issues.

53 Converse, and Schuman, , “‘Silent Majorities’ and the Vietnam War,” pp. 17–25 Google Scholar.

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