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Perceptions of Class and Party in Voting Behavior: 1952*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Heinz Eulau
Heinz Eulau
Affiliation:
Antioch College
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Extract

Political differences among people are not a matter of chance; they are significantly related to such interdependent variables as party identification, issue orientation, and candidate preference. The national sample survey of 1,614 respondents conducted by the Survey Research Center during the 1952 presidential election gives us a sound basis for investigating this phenomenon: 1,200 of the respondents were classified as “middle class” or “working class.” Of the 389 middle class people, 69 per cent said they preferred the Republican candidate, but only 43 per cent of the 811 working class people expressed this preference (Table I).

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 1955 , pp. 364 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1955

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References

1 See Campbell, Angus, Gurin, Gerald, and Miller, Warren E., The Voter Decides (Evanston, Ill., 1954)Google Scholar; and “Political Issues and the Vote: November, 1952”, this Review, Vol. 47, pp. 359–85 (June, 1953)Google Scholar.

2 Of the original sample of 1,614 respondents interviewed both prior to and after the election, 414 cases, including farmers, housewives, and other occupational groupings, had to be dropped because they could not be properly classified as “middle class” or “working class.”

3 Garceau, Oliver, “Research in the Political Process”, this Review, Vol. 45, pp. 69–85, at p. 82 (March, 1951)Google Scholar.

4 However, there may be some legitimacy in using these terms. On a “subjective” index of social class, not used here, 35 per cent of the respondents identified themselves as “middle class,” 58 per cent as “working class,” two per cent as “upper class,” and another two per cent as “lower class,” while three per cent did not know or could not be ascertained. In other words, 93 per cent of all respondents accepted either “middle class” or “working class” as properly descriptive of their class position.

5 Dahl, Robert A. and Lindblom, Charles E., Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New York, 1953), p. 295Google Scholar.

6 MacIver, Robert M., The Web of Government (New York, 1947), p. 211Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 122.

8 See Dahl and Lindblom, pp. 330–33, for a list.

9 See Key, V. O. Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (New York, 1952), p. 231Google Scholar, for relevant items.

10 From the point of view of the individual person, the tendency of people to see themselves and others in similar ways may be explained in terms of “perception” theory: because people have the need to feel supported in their political practices and opinions, they tend to perceive those whom they like and are associated with as seeing things in very much the same way as they do themselves. These perceptions may be close to reality, or they may be distorted. In either case they fulfill the same psychological function.

11 The same question was asked concerning the expected voting behavior of the middle class people, farmers, big business men, labor unionists, Negroes, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

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