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From Life Space to Polling Place: The Relevance of Personal Concerns for Voting Behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Richard A. Brody  and
Paul M. Sniderman
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Extract

To live is to have problems. However the country as a whole fares, the individual has bills to pay, work to do, children to worry about – to mention only a few of the commonplace problems that people face in their daily lives. Commonplace or not, these are problems that people must wrestle with. They are immediate, inescapable, and serious, far more so for most than the ‘large’ issues facing the country. Students of voting have long suspected that such problems may influence political choices, but key questions remain unanswered. Which personal problems are taken to be political and which non-political? Do personal problems have an impact on voting behavior only if they are taken to be political? When and how do personal problems become translated into political choices? In this paper we shall address such questions as these.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 1977 , pp. 337 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Sniderman, Paul M. and Brody, Richard A., ‘Coping: The Ethic of Self-Reliance’, American Journal of Political Science, XXI (1977), in press.Google Scholar

2 This item and the sequence were part of the ‘Form II’ sample in the post-election wave of the Center for Political Studies/Inter-University Consortium for Political Research study of the 1972 American national election. See The CPS American National Election Study (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, 08 1973), pp. 343–6.Google Scholar

3 Another 16 per cent replied that they had no problem and we probed no further on this matter; 6 per cent of the 1,109 respondents replied ‘don't know’ or were not asked the question to begin with.

4 For the full text of the codes see note 13 in the codebook for The CPS 1972 American National Election Study, Vol. 3, pp. 807–15.Google Scholar

5 Since other assessments of personal ‘fears’ report multiple responses it is hard to make direct comparisons of the distribution of personal problems in our sample with others. Generally speaking, our probe brought forth many fewer ‘health’ and ‘war’ responses than have other studies. See Cantril, Albert H. and Roll, Charles W. Jr, Hopes and Fears of the American People (New York: Universe Books, 1971), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

6 Eighty per cent of the sample falls into one of these three classes. The twenty-six respondents who are concerned about ‘safety’ and the 178 who said they had no problem are left out of this scheme.

7 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), Chap. 5.Google Scholar

8 We have followed Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes in operationalizing ‘habituation to voting’ with the item that probes regularity of voting in past elections. ‘Involvement’ is measured by an index which combines: strength of partisanship, interest in the campaign, political efficacy, sense of citizen duty, and concern about the outcome of the election. These elements were factor-analyzed to achieve a one-factor solution and a weighted index based on the factor loadings was computed as follows: ·09 (strength of partisanship)+·21 (concern over outcome)+·26 (sense of political efficacy)+·29 (sense of citizen duty)+·36 (interest in the campaign). As is customary, all variables were standardized.

To replicate the American Voter index as faithfully as possible, the index was partitioned into nine equal intervals. The distribution of the 1972 sample on this nine-step index is as follows:

Our indexing procedure produces a variable that relates to turnout very much in the same way that the American Voter index did in 1956:

gamma1956 = ·53. gamma1972 = ·60.

9 Our finding that only one American in twenty who has a personal concern looks to a private relief agency (e.g. Church or organized charity) is simply a re-discovery of the fact, established since the inception of polling, that self and government are virtually the only agents of relief that Americans consider. See, for example, Erskine, Helen, ‘The Polls: Government Role in Welfare’, Public Opinion Quarterly, XXXIX (1975), 257–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 See, for example, the articles, comments and rejoinders in the American Political Science Review, LXIX (1975), 1232–69.Google Scholar

11 This contrast of course excludes the ‘self-reliant’; those who did not mention that they believed government ought to be helping were not asked if it was being helpful.

12 The reasons for this perversity are not clear to us. Support among Republicans for the incumbent was so overwhelming in 1972 that any of a vast number of factors could singly or in concert have produced this apparently anomalous result.

13 Brody, Richard A. and Sniderman, Paul M., ‘Personal Problems and Public Support for the Political System’, (paper presented at the Conference on Political Alienation, Iowa City, 01 1975).Google Scholar

14 See, for example, the exchange between Miller, Arthur H. and Citrin, Jack: Miller, Arthur H., ‘Political Issues and Trust in Government: 1964–1970’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 951–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Citrin, Jack, ‘Comment: The Political Relevance of Trust in Government’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 973–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although Miller and Citrin disagree on many points, they agree that cynicism is not related to turnout.

15 Sears, David O. and Whitney, Richard E., ‘Political Persuasion’ in Pool, I. de S. et al. , eds., Handbook of Communication (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1973).Google Scholar

16 Crozier, Michel J., Huntington, Samuel P. and Watanuki, Joji, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1976).Google Scholar