Unchanging American Voter - Softcover

Smith, Eric R. A. N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520068300 ISBN 13: 9780520068308

Verlag: University of California Press, 1989

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"One of the most elegant pieces of political analysis I have seen in years. It challenges a generation of research on 'levels of conceptualization' and supposed change in the nature of the electorate, and it does so clearly, thoroughly, and convincingly. . . .A truly superior work."—Gary Jacobson, University of California, San Diego

"This book is technically sophisticated, clearly written, and it makes an important point. It will have a significant impact on students of public opinion and voting."—Henry Brady, University of Chicago

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"One of the most elegant pieces of political analysis I have seen in years. It challenges a generation of research on 'levels of conceptualization' and supposed change in the nature of the electorate, and it does so clearly, thoroughly, and convincingly. . . .A truly superior work." Gary Jacobson, University of California, San Diego

"This book is technically sophisticated, clearly written, and it makes an important point. It will have a significant impact on students of public opinion and voting." Henry Brady, University of Chicago

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The Unchanging American Voter

By Eric R. A. N. Smith

University of California Press

Copyright © 1989 Eric R. A. N. Smith
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520068300
Introduction

How much the American people know about politics has been a topic of a good deal of investigation and concern by political scientists over the years. Before the behavioral revolution in the 1940s, scholars and social commentators used to assume, without much evidence, that people know a great deal about politics. The image of rustic farmers sitting around the cracker barrel in the country store discussing politics is well fixed in American political mythology. The behavioral revolution rudely challenged that myth. In a series of studies of voting, behavioralists developed evidence showing that most voters do not know very much about politics (Berelson et al. 1954; Campbell and Kahn 1952; Campbell et al. 1954; Lazarsfeld et al. 1944). By the end of the 1950s, the situation had progressed to the point at which V. O. Key found it necessary to write a book defending the proposition that "voters are not fools" (Key with Cummings 1966, p. 7).

In recent American electoral behavior, how much voters know about politics and whether they should be considered "sophisticated" has continued to be the subject of debate.1 That debate centers around the description of the American voter put forth by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes in their classic study, The American Voter (1960), and later fleshed out by Converse in "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" (1964). The description they gave was not a particularly glowing one. The typical American voter, according to these investigators, knows little about politics, is not interested in

Kinder (1983) declared the matter settled, but as Luskin (1987) notes, debate and disagreement continue (Inglehart 1985; Jackson 1983; Peffley and Hurwitz 1985).

politics, does not participate in politics, does not organize his or her political attitudes in a coherent manner, and does not think in structured, ideological terms.

The latter two aspects of that description have come to be thought of as political sophistication. To be sophisticated, according to this view, people must have some sort of abstract principles with which they organize their beliefs and attitudes on the issues. For instance, one might believe in the principles of liberalism and hold a corresponding set of liberal opinions on the issues.

The findings of Philip Converse and The American Voter on this score were that remarkably few people were sophisticated. Only about half the people even recognized the terms "liberal" and "conservative," and only a few percent actually thought about politics in those terms. People's attitudes were also fairly mixed up—with most voters holding a seemingly incoherent mixture of liberal, moderate, and conservative positions. In short, few people seemed to have the sophistication necessary to follow politics at the level on which the nation's political leaders discussed it.

That description of the American public was, as it was later characterized, static. The voter Campbell and his colleagues described was not the voter of the late 1950s (the time at which they collected the data), but the unchanging American voter of all time. Although Campbell et al. thought that some changes were likely to occur—rising education would yield more informed and active voters, voting law changes would bring more people to the polls, and so forth—they thought they had identified the basic character of American voters and the factors that influenced them.

This picture of the unchanging American voter was challenged in a series of articles by political scientists who studied changes in the American electorate in the 1960s. The articles by Bennett (1973), Field and Anderson (1969), Nie and Andersen (1974), Pierce (1970, 1975), and Pomper (1972), as well as Nie, Verba, and Petrocik's The Changing American Voter (1976), argued that the electorate had made a great leap forward in political sophistication and ideological thinking between the 1960 and 1964 presidential elections. Their argument was that people change in response to the changing environment and that, in particular, the surge of protest and ideological rhetoric between 1960 and 1964 had resulted in a surge of sophistication. People learned to understand politics better, to relate the issues to the candidates more accurately, and to cast more intelligent, informed votes.

This sequence of events is the topic of this book. What happened in the

1960s? Did the "great leap forward" really happen? From a broader perspective, how much do people change in response to changes in their political environments? This is not merely a question of the political history of the 1960s. This is a question about the political nature of the citizenry. Can American society change so that people will learn more about politics, become more discerning in their selections of candidates, and grow more sophisticated in the ways they think about politics?

My thesis is that the answer is largely no. To be sure, many changes have occurred and will continue to occur. A complete review of the literature describing how the electorate has changed would fill many volumes.2 Yet for society as a whole, there is little to suggest that voters either did or will become more or less sophisticated as time goes by.

Before the articles alleging that sophistication had grown in the 1960s, The American Voter's static picture of people was generally accepted. Those who argued that voters became more sophisticated between 1960 and 1964 relied on two sets of evidence—changes in the level of conceptualization index and changes in various indexes of attitude consistency. Those indexes are methodologically flawed. The problem is that the indexes are time-bound. As I shall explain, the level of conceptualization index simply cannot be compared across time under any circumstances. Indexes of attitude consistency have problems when being compared across time in general and, because of changes in question wording between 1960 and 1964, cannot be used at all to measure changes over those specific years. The result is that the evidence upon which the great leap forward argument hangs cannot be accepted. Without any evidence in favor of the hypothesis that there was a surge in sophisticated thinking in the 1960s, one must reject it and accept the null hypothesis—namely, that Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes were right.

To further the case against the surging sophistication hypothesis, we will look at the other available measures of sophistication. Aside from levels of conceptualization and attitude consistency, there are only a few ways to measure sophistication over time. Although each measure has its own problems, the problems are not as serious as those facing the levels of conceptualization and attitude consistency indexes. The result of my look at other measures supports The American Voter's thesis. The other measures show no change.

See, for instance, Abramson (1983), Burnham (1970), Crotty and Jacobson (1980), Hill and Luttbeg (1983), Ladd and Hadley (1978), Lipset and Schneider (1983), Petrocik (1981), Sundquist (1983), Wattenberg (1984).

Finally, we will develop and test a model to explain political sophistication. Having built the model, I will use it to find out what changes in the independent variables...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1989
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520068300
• ISBN 13: 9780520068308
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 289
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag; orders-books@degruyter.com; ; Genthinerstr. 13; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland