The Causal Relationships between Issues, Candidate Evaluations, Party Identification, and Vote Choice--the View From "Rolling Thunder"

1988 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 961-984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. Whiteley
1988 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 1309-1319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Kenney ◽  
Tom W. Rice

Recent research has altered our understanding of how voters select a candidate in U.S. presidential elections. Scholars have demonstrated empirically that issues, candidate personalities, candidate evaluations, and party identification interact in a dynamic simultaneous fashion to determine vote choice. Other researchers have shown that prenomination candidate preferences play an integral role in structuring the general election vote. We join together these two important trends to introduce and test a revised model of vote choice, using 1980 NES panel data. The results reconfirm that candidate selection is part of a dynamic simultaneous process and reveal for the first time that prenomination preferences are woven tightly into this causal web.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Hawley

AbstractPrior to the 2012 presidential election, some commentators speculated that Mitt Romney's status as a devout and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would undermine his presidential aspirations. Using the 2012 American National Election Survey, this study examines the relationship between attitudes toward Mormons and voter behavior in the United States in that election year. It finds that attitudes toward Mormons had a statistically-significant effect on turnout — though these effects differed according to party identification. It additionally finds that these attitudes influenced vote choice. In both cases, the substantive effects were small, indicating that anti-Mormon feelings did play a role in the 2012 presidential election, but they did not determine the final outcome.


2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN ANSOLABEHERE ◽  
JONATHAN RODDEN ◽  
JAMES M. SNYDER

A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy, or moral issues—eliminates a large amount of measurement error and reveals issue preferences that are well structured and stable. This stability increases steadily as the number of survey items increases and can approach that of party identification. Second, we show that once measurement error has been reduced through the use of multiple measures, issue preferences have much greater explanatory power in models of presidential vote choice, again approaching that of party identification.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cletus Famous Nwankwo

Abstract This article examines the influence of religion on voter choice homogeneity (VCH) in the Nigerian presidential elections of the fourth republic (1999–2015). The result indicates that in the first two elections, religion did not have a significant impact on VCH but had increasing influence from 2011. Thus, compared with the 1999 and 2003 elections, the effect of faith in 2011 and 2015 elections was positive, but the impact of religion was highest in 2015, having a significant and robust effect on VCH. Thus, the paper demonstrates that impact of faith in the presidential elections in the fourth republic has strengthened over time. This finding is, however, put in the context of each election regarding the role of candidates’ popularity, party-identification, ethnicity, candidates’ performance, the number of candidates contesting the election and the position of prominent leaders of the different regions of the country. The paper demonstrates that placing the influence of religion on vote choice in the context of each election and place-specific manifestation of VCH is pertinent in understanding better how religion shapes voting behaviour in Nigeria.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205316801668663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Jasmin Mayer

While positive party identification is one of the most used concepts in election studies, negative partisanship (NPID) is rarely analyzed. Evidence from two-party systems or settings with majority voting shows that hostility towards one of the other parties has its own unique impact on voting behavior. However, this effect has not been analyzed in the context of European multi-party systems with proportional voting. In this paper, I utilize data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, Module 3, which demonstrates that negative partisanship has its own positive effect on turnout (about nine percentage points). In addition, negative partisanship affects vote choice by 2–6 percentage points. However, contrary to previous findings, NPID does not always affect voting for one of the other parties; no significant relationship was found between NPID and vote choice for Conservative/Christian Democratic and Liberal parties. The results of this study add to the growing literature on negative partisanship and demonstrate its importance in the analysis of voting behavior in multi-party systems.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 855-879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Bell ◽  
Julie Aitken Schermer ◽  
Philip A. Vernon

Abstract.This article provides a behaviour genetic heritability analysis of several political issues, including social and economic conservatism, general interest in politics, attitudes toward the major Canadian federal parties, federal party identification and national vote choice. Substantial genetic effects were found for four of six political attitude scales, with heritability values ranging from 41 per cent to 73 per cent. Genetic effects are also reported for several individual items (including feelings toward the major federal parties, party identification and vote choice), with heritabilities from 33 per cent to 62 per cent. The implications of these results for conventional political analyses are explored. Also presented is a theoretical interpretation of political heritability that is derived from an evolutionary perspective which suggests that political personalities or temperaments have evolved that are analogous to the heritable personality structures proposed by psychologists.Résumé.Cet article propose une analyse sur l'héritabilité de la génétique du comportement concernant plusieurs questions politiques, y compris le conservatisme social et économique, l'intérêt général pour la politique, les attitudes envers les principaux partis fédéraux canadiens, l'identification à un parti et le choix de vote au niveau national. Des effets génétiques notables ont été recensés pour quatre des échelles politiques d'attitude sur six, les taux d'héritabilité s'étendant de 41 pour cent à 73 pour cent. Des effets génétiques ont également été recensés pour plusieurs autres éléments étudiés (y compris les sentiments envers les principaux partis fédéraux, l'identification à un parti et le choix de vote), les taux d'héritabilité allant cette fois-ci de 33 pour cent à 62 pour cent. Cette étude explore l'incidence de ces résultats sur des analyses politiques conventionnelles. Il s'agit aussi d'une interprétation théorique de l'héritabilité politique dérivant d'une perspective évolutionnaire, qui suggère que les personnalités ou les tempéraments politiques ont évolué et que ces derniers sont analogues aux structures de personnalité transmissibles proposées par les psychologues.


The Forum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-545
Author(s):  
Anne M. Cizmar ◽  
John McTague

Abstract This paper examines the role of authoritarianism in the 2018 US congressional elections. In particular, we assess whether the issues that have historically been central to the authoritarian divide in the American electorate were salient in the campaigns of several important Senate races. We demonstrate that authoritarian attitudes played a consistent, significant role on presidential vote choice, party identification, and numerous policy areas in the 2016 presidential election using data from the American National Election Studies. Using case studies of six Senate races in the 2018 midterm elections, we find that authoritarianism was more muted than in 2016, and that the role of authoritarianism varied considerably depending upon the race. States with stronger Trump support in 2016 featured authoritarianism more heavily than states with less Trump support in 2016, but authoritarianism overall was not as prominent in 2018 as in 2016. Overall, Senate candidates relied on traditional campaign messages related to candidate qualifications, personal attacks, the economy, and other messages less central to authoritarianism.


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