Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core (original) (raw)

1 Lazarsfeld, Paul P., Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944)Google Scholar. It is paradoxical that Lazarsfeld and his associates should have come to so static a view of party preference, since the desire to observe changes of preference was so central to their original intentions. Had they worked within the context of an election such as that of 1952 it is entirely unlikely that they could have ignored the presence of massive inter-election change, overlaid on the social bases of preference summarized in the Index of Political Predisposition.

2 For a report of the application of this model to the Eisenhower elections see Stokes, Donald E., Campbell, Angus, and Miller, Warren E., “Components of Electoral Decision,” this Review, 52 (06 1958), 367–387Google Scholar.

3 The vertical coordinate of Figure 1, as well as of Figures 2 and 3, gives the value of the quantity

defined in the appendix. As explained there, this quantity may be interpreted either at the individual level as the average amount by which a given dimension has increased (or lessened, in the case of negative values) the probability of the individual's voting Republican or at the level of the whole electorate as the proportion of the total two-party vote by which a given dimension has increased (or lessened) the Republican share.

4 For direct additional evidence on this point see Converse, Philip E., Clausen, Aage R., and Miller, Warren E., “Electoral Myth and Reality: The 1964 Election,” this Review, 59 (06 1965), p. 332Google Scholar.

5 For evidence on the distribution of party identification in this period see “The Concept of the ‘Normal Vote’,” in Campbell, A., Converse, P., Miller, W., and Stokes, D., Elections and the Political Order (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, Ch. 1.

7 Certainly evidence of it is plentiful enough in the Center's studies. See, for example, Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), pp. 120–145Google Scholar. An excellent general review of the achievement of cognitive congruence in political attitudes is given by Lane, Robert E. and Sears, David O. in their Public Opinion (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964)Google Scholar. An interesting application of these concepts to attitude change may be found in Sullivan, Denis G., “Psychological Balance and Reactions to the Presidential Nominations in 1960,” in Jennings, M. Kent and Zeigler, L. Harmon, (eds.) The Electoral Process (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1966), pp. 238–264Google Scholar.

9 The voter's attitude toward a given political object may be influenced by the presence of other objects in his perceptual field even when no question of order is involved in the formation of attitude. In such a case, however, it is more reasonable to think of these effects as belonging to the configuration of stimulus objects, rather than to the voter's response dispositions.