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References
See, for example, Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes,The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), pp. 128–136; Philip E. Converse and George Dupeux, “De Gaulle and Eisenhower: The Public Image of Victorious Generals”, in Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes,Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp. 292–349; Herbert F. Weisberg and Jerrold G. Rusk, “Dimensions of Candidate Evaluation”,American Political Science Review LXIV (1970), pp. 1167–85; and Benjamin I. Page, “Party Loyalty and the Popularity of Presidential Candidates” (unpublished manuscript, Feb. 1972).
This question is explored in Campbell et al.,The American Voter, pp. 64–115; Donald E. Stokes, “Some Dynamic Elements in Contests for the Presidency”,American Political Science Review LX (1966), pp. 19–28; and William Riker and Peter Ordeshook, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting”,American Political Science Review LXII (1968), pp. 25–42.
Stanley Kelley, Jr., Richard E. Ayres, and William G. Bowen, “Registration and Voting: Putting First Things First”,American Political Science Review LXI (1967), pp. 359–79.
Sidney Verba and Norman Nie,Participation in America (New York: Harper, 1972); Robert Lane,Political Life (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959); Lester Milbrath,Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961).
Anthony Downs,An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 39, 260–76; see also, Gerald Garvey, “The Theory of Party Equilibrium,”American Political Science Reviéw LX (1966); Otto Davis, Melvin Hinich, and Peter Ordeshook, “An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process”,The American Political Science Review LXIV (1970), pp. 426–48; Peter C. Ordeshook, “Extensions to a Model of the Electoral Process and Implications for the Theory of Responsible Parties”,Midwest Journal of Political Science 14 (Feb. 1970), pp. 43–70.
P. E. Converse, “The Concept of the Normal Vote”, in Campbell, et al.,Elections and the Political Order, op. cit., ( p. 24.
See the sources cited in footnote 5.
Campbell et al.,The American Voter, pp. 96–101, Riker and Ordeshook,loc. cit. Riker and Ordeshook give an excellent discussion of the logic of the turnout decision, and present some data indicating that indifference is one cause of abstention. Their measure of indifference, however, which depends on the respondent's own report of how much difference the election makes to him, may be somewhat more subject to rationalization than the measure used in this study, which is based on separate report of the evaluations of different candidates.
For example, expressive benefits might be included in the “D”, or non-contingent rewards of voting, term in the R=PB−C+D model of turnout. Riker and Ordeshook,loc. ci t., p. 28. See also William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook,An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 61–7; and, for applications to multi-candidate elections, Richard D. McKelvey and Peter C. Ordeshook, “A General Theory of the Calculus of Voting”, inMathematical Applications in Political Science Vol. 5 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1971) ed. J. F. Herndon, pp. 32–78.
Downs,op. cit., p. 119. Downs thereby attempted to resolve an inconsistency between his theory of turnout, which specifies abstention due to indifference only, and his theory of two-party competition, which apparently relies on abstention due to alienation. Downs,op. cit., pp. 260–76, 117–9.
A. P. Lerner and J. W. Singer, “Some Notes on Duopoly and Spatial Competition”,Journal of Political Economy XLV (1939), pp. 45–186; Arthur Smithies, “Optimum Location in Spatial Competition”,Journal of Political Economy XLIX (1941), pp. 432–9; Downs,op. cit., p. 117; Davis, Hinich and Ordeshook,loc. cit.; Melvin J. Hinich and Peter C. Ordeshook, “Abstentions and Equilibrium in the Electoral Process”,Public Choice, 7 (Fall 1969), pp. 81–106. As Hinich and Ordeshook show, alienation and bimodality of opinions are not sufficient, in themselves, to guarantee party divergence or even the existence of equilibrium. Downs also imposed severe restrictions on party mobility, not allowing movement past each other or past the midpoint of public opinion.
In the ORC/IEP survey respondents were given only these options; “don't know” and “not familiar enough to judge” have been combined into the neutral category. The SRC survey employed a more finely-grained measure, the “thermometer”, which included these five points and also permitted responses at any integer value between them. For a description of the thermometer, see Weisberg and Rusk, op. cit. Despite the apparently great differences between the ORC/IEP and SRC measures, empirical analysis — including that reported in this paper — has shown that they are virtually interchangeable, in part because SRC respondents used very few of their options. For a given candidate, the mean value of either scale is very nearly the same; correlations with other variables are highly similar; and the relationship with voting is practically identical. See Benjamin I. Page,loc. cit.
Bertram H. Raven and Philip S. Gallo, “The Effects of Nominating Conventions, Elections, and Reference Group Identifications Upon the Perceptions of Political Figures”,Human Relations 18 (1965), pp. 217–29; Page,loc. cit.
Benjamin I. Page, “Effects of Party Cleavages”, inPresidential Campaigning: The Rhetoric of Electoral Competition, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Stanford University, 1973), pp. 119–61.
We are grateful to Hayward R. Alker, Jr., for help in formulating the models tested in this section. An earlier version of this section was presented in Richard A. Brody, Benjamin I. Page, Sidney Verba and Jerome Laulicht, “Vietnam, the Urban Crisis and the 1968 Presidential Election: A Preliminary Analysis”, paper delivered at the 1969 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association.
This model is based on Duncan Luce's “beta response-strength” model, which is discussed briefly in R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter,Handbook of Mathematical Psychology (New York: Wiley, 1963) pp. 25–30.
Stokes,loc. cit., p. 58.
They were, in fact, highly dependent upon party identification. See, Benjamin I. Page,loc. cit.
This conclusion supports the anticipation of the authors ofThe American Voter; that for those with faint images of the candidates, party loyalty would exert an unusually direct effect. Campbellet al., The American Voter, p. 136.
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Partial support for this study was provided by the National Science Foundation (Grant #GS 2855), and by the International Data Archive, the University of Michigan. Some of the data were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research. These data were originally collected by the Survey Research Center Political Behavior Program, Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented herein. We wish to thank Merrill Shanks and Richard Juster for their help in the analysis of open-ended data.
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Brody, R.A., Page, B.I. Indifference, alientation and rational decisions. Public Choice 15, 1–17 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01718840
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01718840