Band 10, Heft 3 - A Voting Paradox in Modern American Politics

Despite mountains of election returns, opinion surveys, and controlled experiments, political scientists have not offered a particularly compelling explanation for the most important conundrum facing students of U.S. elections: how could we have had such different election results across the past decade when the electorate is so polarized along partisan lines? Relying mostly on data from the American National Election Studies, this article examines the nature of party attachments and presidential voting in the 2000s, with an eye towards estimating the relative importance of persuasion and mobilization for variation in electoral outcomes. I also consider the most obvious source for future party system transformation: the mobilization of Hispanic-American and Asian-American voting cohorts.

Swing voters are persuadable voters: voters who are not so solidly committed to one candidate or the other as to make all efforts at persuasion futile. This article examines the paradoxical position of swing voters in contemporary presidential elections. On the one hand, the number of swing voters in the U.S. electorate has been declining since at least the 1970s. Yet those that remain play a critical role in determining who gets elected president. Since neither party’s base vote constitutes a majority of the voters, and since the number of each party’s identifiers in the electorate has become increasingly equal, presidential general election campaigns will continue to be a struggle to win over the swing voters.

The conventional portrait of House elections is that they are overwhelmingly constituted of incumbents who are increasingly safe. Yet the evidence does not support that picture. Widespread incumbency and electoral volatility can much more easily coexist than the conventional wisdom has suggested. Many Members are indeed vulnerable, which makes party control vulnerable as well.

Are Americans ideological, and if so, what are the foundations of their ideology? According to Converse’s seminal view, whatever the case in other western democracies and despite its centrality to traditional versions of textbook democracy, the American public is distinctly non-ideological. Our objective is to compare the standard and by far most widely used measure of political ideology—a measure that presumes ideology is one-dimensional—to a more recent measure that allows for a multi-dimensional conception and measurement. This measure demonstrates that while American political elites compete across a single dimension of conflict, the American people organize their policy attitudes around two distinct dimensions, one economic and one social. After explaining how we derived the measure and how it can be used to develop five separate ideological groups, we show how these groups differ politically and why it is not possible to map their preferences onto a one-dimensional measure of ideology.

The Myth of the Independent Voter crystallized views that were becoming accepted in political science and began an effort to convince the press that self-described independent voters were not truly independent, but that these “leaners” were really closet partisans. Despite the success of that book, its argument has come with a cost. Most especially, a misrepresentation of the argument can play into the myth of a deeply polarized electorate. When scrutinized closely, it becomes clear that Americans often vote in a highly partisan way, yet they are far less likely to think in a clearly partisan fashion. All partisans, but especially weak partisans and independent leaners, disagree frequently with their respective parties. Indeed, just as we no longer see independents as a united block, we should avoid making claims that partisans are united, because even though these partisans often vote alike, they do not always think alike.

Previous research has shown that Independents who lean towards the Democratic or Republican parties exhibit voting behavior similar to outright partisans. Less attention has been paid to the policy positions of Independent leaners. In this article we compare the policy positions of Independent leaners, Strong and not very strong Democrats and Republicans, and Pure Independents on five policy issues: the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the 2009 stimulus bill, the war in Iraq, abortion, and same sex marriage. On all five issues, Independent leaners are policy partisans; their positions are almost identical to the positions of outright partisans, and quite different from the views of Pure Independents. Analyses which consider Independents as one monolithic block are just as erroneous on policy issues as they are on political behavior.

The ideal of the Independent citizen has not fared well in survey research. The study of party identification recast Independence from parties as a weakness rather than strength. Others, however, have derided the gloomy findings about Independents as a myth; those Independents who profess partisan leanings appear to deserve better. Our examination of partisan leaners then and now finds that, oddly enough, the gloomy conclusion about Independents then was off the mark. In 1952, partisan leaners surpassed party identifiers in being politically involved and informed. Nowadays, however, the reverse is true. The partisan leaners, let alone pure Independents, have handed over the edge on positive qualities to party identifiers. We surmise that these changes have occurred due to increased polarization. Nonetheless, then and now partisan leaners prove far too volatile to qualify for the long-term partisanship that is found among party identifiers.

The United States faces a severe fiscal crisis, a crisis unparalleled since the immediate post-World War II era. Unlike then, the capacity for the U.S. to survive this crisis without serious consequence will depend on our capacity to overcome growing political polarization. This paper explores the gravity of the debt situation, outlines the recent history leading to the crisis, investigates the capacity of the U.S. to solve the crisis in a time of political polarization, and speculates on what we might expect in the future.

For every American who identifies himself as a liberal, there are two conservatives. Practically all Republicans see themselves as such, but many Democrats are not liberals. The political system works quite well from one specific viewpoint: it delivers what the majority says it wants—rather conservative policies, including the period 2008-2012. Conservative Democrats in Congress help pass GOP items, but GOP representatives almost never vote for liberal items. The question is, given that the majority gets what it seeks, why is this majority so alienated? The article offer several explanations.

Political Scientists can learn quite a bit about the Obama presidency by reading Jodi Kantor's The Obamas, but they will need to wade through some journalistic fluff to do so.