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Ideology in the 1972 Election: Myth or Reality—A Rejoinder*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Arthur H. Miller  and
Warren E. Miller
Arthur H. Miller
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
Warren E. Miller
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
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American Political Science Review , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 832 - 849
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1976

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References

1 The early University of Michigan work most specifically focused on the impact of candidate attributes was reported in Stokes, Donald E., Campbell, Angus, and Miller, Warren E., “Components of Electoral Decision,” American Political Science Review, 52 (06 1958), 367–387CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” American Political Science Review, 60 (03 1966), 19–28Google Scholar.

2 “Comment on ‘A Majority Party in Disarray’” by Frederick Steeper and Robert Teeter reached us after the major arguments for this rejoinder had been developed; we thus make no specific reference to their piece. Their main discussion, which focused on the Vietnam issue, rests heavily on their interpretation of marginal distributions rather than on a cogent test determining if their Vietnam variables correlate with the vote or other criterion variables differently than did those used by CPS. As we did not have access to their data, and because their data apparently does not include questions about actual vote, further elaboration seems unnecessary. Our rejoinder does, however, deal with many of their arguments, especially their concluding comments.

“Comment: What Have You Done for Me Lately? Toward an Investment Theory of Voting” by Samuel L. Popkin, John W. Gorman, Charles Phillips and Jeffrey A. Smith will be referred to as the Popkin “Comment” for purposes of brevity (pp. 779–813).

3 The original version of “Majority Party in Disarray” was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in September, 1973. An initial evaluation of the paper by the Review produced specific instructions for shortening. The deleted material focused primarily on the candidates and the question of partisan realignment and has been published previously. See Miller, Arthur H. and Miller, Warren E., “Issues, Candidates and Partisan Divisions in the 1972 American Presidential Election,” British Journal of Political Science, 5 (10 1975), 393–434CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Miller, and Miller, , “Issues, Candidates and Partisan Divisions,” p. 422Google Scholar.

5 Ibid.

6 RePass, David, “Comment: Political Methodologies in Disarray,” p. 814Google Scholar.

7 Miller, and Miller, , “Issues, Candidates and Partisan Division,” p. 422Google Scholar.

8 The candidate and party affect measures used in the regressions were based on a series of questions asking respondents what they liked and disliked about each party and candidate. The positive and negative comments about each party and again for each candidate were summed to provide two indices, one for the parties and the other for the candidates. The final indices are “net” affect measures, that is, they indicate the preponderance of positive or negative attitudes toward the Republican candidate or party over those toward the Democratic candidate or party. These indices are similar but not identical to those originally employed by Donald E. Stokes in “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency.”

9 Popkin, , “Comment,” pp, 793–795Google Scholar.

10 See Weisberg, Herbert F. and Rusk, Jerrold G., “Dimensions of Candidate Evaluation,” American Political Science Review, 64 (12 1970), 1167–1185CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rusk, Jerrold G. and Weisberg, Herbert F., “Perceptions of Political Candidates: Implications for Electoral Change,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 16 (08 1972), 388–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 RePass, , “Comment,” p. 823Google Scholar.

12 Barber, James D., The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972)Google Scholar is most suggestive on this topic.

13 Popkin, , “Comment,” p. 794Google Scholar.

14 The factor analysis was accomplished by forming a series of dummy variables from the codes to the likes/dislikes questions that deal with candidate attributes. These dummy variables were coded “1” if the respondent mentioned a particular candidate characteristic and “0” if no mention was made. A tetrachoric r correlation matrix was then computed for the 34 resulting dummy variables and subjected to factor analysis; the resulting five dimensions accounted for 65 per cent of the total item variance. Tetrachoric r was considered the appropriate coefficient for this analysis because we sought information about the underlying dimensional structure. See Weisberg, Herbert F., “Models of Statistical Relationship,” American Political Science Review 68 (12 1974), 1638–1655CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a discussion of Tetrachoric r.

15 The six-components analysis as originally conducted by Stokes in “Some Dynamic Elements” employed six indices that were constructed from responses to the openended questions asking the survey respondents what they liked and disliked about the parties and the candidates. The six components or indices refer to (1) the personal characteristics of the Democratic candidate, (2) the personal characteristics of the Republican candidate, (3) party management, (4) domestic issues, (5) foreign issues, and (6) group benefits. Each index is scored to indicate the preponderance of negative or positive comments by subtracting the number of “dislike” statements related to the specific index from the number of “like” comments that the respondent volunteers.

16 See Miller and Miller, “Issues, Candidates and Partisan Divisions.”

17 RePass, , “Comment,” p. 823Google Scholar; italics added.

18 Eta is the appropriate statistic to use here because the theory leads to an expectation of a nonlinear relationship. Eta is sensitive to nonlinearity whereas Pearson's r is not.

19 Miller and Miller, “Issues, Candidates and Partisan Division,” incorporates a discussion that also explores the impact of party identification, the Eagleton affair and cultural orientation on candidate evaluations.

20 Popkin, , “Comment,” p. 782Google Scholar.

21 The Popkin and RePass suggestion that “Majority Party” understated the relative importance of the candidate factor has already been discussed and therefore needs no further elaboration.

The four variable causal model presented in footnote 30 of “Majority Party” also showed a larger direct effect of candidates on the vote but a slightly larger total effect for issues. To clear the confusion evidenced by RePass' footnote 17, it should be noted that only the total effects for the causal model were presented in the footnote both to save space and because they were the only statistics of relevance to the substantive discussion. Given our theoretical model, candidates and issues would not affect the vote through party identification; the total effects presented were therefore appropriate for our model.

22 Popkin, , “Comment,” p. 782Google Scholar.

23 Popkin, , “Comment,” pp. 783–784Google Scholar. It should be noted that the electoral impact of “group benefits” also varied by level of education in 1972. Group references had a larger impact (bi·, of 5.04%) on the vote among grade school educated than among high school (4.81 %) or college educated (3.96%) respondents. Party management was statistically insignificant and had a zero weight for all three levels of education.

24 The RePass approach to issue importance cannot be used for purposes of across-time comparisons because, as he indicates in footnote 5 of his comment, the 1972 measure of issue importance is not comparable to the previous studies.

25 See Popkin, , “Comment,” footnote 9 (p. 781)Google Scholar.

26 Because funding for the 1972 CPS national election study was limited, several economizing measures were employed, one of which was to code only the first three responses to open-ended materials into the data file. For the purpose of this rejoinder, we returned to the protocols and coded the fourth and fifth responses into our data.

It should also be noted that contrary to Popkin's footnote 9, the assignment of responses to the specific components are not indicated by the codebook; coders work from individual codes, not from the subtitles presented in the user's codebook. The Popkin six-components analysis does not therefore replicate the collapsing of code categories into the components as they have been used in previous SRC/CPS work.

27 Kagay, Michael R. and Caldeira, Greg A., “I Like the Looks of his Face: Elements of Electoral Choice, 1952–1972.” Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, September 2–5, 1975Google Scholar. The Kagay and Caldeira piece not only uses the full five responses to the open-ended questions asked prior to 1972, but it is also an excellent replication of the original scheme used to combine codes into the specific components.

28 These results seem to contradict the RePass contention that “… when issues are measured by open-ended questions, a greater degree of issue voting can be demonstrated than when preformulated questions are used.” See RePass, , “Comment,” p. 816Google Scholar.

29 An excellent theoretical interpretation of the components model has been offered by Kelley, Stanley Jr. and Mirer, Thad W. in “The Simple Act of Voting,” American Political Science Review, 68 (06 1974), 572–791CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Brody, Richard A. and Page, Benjamin I., “Comment: The Assessment of Policy Voting,” American Political Science Review, 66 (06, 1972), 450–458CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 These problems are discussed in “Majority Party” and in Brody and Page, “Comment: The Assessment of Policy Voting.”

32 RePass, , “Comment,” pp. 818–819Google Scholar.

33 For a more complete discussion of these topics related to the 1972 election, see Miller, and Miller, , “Issues, Candidates and Partisan Divisions in the 1972 Election,” as well as Miller, Warren E. and Levitin, Teresa E., Leadership Change: New Politics and the American Electorate, (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, Inc. 1976)Google Scholar.

34 RePass, , “Comment,” p. 818Google Scholar.

35 RePass, , “Comment,” p. 818Google Scholar.

36 It should be noted that the number of cases in Table 2 does not correspond to that in the RePass Table 1. We have investigated this discrepancy carefully and can only conclude that either there is an error in the RePass analysis or that he useda definition of issue position and thermometer ratings other than indicated in his table. Whatever the explanation for the discrepancy, Table 2 follows the definitions exactly as presented in the RePass “Comment.”

37 RePass, , “Comment,” p. 820Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 820.

39 It should be noted that the normal vote short-term statistics incorporatea control for strength of party identification as part of the analysis approach. That is, the statistic indicates the degree of deviation away from the long-term or partisan baseline that is normally expected. Thus, RePass controlled for both candidate and party effects by using the normal vote analysis among subgroups defined by candidate ratings.

40 See Miller, and Miller, , “Issues, Candidates and Partisan Divisions in the 1972 Election,” pp. 415–422Google Scholar for a discussion of how important the four issue domains were for various population subgroups.

41 Other data suggesting the ideological nature of the 1972 electorate include the strong relationship between the liberal/conservative scale and the vote, the nearly onedimensional solution for the candidate evaluation analysis summarized in footnote 38 of “Majority Party,” and the trend toward more attitude constraint that has been reported by a number of scholars, including Nie, Norman and Andersen, Kristi in “Mass Belief Systems Revisited,” Journal of Politics, 36 (08 1974), 540–591CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 RePass, , “Comment,” pp. 823–825Google Scholar.

43 Popkin, , “Comment,” p. 797Google Scholar.

44 The same coding scheme previously used in The American Voter and by Converse to construct levels of conceptualization was employed in coding the 1972 levels of ideology. We have, however, collapsed the several nonideology codes into a single category. The three resulting categories—ideologues, near-ideologues and nonideologues—are sufficient for the substantive question under discussion here, namely, degree of ideology.

45 The 1968 levels of conceptualization coding was performed by Hans Klingemann and William E. Wright and their results are reported in Converse, Philip E., “Public Opinion and Voting Behavior,” Volume 4 of the Handbook of Political Science, Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson, editors, p. 102Google Scholar. “Unclassified” respondents have been excluded from the calculation of any percentages for 1972 so that our figures would be comparable to those reported by Converse.

46 The 1972 increase in ideology is even more interesting when it is noted that ideologues do not include the 5 per cent of all respondents who referred to McGovern as “too liberal” or “too radical” even if they could talk about being “too liberal” in terms of the issues. These individuals were not included in either level of ideology because we thought that the phrase “too liberal” might perhaps indicate a ritualistic criticism of McGovern rather than a developed, consistent understanding of politics in terms of broad dimensions such as a liberal to conservative distinction or a broad set of policy considerations.

47 See Philip E. Converse, “Public Opinion and Voting Behavior,” in the Handbook of Political Science for a discussion of the theoretical relevance of this test among ideologues, and nonideologues, as well as for a discussion of how social conditions might affect the relationship between survey items.

48 That the percentage of respondents refusing to guess which party was more conservative is lower than that of any previous election survey is also evidence in confirmation of the ideological nature of the 1972 election.

49 Philip E. Converse, “Public Opinion and Voting Behavior” contains a discussion of the difference between interitem correlations or attitude structure indicators and indicators bearing on more explicit use or recognition of ideological concepts.

50 Popkin, , “Comment,” pp. 785–786Google Scholar, RePass, , “Comment,” pp. 829–830Google Scholar.

51 See Kagay, and Caldeira, , “I Like the Look of His Face,” pp. 41–58Google Scholar, for a discussion of polarization.

52 Ibid.; see especially their Figure 6.

53 The footnote on Table 10 of the Popkin “Comment” describes the dependent variable as “… a scale from + 3 (McGovern) to − 3 (Nixon).”

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