Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions

I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple running tally of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of objective politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.     

Party identification and party closeness in comparative perspective

The present analysis uses data from 1974 and 1981 U. S. cross sections, which incorporate a panel, to compare the standard NES measure of party identification (ID) with a measure of partisanship derived from a party closeness question widely employed in cross-national research. Important features of the two scales are examined by transforming the closeness measure into a scale of very close, fairly close, not very close, and no preference corresponding to the seven-point ID scale. The scales are highly correlated and are similar in their reliability. More than 75% of the independents in the ID scale choose a party in the closeness version, and over half of these select the fairly close category. Respondents do not volunteer that they are independents when that alternative is not stated in the question.     

Partisan schemas and economic voting: The federal budget deficit and the 1988 presidential election

This paper considers the issue of the budget deficit and its influence on the 1988 presidential election. Specifically, we are concerned with the role of partisan economic schemas, and the possibility that many voters might have supported the incumbent Republicansbecause of the deficit problem (reasoning that the GOP, regardless of the failures of the previous 8 years, was the best party to reduce government spending). We find that the deficit issue, despite its high salience, did not have an overwhelming impact on the 1988 race, but what effect it did have apparently favored the Republicans. We demonstrate that schematic voters concerned about the deficit were, indeed, more likely to support George Bush over Michael Dukakis. We conclude by discussing the importance and limits of partisan schemas in explaining economic voting.     

The meaning of party labels

To determine the meaning(s) of the concepts Republican, Democrat, and Independent, the most frequently cited attributes of each party label were scaled in terms of their semantic centrality. An analysis of the magnitude scale values demonstrates that the labels Republican and Democrat have unique cognitive properties which easily discriminate one label from another. The most characteristic and discriminating properties refer to (1) voting, (2) electioneering, and (3) other forms of electoral behavior. Although these two labels have many strong properties over which there is considerable agreement, such consensus is lacking for the fewer and weaker properties which characterize and discriminate the label Independent. Whereas Republican and Democrat are sharply delineated, semantic inversions of one another, the concept Independent is ambiguously defined and only weakly distinguishable from other concepts.     

Policymaking and technology transfer: The need for national thinking laboratories

The objectives of this paper are to understand what is meant by better policymaking and more efficient technology transfer, to explore what is needed for their achievement, and to suggest an operational mechanism for improving the two processes.The author introduces a few new terms: (1) Inter-context information is defined, and its importance in decisionmaking, policymaking, technology transfer and education is pointed out; (2) a distinction is drawn between incidental technology transfer—initiated by the donor—and organized technology transfer—initiated by the recipient.The author suggests that National Thinking Laboratories should be established to promote organized technology transfer and to act as catalysts to organized policymaking. Their charter should be to match needs in one context to capabilities in another context. This charter is outlined in operational terms by five general objectives listed by the author. The National Thinking Laboratories are most urgently needed, particularly in the developing countries.     

I'm Not That Liberal: Explaining Conservative Democratic Identification

The persistence of self-identified conservative Democrats in the electorate is puzzling. Both the ongoing Southern realignment and the recent ideological polarization should have resulted in conservative Democrats changing their party identification to accord with their discrepant ideology. Instead, the number of conservative Democrats, as a percentage of the total electorate, has held steady over the last 20 years. I propose an explanation for this phenomenon that draws upon theories of mass belief systems, as well as an element of recent political reality: the popular stigmatization of the word liberal. I argue that Democrats who are susceptible to elite cues garner positive affect toward the conservative label and negative affect toward the liberal label. They then identify themselves accordingly, regardless of their issue positions.     

A second best mechanism for marketing emissions reductions

The purpose of this paper is to present a strategy for pollution control, representing a hybrid of conventional emission fees and standards approaches, which is designed to meet the dual needs of many localities for sustained industrial growth and compliance with air quality standards. We evaluate several second best policy mechanisms and extend our focus from questions of relative efficiency loss to concerns for feasibility, compliance incentives, and local objectives. For each non-attainment area, we suggest that a Clean Air Management Unit (CAMU) be established to formalize and oversee markets in emissions reductions.This work was supported by the Office of Environmental Affairs, City of New Orleans. The City Administration assumes no liability for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of this information.     

Ideas,interest and institutions in policy change: Transformation of India's agricultural strategy in the mid-1960s

Over the last ten years, policy change in the third world has become a matter of considerable intellectual and practical importance. For the theoretically inclined, how one explains changes in the behavior of the state is the main issue. Both Marxian and liberal orthodoxies had a tendency to read off state behavior from the power relationships at the level of the society, though differing in the way they conceptualized power. The return of institutional and state-centric explanations over the last decade has attempted to reverse this bias by looking more closely at the power struggles within the state institutions. For the practically inclined, the powerful intellectual rationale behind so many policy recommendations has often been puzzlingly lost in the maze of politics. What interests impede the implementation of good ideas, what institutions block getting policies right - these are some of the key questions on the agenda of international development institutions. Responding to these varied concerns, this paper analyzes a particularly successful case of policy change. While most of third world was still experimenting with land reforms and cooperatives as the ways to develop agriculture, India in the mid-1960s switched to producer price incentives and investments in new technology, a change that is widely believed to have turned India from a food-deficit to a food-surplus country. The focus is on how ideas, interests and institutions interacted to produce the change.     

Policy: Constructing a definition

If policies are to serve as guides to real world actions and be subject to criticism and improvement out of human experience, they must have certain attributes and capacities - those requirements serve to define the meaning of the term. This article seeks (a) to demonstrate the substance of those requirements through a systematic analysis of the structures and processes involved in reasoned, corrigible actions, (b) to sketch the basic assumptions of a theory of knowledge able to show how those requirements can be fulfilled within the limits of human capacity, and (c) to examine the implications of that conception of policy, and its companion concept theory, for those involved in collective policymaking and policy studies.     

The prevention of nuclear war in a world of uncertainty

The simple treatment of complex issues in the nuclear world has created dangerously self-deceptive and sterile views of such conflict. Calculations of missile duels and other possible strategic interactions have led to analytic self-deception where the more simplified the calculation, the greater the distance between the atrocious abstraction and the incomprehensible reality for which it serves as a disguise. Fictionalizing about deterrence and its variants has led to intellectual and moral self-deception where the focus of the fiction has diverted attention and action from other likely ways in which a nuclear conflict could be initiated, such as accidents, conventional wars, or terrorism. Besides reexamining old and diversionary patterns of thought and action—cultural strait jackets—we need more fundamental investigations into ways in which the weapons of modern war might be made less dangerous, procedures to make crises reversible, and improved and creative mechanisms for reducing and limiting the spread of nuclear weapons.     

Policy termination as a political process

The problem of how to terminate ineffective or outdated public policies, programs, or organizations is increasingly important. This paper argues that it is helpful to conceive of termination as a special case of the policy adoption process: there is a struggle to adopt a policy A, the substance of which is to eliminate or curtail policy B. The main distinguishing feature of this class of policy contests is the activity of vested interests who are able to advance a peculiarly powerful moral claim concerning the inequity or unfairness of change.     

Evolution,consciousness, and political thinking

Evolutionary theory is utilized to sketch the outline of a performance-based perspective of political thinking. It is argued that human consciousness evolved as an emergent and interactive mechanism for enabling the individual to cope strategically with environmental exigencies. Within the context of this evolutionary perspective, consciousness at the individual level is shown to develop in patterned yet flexible and individually variable ways as a result of the interaction of biological and environmental variables including, among the latter, those elements of the social environment like ideas, values, and intentions, as well as institutional patterns of conflict, affiliation, and authority, which are themselves products of coping strategies. Political thinking, it is suggested, is a strategic coping enterprise involving equilibration between the individual's own strivings and social demands for conformity in collective affairs.     

Ideology and the construction of nationality: The Canadian elections of 1993

Canada is one nation, but it is in many ways two communities, one Francophone and the other Anglophone. We employ a formal model of ideology and analyze how nationality is constructed in people's minds. The magnitude of the changes in expressed preferences in terms of ideology depends on the salience of the new issue, the extent to which it confirms with the existing ideological cleavage, and the difference between the perceived status quo on the new dimension and the voter's most preferred alternative. Using data from the 1993 Canadian National Election Study, we consider the relative importance of different policy dimensions in explaining voting decisions among educated Canadians. The issue of Quebec sovereignty, alone, is shown to have significant power for predicting vote choice. A plausible explanation, confirmed here by regression analysis, is that Quebec sovereignty stands for other issues in voters' conception of Canadian politics.     

Public opinion and presidential responsibility for the economy: Understanding personalization

The general mechanisms which underlie the psychological phenomenon ofpersonalizing (cognitive simplification and defensive attribution) would seem to have great utility in explaining attributions of presidential control over the economy. Yet previous research has generated inconsistent and inconclusive empirical results. This study identifies several sources of inconsistency and then attempts to clarify the approach by focusing separately on the object and the subject of personalizing. Our findings suggest that the determinants of personalizing to the president are different from the factors that explain personalizing to the incumbent. In addition, we find that the impact of the two psychological mechanisms differs substantially within economic subject areas.Paper prepared for delivery at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association, Fort Worth, Texas.     

Defining “images” of presidential candidates from televised political spot advertisements

The proliferation in the use of televised political spot advertisements by presidential candidates justifies the increasing attention given to assess their value for the political system. Some controversy surrounding the value of their content concerns their reliance on image material. Yet the concept of candidate images has been ambiguous since images can refer to either graphic display of candidates or to candidates' character attributes. This study assesses candidates' character attributes in televised political commercials for 1980's American presidential primaries and finds that political spots offer useful and accurate profiles of candidates in campaigns and are helpful sources for the electorate to use in weighing the various strengths and weaknesses of presidential hopefuls.     

Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions

Using the SRC/CPS's national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investigates the effect of education on consistency among the public's domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use liberal and conservative terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1978 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

Dilemmas in a general theory of planning

The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, becuase of the nature of these problems. They are wicked problems, whereas science has developed to deal with tame problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about optimal solutions to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no solutions in the sense of definitive and objective answers.This is a modification of a paper presented to the Panel on Policy Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston, December 1969.     

The dynamics of interpersonal attitudinal influence: Some additional evidence

The process by which one individual or group of individuals influences the attitudes of another is an important area of concern for students of political behavior. A few years ago a major political science journal published an article pointing to the salience of perceptual accuracy and issue salience in this regard. Interpersonal affective relationships were also considered but dismissed as lacking independent causal significance.Through parallel analysis of a separate data base, along with additional insights from a social conditioning approach, this report attempts to show that affectis an important variable mediating interpersonal attitudinal influence. It does so in multiplicative interaction with measures of parental cue-giving, such as issue salience. Hence, adding affect to the statistical modelafter removing the effects of cue-giving masks the joint effects.     

Characteristics of migrants within the framework of current migration direction in the United States: Some evidence from micro-data analysis

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the phenomenon of an apparent population distribution reversal in the United States. This paper examines the characteristics of migrants participating in such moves between 1969 and 1977, based on data from a longitudinal nationwide household sample survey conducted by the University of Michigan. The data show that the amount of ruralward migration outweighs that of urbanward migration. While the ruralward migration was particularly prevalent in the Northeast, the direction of migration in the South was predominantly urbanward. Ruralward migrants appeared to be young single people and young married people without children, as well as stable families. The most ruralward migrants tended to be from the most highly urban environments. This new pattern of migration is independent of both white suburban flight and the sun-belt phenomenon. The findings suggest an important societal reorganization towards a newer post-industrial and less urban population distribution.     

Changing levels of political information in 1988 and 1990

The 1988 and 1990 National Election Studies indicate that the public is less politically informed in a low-stimulus election year than after a high-stimulus campaign. Although the same factors are responsible for what people know in each year, the process of becoming informed in an information-poor environment is slightly different than in an information-rich atmosphere. The data also show that, just as Angus Campbell's surge and decline theory predicts, core voters are slightly more knowledgeable than peripheral voters.