Mass Political Support in Sweden: Retesting a Political-Economic Model

This paper tests a model of mass political support for Sweden, 1967–1974. The model is composed of two economic variables (the Consumer Price Index and assessments of the short-run employment situation) and two non-economic variables (media criticism of government and media pessimism). The model performs very well, accounting for approximately two-thirds of the variance in the popularity of the governing party, the Social Democrats. The most impressive showing is made by the unemployment variable, but the Consumer Price Index and media criticism also make important contributions. Concluding discussion centers on the implications of these findings for our understanding of Swedish politics and for the validity of political-economic models of mass political support.     

Shattered expectations: Public responses to “out-of-character” presidential actions

Six alternative hypotheses about public responses to out-of-character presidential actions were tested in an experiment that manipulated both the president's preexisting policy position (a hawkish or a dovish stance in international affairs) and the nature of his action in an international crisis (hawkish versus dovish). In addition, subjects themselves were classified as hawks or doves. Approval of the president and of his response to the crisis was a complex function of the policy views of the subject and the consistency of the president's action with his past record. Doves supported presidents and actions that were compatible with their own dovish leanings but resented a dovish president who behaved hawkishly, generally confirming the view that similarity breeds attraction. By contrast, hawks were willing to tolerate dovish behavior if it was undertaken by a hawk, supporting the expectation that out-of-character actions are uniquely capable of disarming would-be opponents. For neither hawkish nor dovish presidents were these findings consistent with the waffling interpretation, which holds that inconsistency per se is downgraded. Compared to presidents whose actions were consistent with their previous beliefs, out-of-character presidents were preceived as more changeable, in both positive and negative senses; were believed to have disliked doing what they had done; and were judged to have been relatively uninfluenced by internal causes.     

The Unmet Potential of Interdisciplinary Research: Political Psychological Approaches to Voting and Public Opinion

Since its founding, political science has embraced interdisciplinary research. Yet there exist few, if any, systematic assessments of the success of these endeavors. We assess what is often seen as a paradigm of interdisciplinary collaboration: political psychological research on voting and public opinion. Surprisingly, we find little evidence of true interdisciplinary work; instead, we uncover misused concepts and scant evidence of conceptual or disciplinary integration. We conclude with suggestions for how to improve interdisciplinary research on voting and public opinion, and more generally.     

The dynamics of presidential support during international conflict situations: The Iranian hostage crisis

Public opinion data concerning President Carter's handling of the Iranian hostage crisis are used to analyze (1) the factors that facilitate support for the President's handling of international conflict situations, and (2) the factors that influence the persistence of such support. Analysis reveals that support for the President's performance is enhanced if one holds a favorable personal image of the President, if one's own policy preferences are congruent with the President's actions, and if one belongs to the President's party. Over time, the impact of these factors grows, reflecting the fact that those who hold unfavorable images of the President, who disagree with the policies he is pursuing, and who belong to the opposition party fall out of the support coalition at an unusually high rate.     

Avoidance or Engagement? Issue Convergence in U.S. Presidential Campaigns, 1960–2000

A widely noted and oft-decried characteristic of campaigns in the United States is the tendency of the competing sides to talk past each other—to avoid engaging with one another on the same issues. We bring a massive database on statements by the major-party presidential candidates and other campaign spokespersons in the 1960 through 2000 elections to bear on the question of issue convergence. Far from the exception, a high degree of similarity in the issue emphases of the two sides appears to have been the norm in these campaigns. This result suggests the need to rethink some influential empirical, formal, and normative perspectives on campaigns.     

Analyzing Censored and Sample-Selected Data with Tobit and Heckit Models

Political scientists are making increasing use of the Tobitand Heckit models. This paper addresses some common problemsin the application and interpretation of these models. Throughnumerical experiments and reanalysis of data from a study byRomer and Snyder (1994), we illustrate the consequences of usingthe standard Tobit model, which assumes a censoring point atzero, when the zeros are not due to censoring mechanisms orwhen actual censoring is not at zero. In the latter case, wealso show that Greene's (1981) well-known results on the directionand size of the bias of the OLS estimator in the standard Tobitmodel do not necessarily hold. Because the Heckit model is oftenused as an alternative to Tobit, we examine its assumptionsand discuss the proper interpretation of the Heckit/Tobit estimationresults using Grier and co-workers' (1994) Heckit model of campaigncontribution data. Sensitivity analyses of the Heckit estimationresults suggest some conclusions rather different from thosereached by Grier et al.