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Beliefs, Feelings and Votes: The British Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Martin Harrop
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Extract

The image of voting in the United States developed by political scientists over the last decade differs markedly from the perspective offered in that classic study of electoral behaviour in the 1950s, The American Voter. Whereas the authors of The American Voter painted a rather unflattering portrait of the way in which the voter of the 1950s made his electoral choice, contemporary research has begun to discover some unexpected virtues in the American electorate of the 1960s and early 1970s. Compared to his counterpart in the previous generation, today's voter seems to attach less significance to his party identification, and more importance to his perceptions of the parties' stands on issues with which he is concerned, in deciding which party to support in presidential elections. Indeed, it would perhaps be only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the notion of electoral choice has now become a realistic, and not merely a metaphorical, manner of speaking about the American voter.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 1977 , pp. 301 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).Google Scholar

2 Nie, Norman H. and Verba, Sidney, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

3 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957).Google Scholar

4 As Key, V. O. discovered in The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Butler, David and Pinto-Duschinsky, Michael, The British General Election of 1970 (London: Macmillan, 1971), Chap. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar All references are to the second edition.

7 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 39–47.Google Scholar

8 Butler, and Pinto-Duschinsky, , The British General Election of 1970, p. 346.Google Scholar

9 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 60.Google Scholar

10 Abelson, Robert, ‘Modes of Resolution of Belief Dilemmas’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, III (1959). 343–52. P. 346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 288.Google Scholar

12 This possibility is explicitly recognized in other writings of the Michigan school. See, for example, Converse, Philip E., ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’ in the book edited by Apter, David E., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), 206–61, P. 245.Google Scholar

13 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 24.Google Scholar

14 See the series of election studies by David Butler et al.

15 With a Conservative preference scored ‘2’, a no difference reply, ‘1’ and a Labour preference, ‘0’, the range of the scale, given that a maximum of three problems were recorded by the interviewer, is from zero to six. The number of problems mentioned most frequently was one; thus, the application of any remotely plausible system of weights to the order in which problems were mentioned by the respondent would produce a scale highly correlated with the scale used in the analysis. Liberal preferences were excluded.

16 The exact instructions given to the respondent were as follows: ‘Here is a slightly different way that I want to ask you how you feel towards certain places or people. This card has what we call a ‘feeling thermometer’. [Interviewer hands card to respondent.] If you don't know too much about one of the places or people that I'm going to ask you about, or don't feel particularly warm or cold towards them, then you should place them in the middle, at the 50° mark. If you have warm feelings towards them, you should given them a score somewhere between 50° and 100°, depending on how warm your feeling is. On the other hand, if you don't feel favourable towards them, you should place them somewhere between the 0° and the 50’

17 These open-ended questions asked the respondent to mention anything he particularly liked or disliked about the Conservative and Labour parties. The respondent's attitude towards a given party is taken as the difference between the number of ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ mentioned about that party, while a measure of the respondent's overall attitude is obtained by subtracting the score given to one major party from the score given to the other.

18 This technique draws on Rokeach, Milton, The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1960)Google Scholar and on Converse, ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’.

19 The reverse constraints-from the affective to the instrumental orientation – could equally well be applied. Although the regression equation in Table 2 arbitrarily takes the affective orientation as the ‘dependent’ variable, similar results would be obtained if the affective orientation were regarded as ‘independent’, since the asymmetry of regression analysis is not, in a case such as this, likely to be of any great significance.

20 It would be easy to devise more plausible, and more complicated, models than the ones under consideration here. Our purpose, however, is not that of discovering the model most descriptive of reality, but is rather to use these two simple models as a device for assessing the relative centrality of the affective and instrumental orientations in the respondent's mind.

21 In social psychology, this kind of model is associated with the work of Martin Fishbein. See, for example, Fishbein, 's ‘An Investigation of the Relationships Between the Beliefs About an Object and the Attitude Toward that Object’, Human Relations, XVI (1963), 233–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 The possible mechanisms of such a relationship would include the distorted selection, perception, interpretation, storage and recall of political information by the elector. The prominent role accorded some of these mechanisms in the Michigan approach to voting has been noted by Ivor Crewe in his article entitled ‘Do Butler and Stokes Really Explain Political Change in Britain?’, European Journal of Political Research, II (1974), 47–92, p. 55.Google Scholar

23 The phenomenon of ‘regression towards the mean’ is the likely explanation for the relationship (r = + 0·37) between affective orientation scores in 1969 and the change in these scores from 1969 to 1970. The relationship (r = + 0·75) between the measure of dissonance and the 1969 affective orientation scores must arise, in part, from the role of the latter variable in the construction of the former. Such a strong relationship between independent variables might reasonably induce doubts concerning the unbiased nature of the estimates in Table 3. The purpose of this table, however, is to provide a point of comparison for Table 4, the independent variables of which exhibit the same order of correlation (r = + 0·75). Provided the effects of any multi-collinearity are similar in the two cases, therefore, such a comparison will still be in order.

24 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 38.Google Scholar

25 Downs, , An Economic Theory of Democracy, pp. 260–76.Google Scholar

26 A proponent of the ‘economic’ approach would accept the hypothesis, ‘the greater the perceived difference in the instrumental values of the parties, the greater the likelihood of an elector turning out to vote’, but might add the crucial qualification that such a probability will still be extremely small in a situation, like a British general election, where no single vote is likely to prove decisive. But since this qualification leads to the absurd prediction of no one actually bothering to vote at all, we will assume, generously, that the ‘instrumental’ approach is compatible with the hypothesis in its unqualified, and far less absurd, form.

27 This assumption gives a hypothetical turnout for 1969 of about 71 per cent, an aggregate proportion close to the actual turnout of 72 per cent at the 1970 election. The exact question used in the 1969 survey was, “There will be a general election in the next year or two. How likely would you say it is that you will vote in the next election – quite certain, very likely, fairly likely, or not very likely?’

28 Cramer's V= √(chi-square/[N(L−1)], where L is the smaller of the number of rows or the number of columns in the table. Cramer's V is not influenced in its value by the number or distribution of cases in row or column totals, nor by the number of categories taken by either variable. In 2 × 2 tables, however, (Cramer's V is equivalent to phi. See Loether, Herman J. and McTavish, Donald G., Descriptive Statistics for Sociologists (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1974), p. 197.Google Scholar

29 See Michael Steed's appendix to Butler, and Pinto-Duschinsky, , The British General Election of 1970.Google Scholar

30 With the data and techniques now available, it should be possible to identify, with some precision, those respondents who do have an opinion on a given issue, and to examine the impact of these opinions on electoral choice among this possibly quite small group of respondents. For a discussion of procedures, see Coleman, James S., Models of Change and Response Uncertainty (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964).Google Scholar