Donald Stokes

Spatial Models of Party Competition

The use of spatial ideas to interpret party competition is a universal phenomenon of modern politics. Such ideas are the common coin of political journalists and have extraordinary influence in the thought of political activists. Especially widespread is the conception of a liberal-conservative dimension on which parties maneuver for the support of a public that is itself distributed from left to right. This conception goes back at least to French revolutionary times and has recently gained new interest for an academic audience through its ingenious formalization by Downs and others. However, most spatial interpretations of party competition have a very poor fit with the evidence about how large-scale electorates and political leaders actually respond to politics. Indeed, the findings on this point are clear enough so that spatial ideas about party competition ought to be modified by empirical observation. I will review here evidence that the “space†in which American parties contend for electoral support is very unlike a single ideological dimension, and I will offer some suggestions toward revision of the prevailing spatial model.

PARTY GOVERNMENT AND THE SALIENCY OF CONGRESS

To what extent do public reactions to the legislative records of the major parties influence voters choices among party candidates at mid-term congressional elections? Here is a study that provides an answer and throws light on some of the unique aspects of the American party system. Donald E. Stokes and Warren E. Miller are members of the staff of the Survey Research Center and Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mr. Miller is, in addition, Director of the newly organized Interuniversity Consortium for Political Research.

Stability and Change in 1960: A Reinstating Election

John F. Kennedys narrow popular vote margin in 1960 has already insured this presidential election a classic position in the roll call of close American elections. Whatever more substantial judgments historical perspective may bring, we can be sure that the 1960 election will do heavy duty in demonstrations to a reluctant public that after all is said and done, every vote does count. And the margin translated into “votes per precinct” will become standard fare in exhortations to party workers that no stone be left unturned. The 1960 election is a classic as well in the license it allows for “explanations” of the final outcome. Any event or campaign strategem that might plausibly have changed the thinnest sprinkling of votes across the nation may, more persuasively than is usual, be called “critical.” Viewed in this manner, the 1960 presidential election hung on such a manifold of factors that reasonable men might despair of cataloguing them. Nevertheless, it is possible to put together an account of the election in terms of the broadest currents influencing the American electorate in 1960. We speak of the gross lines of motivation which gave the election its unique shape, motivations involving millions rather than thousands of votes. Analysis of these broad currents is not intended to explain the hairline differences in popular vote, state by state, which edged the balance in favor of Kennedy rather than Nixon. But it can indicate quite clearly the broad forces which reduced the popular vote to a virtual stalemate, rather than any of the other reasonable outcomes between a 60-40 or a 40–60 vote division.

“Presidential” address1: The changing environment of education for public service

University education for public service has, from its inception, been formed by a vision of the needs of government and of our society. It has therefore changed with the changing vision of these needs. Tracing these changes over the course of this century offers a unique perspective on the evolution of American democracy; it also inspires a degree of optimism about the prospects of training for public service as the century draws to a close. I will offer an analysis of the changing environment of education for public service by developing three home truths:

The Aging of the Class Alignment

The class alignment has, as we have seen, supplied British politics its dominant motif for half a century. Much of the electoral history of this period can be presented in terms of a process of realignment on class lines that is in some respects still under way. It may therefore seem paradoxical to suggest that the class basis of party allegiance was becoming weaker in the 1960s. After all, the working class was at least as heavily Labour in the youngest age-group as in the older cohorts. Indeed, the 1960s continued a long process of evolution.

The Analysis of Short-Term Conversion

In the last chapter we attempted to measure the extent to which electors change their positions. It now remains to examine why they did so. The schoolbook accounts of democracy assume that the electors act like a jury passing judgment on current policies and current leaders, responding to the merits of the issues before them. The earlier chapters of this book were devoted to showing how far votes are linked to loyalties formed deep in the past and to causes that have little to do with contemporary questions, and how far elections are decided by the changing composition of the electorate as a whole, as distinct from the conversion of individual electors. However, as the last chapter showed, many people do switch their votes, apparently in response to current events or propaganda. Which of the many stimuli to which the elector is subject are most likely to move his vote? Before we can answer this question we need to explore the ways in which the link between issues and changes of political attitude can best be analyzed.

The Political Life Cycle

There has been a natural inclination in electoral studies to consider single elections. While the focus is a useful one, it is important to see that one election with all its preliminaries is but a moment in the life of the nation or the individual citizen and that much is to be gained by taking a longer view. The processes of change are hardly to be understood without doing so. We begin here with the development of political attitudes during the lifetime of the individual voter, identifying several phases of the political “life cycle.”

Class, Generation and Social Milieu

We must look outward to the voters’ environment as well as inward to their attitudes and beliefs if we are to explain the links of class and party. There is a sociological as well as a psychological reality to these connections, and we must move beyond our analysis of the beliefs linking class and politics in the voter’s mind to consider aspects of the social milieu which forge a link between class and party. We shall first examine the transmission of social and political identifications in the initial social group, the childhood family. We shall then extend this analysis to consider ways in which this inheritance is aided or inhibited by education and the social environments of the later years. Such a discussion poses interesting questions about the political effects of broad changes in the structure of the economy and in Britain’s social policies for education and housing. At the end of the chapter we shall extend the treatment of the social milieu to include other sources of the political information and political cues to which the voter is exposed.

Continuity and Change

The sheer complexity of the processes which change the parties’ strength is underlined again and again throughout this book. Indeed, the variety of the factors at work has dominated our discussion of the physical replacement of the electorate, of fundamental shifts of party alignment, and of more transient variations of electoral strength. Any catalogue of the factors involved in these processes must include some that are to be found in the voter’s mind, some in the circumstances that govern his chances of being born and of surviving to any given age, some in his interaction with his family and with his neighbours and workmates, some in the structure and operations of the communications media, some in the behaviour of political leaders and party organizations, and some in the trends of the economy or in world events — and even this list is far from exhaustive.

The Geography of Party Support

The pre-eminence of class in electoral alignments is not a universal fact of modern politics. There are many countries and party systems where race, or religion, or region, or other lines of potential cleavage are more important than class in defining electoral support. We can indeed imagine a very different electoral history for modern Britain. The Irish question in particular might have influenced the pattern of party politics even more radically than it did. This issue, which so clearly cut across class lines, led to a drastic realignment of parties in the 1880s, with Joseph Chamberlain leading a large body of the industrial working class over to the Conservatives. To this day it leaves a major mark on the politics of Clydeside and Merseyside. It is not beyond possibility that if Europe had escaped a general war in August 1914 the United Kingdom would have slipped into civil war over the position of Ulster under Dublin Home Rule. The resulting conflict might have left scars on the British body politic comparable to those imposed on the United States for a hundred years by its own civil war. In such a situation the place of class would have been very different.