John H. Aldrich

The Decline of Electoral Participation in America

Since 1960 turnout has declined in presidential elections, and since 1966 it has declined in off-year congressional elections. These declines occurred despite several major trends that could have increased electoral participation. An analysis of the eight SRC-CPS presidential election surveys conducted between 1952 and 1980 and of the six SRC-CPS congressional election surveys conducted between 1958 and 1978 suggests that these declines may result largely from the combined impact of two attitudinal trends: the weakening of party identification and declining beliefs about government responsiveness, that is, lowered feelings of “external†political efficacy. Between two-thirds and seven-tenths of the decline in presidential turnout between 1960 and 1980 appears to result from the combined impact of these trends. Data limitations hinder our efforts to study the decline of congressional turnout, but approximately two-fifths to one-half of the decline between 1966 and 1978 appears to result from the combined impact of these attitudinal trends.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND ISSUE VOTING: DO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES "WALTZ BEFORE A BLIND AUDIENCE?"

VWhile candidates regularly spend much time and effort campaigning on foreign and defense policies, the thrust of prevailing scholarly opinion is that voters possess little information and weak attitudes on these issues, which therefore have negligible impact on their voting behavior. We resolve this anomaly by arguing that public attitudes on foreign and defense policies are available and cognitively accessible, that the public has perceived clear differences between the candidates on these issues in recent elections, and that these issues have affected the publics vote choices. Data indicate that these conclusions are appropriate for foreign affairs issues and domestic issues.

A Method of Scaling with Applications to the 1968 and 1972 Presidential Elections

A method of scaling is proposed to estimate the positions of candidates and voters on a common issue dimension. The scaling model assumes that candidates occupy true positions in an issue space and that individual level perceptual data arise from this in a two step process. The first step consists of a stochastic component, satisfying the standard Gauss Markov assumptions, which reflects true misperception. The second step consists of a linear distortion which is introduced in the survey situation. Estimates of the parameters of the model are developed by applying the least squares criterion, and distributions of the estimates are investigated by Monte Carlo methods. The scaling technique is applied to the seven-point issue scales asked in the 1968 and 1972 SRC survey. The resulting ideal point estimates are related to candidate positions in 1968 to test a simple Downsian voting model.

The Transition to Republican Rule in the House: Implications for Theories of Congressional Politics

The 1994 congressional elections were dramatic. The Republicans won control of the U.S. House, ending the longest continuous reign by a single party in the nations history and including the defeat of a sitting Speaker for the first time this century. These results caught nearly everyone by surprise. Hardly a pollster, pundit, scholar, or even Republican party leader anticipated such GOP victories in the House. As dramatic as the election returns proved to be, Republican activities within the House in the 104th Congress were equally as dramatic. Speakerto-be Newt Gingrich (GA) led an aggressive change in the rules and practices of the House, apparently with the hope that such changes would result in dramatically different policies forthcoming from it. In this article we investigate the nature of the structural and procedural changes, focusing in particular on the manner in which the newly elected Republican majority reorganized its partisan and leadership institutions with the apparent expectation of using them to enact outcomes the party collectively sought to achieve. Our purpose is to consider what these changes reveal, not just about the different views between the two parties as to the appropriate ways to conduct the publics business, but also as to the importance and role of structure and process in congressional politics. The House has long been the more highly structured and rules-driven of the two chambers. Over the last few decades, the

INDIVIDUAL AND CONTEXTUAL VARIATIONS IN POLITICAL CANDIDATE APPRAISAL

Tn this note we elaborate on the conditions under which on-line and memory-based strategies of political candidate evaluation can be implemented. We suggest that the structure of information . may be an important contextual variable affecting the voters choice of these strategies. In addition, we propose that citizens with less political sophistication are particularly sensitive to structural differences in the political information environment. We use an experimental design that manipulates the information-processing context to test these ideas. Our results suggest that the context in which information is presented plays a critical role in moderating the influence of individual differences in political sophistication.

Conditional Party Government in the States

We extend theories of congressional parties and committees to the state legislative setting, using the variation among legislatures to explore the links between elections and parties and between parties and committees. We examine elections by comparing the electoral concentration of parties to measures of conditional party government. We examine informational and partisan theories of com? mittees by looking to the relationship between committee representativeness and conditional party govern? ment. With data from eleven states, we find that competitive party sys? tems breed highly polarized legisla? tive parties, and these two traits lead to representative committees.

A model of party constraints on optimal candidate positions

In this paper, we propose a generalized version of the spatial model of electoral competition. A model of political parties is developed and a general theorem about the existence of distinct Nash equilibria distributions of party activists is proven. Candidates are assumed to acquire resources from the party and its activists and through the candidates own campaign organization to assist in their campaign efforts, and they are assumed to value both winning and policy outcomes. We then explore the formal properties of this more general model, especially examining the impact of party-based resources and of candidate policy preferences on the optimal location of candidates. We show, in particular, that such positions will, in general, be divergent, and yet there will be regular differentiation between the nominees of the two political parties.

Progressive Ambition among United States Senators: 1972–1988

A rational-choice model is used to account for the decisions of United States Senators to run for president. The model predicts that senators will be more likely to run for president if their relative costs of running are low, if they have no political liabilities that might reduce their chances of winning, and if they have a propensity to take risks, which we measure by their past willingness to take risks in running for the Senate. The model works well in accounting for the decisions of Democrats to seek the presidency in 1972, 1976, and 1984, and can explain why few Republican senators ran in 1980. The model is used to predict which senators in the 99th Congress are relatively likely to run for president in 1988. The model works better in accounting for the past behavior of Democrats than Republicans, and also generates more plausible predictions about future Democratic presidential candidates. This partisan difference results largely from the different opportunity structures of the two parties. Finally, we discuss the changing dynamics of the nomination process and the implications of this change both for our model and for American electoral politics.

Comparing Strategic Voting under FPTP and PR

Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherlands, the authors find that a substantial proportion of the voters desert their most preferred candidate or party and that patterns of strategic voting across FPTP and PR bear striking similarities. In every election, smaller parties tend to lose votes to major parties. Because there tend to be more small parties in PR systems, tactical voting is actually more common under PR than under FPTP. The findings suggest that whatever the electoral system, voters focus on the policy consequences of their behavior and which parties are likely to influence policy outcomes following the election.

Third-Party and Independent Candidates in American Politics: Wallace, Anderson, and Perot

Between 1852 and 1992 the United States held thirty-six presidential elections. The Democrats won fifteen, the Republicans won the other twenty-one. This duopoly has been threatened from time to time, and Perots 1992 challenge was remarkably successful in winning popular votes. But no third-party or independent candidate has come close to winning the presidency, largely because the electoral rules in the United States create barriers that third parties and independent candidates have been unable to surmount.1 We review U.S. elections since 1832, for these barriers to new political parties were in place even then. The Republicans displaced the Whigs between 1854 and 1860, despite these structural barriers, by changing the issue agenda over slavery.2 Fortunately for the United States, but unfortunately for third par-