John R. Petrocik

Realignment: New Party Coalitions and the Nationalization of the South

Among academic and non-academic observers the Reagan election provoked speculation about whether the party system was finally embarking upon a realignment whose symptoms had been visible for some time. The discussion rarely produced a consensus because definitions of realignment are neither explicit nor theoretical, but historical and descriptive. This paper extends an argument which defines realignments as changes in the social group coalitions which distinguish party supporters. It uses this definition to describe changes which have been underway for over twenty years; it identifies the significance of the South in the transformation, and it shows the realignment to be programmatically significant even if the Democratic party retains its numerical dominance.

The Variable Incumbency Advantage: New Voters, Redistricting, and the Personal Vote

In this article we explore the personal vote costs of redistricting. After redistricting, incumbents often face significant numbers of new voters—voters that were previously in a different incumbents district. Existing conceptualizations of the incumbency advantage suggest that the cost to incumbents of having new voters should be relatively small and predictable. We propose a different formulation: a variable incumbency advantage. We argue that any incumbency advantage among the electorate is a function of short-term effects, partisanship, and electoral saliency. We use a massive untapped dataset of neighborhood-level electoral data to test our model and to demonstrate how the intersection of the personal vote, redistricting, and short-term environmental variables can provide a healthy margin to incumbents—or end their careers.

Voter Turnout Among the American States: Systemic and Individual Components

Almost all modern states subscribe to the principle of universal adult suffrage, but in no state is the actual voter participation universal. As individuals differ from one another in their likelihood of voting at a particular election, so do groups in their rate of voting. For example, in the 1960 presidential election, which had the highest overall voter turnout in recent history (64 per cent), less than 26 per cent of the adult population in the state of Mississippi cast their ballots. The persistence of inequality of such a magnitude calls for an explanation. The main objective of this study is to examine the sources of variation in the voter turnout among the American states. More specifically, its goal is to evaluate the relative importance of socioeconomic, legal and political factors for turnout variation among the states in the 1960 presidential election by combining information about individual behavior obtained from survey data, with information about the state obtained from the 1960 census, from aggregate election statistics, and from published election rules.

The Partisan Consequences of Majority-Minority Redistricting in the South, 1992 and 1994

This paper demonstrates that the creation of majority-minority districts was no more than an indirect cause of Democratic losses in 1992 and 1994, and the second-order effect of losing familiar voters was more important than the first-order effect of a reduced black constituency. Further, it demonstrates that a pro-GOP surge, independent of redistricting, was the critical factor without which neither new voters nor the reduced black population would have defeated many incumbent Democrats. These results integrate existing theory about voter behavior, the influence of short-term forces, incumbency dynamics, and structural adjustments such as redistricting to formulate a fuller account of the losses.

Incumbency and Short-Term Influences on Voters

Using NES surveys from 1980 through 2000, this article examines the incumbency advantage with a series of survey reports of the vote, an approach that departs from the convention of estimating the incumbent advantage with aggregate election returns. Previous work conceptualizes the incumbency advantage as a small and stable vote bonus of six to eight percentage points since about 1970, based on aggregate electoral returns. This study provides a different perspective on the incumbency advantage, considering the behavior of individual voters instead of aggregate electoral outcomes. We conceive of incumbency as an anchor that diminishes the influence of short-term tides on voters. Further, the effect of incumbency on voters is neither small nor stable, and varies systematically with short-term political tides.

The midterm referendum: The importance of attributions of responsibility

Analysts and commentators have long regarded midterm congressional elections as an interim evaluation of the president. Recent research has emphasized the effect of the individual qualities of congressional candidates on the vote. Both factors contributed to the 1982 congressional vote. However, the relative success of the Republican party in 1982 was made possible by the unwillingness of a majority of the electorate to attribute the countrys economic problems to the administration. This attribution factor, implicitly ignored in most analyses of the effect of the economy on vote choices, is examined here.

Voter Turnout and Electoral Oscillation

Declining levels of participation in elections and especially presidential elections, have prompted greater interest among academics and policy makers in the sources and practical consequences of low turnout. This article shows that although nonvoters have many characteristics which mark them as Democratic voters, there is no reason to believe that high turnout elections, especially at the presidential level, would benefit Democratic candidates. The lower levels of involvement and commitment which characterize chronic nonvoters and peripheral voters would simply promote greater interelection oscillation if these voters began to turn out.

Levels of Issue Voting The Effect of Candidate-Pairs in Presidential Elections

In the last five years studies of the American electorate have found some evidence that voters have adopted more of the attributes that mark the informed citizen. Increasing concern with issues and a greater correlation between issues and the vote have cheered observers who were always uneasy with what appeared to be a blind commitment to voting for the party. However, other recent studies have indicated that candidates also play a role in the level of issue voting which characterizes any election. These data support an early argument that candidates are a critical variable for the level of issue voting in any election; and that higher levels of issue voting since 1964 may be a reflection of different candidates rather than greater ideological concern among voters. This article examines the latter possibility. The article presents a typology of elections based on the nature of the candidate-pair; it documents the similarity of elections with like candidate-pairs but unlike electorates; it attempts a tentative assessment of the impact of candidate pairs on the individual voter level; and it applies the hypothesis about candidate-pairing effects to the 1976 election.

The Politics Missed by Political Science

This essay offers some experience-based observations about electoral phenomena that academic political science misses because of a focus on conceptual and theoretical debates that often take pride of place over the empirical phenomena that gave rise to the ideas and concepts that we highly value. We suggest that academic political science is increasingly committed to models and methods that serve a theory or an idea more than they account for observable empirical regularities. Practitioner methods and innovations for persuading voters and winning elections under varying electoral conditions are largely unknown to scholars, with consequences for our collective factual knowledge and ability to test current hypotheses and theories about elections in an appropriate wide range of circumstances.

Benjamin I. Page. Choices and Echoes in Presidential Elections: Rational Man and Electoral Democracy. Pp. xvi, 336. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

The study of elections has been the province of students of mass behavior for almost thirty years, with the result that the voter, not the candidates or the campaign, has provided the centerpiece for most accounts of what happened, and why. Choices and Echoes, in contrast, deals less with voters than it does with candidates. The mass behavior studies confronted traditional theories of elections and democracy with an electorate that didn’t fit the theories; this book attempts to fit candidate behavior to two contrasting theories of elections and democracy. Both of these theories, according to Page, postulate a strong role for public opinion; it is the nature of the role that distinguishes the theories. The first theory rests upon spatial models. Candidates and parties respond to public preferences, in this theory, by offering virtually indistinguishable programs to the electorate. The Democrats and Republicans, and their respective candidates, respond to public opinion by adopting the position of the median voter, resulting in elections in which