John Sprague

POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTORAL MOBILIZATION: POLITICAL STRUCTURE, SOCIAL STRUCTURE, AND THE PARTY CANVASS

A s agents of electoral mobilization, political parties occupy an important role in the social flow of political communication. We address several questions regarding party mobilization efforts. Whom do the parties seek to mobilize? What are the individual and aggregate characteristics and criteria that shape party mobilization efforts? What are the intended and unintended consequences of partisan mobilization, both for individual voters and for the electorate more generally? In answering these questions we make several arguments. First, party efforts at electoral mobilization inevitably depend upon a process of social diffusion and informal persuasion, so that the party canvass serves as a catalyst aimed at stimulating a cascading mobilization process. Second, party mobilization is best seen as being environmentally contingent upon institutional arrangements, locally defined strategic constraints, and partisan divisions within particular electorates. Finally, the efforts of party organizations generate a layer of political structure within the electorate that sometimes competes with social structure and often exists independently from it.

Discussant Effects on Vote Choice: Intimacy, Structure, and Interdependence

Political discussion during an election campaign is an important vehicle of social influence--a means whereby the preferences of individuals are brought into correspondence with political surroundings. Correspondingly, the study of discussion effects is not simply an examination of dyadic information flows. Rather, it is one part of a more thorough explication of the political linkages that lie between individuals and groups within the society, and of the manner in which individual politics is imbedded within the larger community. This paper addresses a series of questions related to the influence of political discussion. To what extent are political preferences affected by discussion? What types of discussant relationships are most likely to foster political influence? What types of discussants are most influential? These questions are addressed on the basis of an election study conducted in South Bend, Indiana during the 1984 presidential election.

Alternative Contexts of Political Behavior: Churches, Neighborhoods, and Individuals

This paper examines the political consequences that arise due to multiple and simultaneous bases of social experience. Two alternative contexts--those of neighborhoods and churches--provide an empirical setting for the effort; and the analysis focuses on two different political attitudes--policy preferences regarding abortion and partisan self-identification. Several questions are addressed: In what manner are the alternative contexts of politics different and in what manner are they similar? To what extent are churches and neighborhoods reinforcing in the political messages they convey, and to what extent do they serve as independent bases of social experience? How do individual differences and individual discretion mediate and deflect the impact of these alternative sources of political influence?

The Dynamics of Collective Deliberation in the 1996 Election: Campaign Effects on Accessibility, Certainty, and Accuracy

We examine the effectiveness of political communication and deliberation among citizens during a presidential election campaign. In order for communication to be effective, messages conveyed through social interaction must be unambiguous, and the recipient must readily, confidently, and accurately perceive the intent of the sender. We address a number of factors that may influence communication effectiveness: the accessibility and extremity of political preferences, the distribution of preferences in the surrounding environment, disagreement between the senders and receivers of political messages, and the dynamic of the election campaign. The analysis is based on a study of the 1996 campaign, which interviewed citizens and discussion partners between March 1996 and January 1997. The citizens are a random sample of registered voters in the Indianapolis and St. Louis areas, and these registered voters identified the discussion partners as people with whom they discuss either “government, elections, and politics” or “important matters.”

POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTS, POLITICAL DYNAMICS, AND THE SURVIVAL OF DISAGREEMENT *

This paper addresses a series of questions related to the survival of disagreement among interdependent citizens during an election campaign. Do campaign-stimulated processes of collective deliberation result in the elimination of disagreement within networks of social communication? If not, what are the factors that sustain political heterogeneity and disagreement? And what are the consequences of political heterogeneity within these communication networks for patterns of political influence between and among citizens? Finally, in what manner is the influence of one citizen on another conditioned by the structure of communication networks and the distribution of preferences in the remainder of these networks? We address these questions based on a study of electoral dynamics in the 1996 presidential campaign as it took place in the Indianapolis and St. Louis metropolitan areas.

Election Campaigns, Social Communication, and the Accessibility of Perceived Discussant Preference

This paper examines the communication of political preferences between citizens during the course of an election campaign. We are particularly concerned with the ability of individuals to make judgments regarding the likely votes of others within their networks of relationships. To this end, we employ the concept of accessibility and its measurement device—response latency or response time—in the context of a computer-assisted telephone interview. We argue that the accessibility of respondent perceptions regarding the voting preferences of their associates depends on a range of individual and contextual factors, and the analysis focuses on variation across individuals, across relationships, and across the temporal contexts of election campaigns.

Urban Unemployment Drives Urban Crime

Burglary and robbery rates in St. Louis, Missouri, are investigated as functions of census unemployment levels taken in 1970 and 1980 for twelve yearly cross sections of crime rates, with all rates aggregated to the level of census tracts for analyses. The relationship of burglary and robbery rates to unemployment is found to be positive, and the interactive (logged) model is found to be the one most consistent with theory as well as the best predictive model. The magnitude of unemployment effects is large, and the policy implication is that urban areas fighting crime would benefit substantially from successfully targeted employment programs.

Race, space, and turnout

Abstract Urban politics in St. Louis is driven by race. For several decades the city of St. Louis has been nearly evenly divided between blacks and whites. Other ethnic minorities have accounted for 2% or less of the population over this same period. The geographic distribution of race exhibits a high level of segregation — blacks on the North side, whites on the South side, and a mixture of whites and blacks in the central corridor between north and south. These racial enclaves behave quite differently in city politics and separating them for analysis provides additional purchase on the structure of electoral mobilization. Turnout in a Democratic primary election (1989) and a non-partisan School Board election (1991) are studied here with the same precinct coverage. Demographic covariates used in the analyses are taken from the Census (1990) and several measures were constructed by allocation from block groups, to blocks, and then back to the precinct level by means of a concordance between the blocks and the precincts. Geographic tools (maps and spatial correlograms) are used throughout and extensive use is made of graphic visualization of these data. The end results show that count models utilizing a small number of Census measures as predictors defend themselves well, provided that race is controlled systematically.

Additive and Multiplicative Models of the Voting Universe: The Case of Pennsylvania: 1960–1968

Of all the fields of political science where quantitative methods have been developed over the past generation, probably the one where scholarly understanding has been most enriched has been that of mass voting behavior. But while we know vastly more about this behavior on the individual and aggregate level than we did a quarter-century ago, there are still large territories on the map which are blank, or in which exploration has only very recently begun. There remain a number of doubtful areas in which issues of methodology and of substantive interpretation are still very much open to systematic inquiry. One such area is that associated with the interrelation of socio-economic correlates of the vote. That is, there is a real question as to whether such independent or predisposing variables should be conceptualized as making mutually independent or, alternatively, interdependent contributions to the prediction of voting patterns. The normal practice in research involving multiple correlation of aggregate voting behavior with a set of independent variables has been to assume implicitly that the relationship of these variables is additive ( i.e. , non-interactive) and that the appropriate theoretical representation is of the general form y = b + m 1 x 1 + m 2 x 2 … + m n x n . Such an assumption seems plausible so far as individual voting for American major parties and their candidates is concerned. Thus, for example, the authors of the MIT 1960 simulation study found strong evidence that predispositional factors summate, i.e. , are indeed additive in character.

Racial context and voting behavior in one-party urban political systems

Abstract Two Democratic primary elections for city-wide office in St Louis and one non-partisan election for city-wide school board positions are analyzed for the vote of seven candidates. Racial structuring of voting patterns is the focus of analysis and the precinct is the unit of analysis. Census information is aggregated or allocated to the precincts. Racial effects order the voting behavior in models based solely on race. When multivariate prediction models are formulated which include non-racial predictors the racial effects remain strong. Evidence for social class effects running contrary to the direction of race are found in the school board elections but not in contests for the mayoralty Democratic nomination. Spatial autocorrelation between observation units is assessed for voting and shown to be strong. Reassessment of spatial autocorrelation in the multivariate model residuals is used to evaluate model specification. Although very large reduction in spatial autocorrelation is achieved with multivariate event count models, the residuals retain statistically significant evidence of spatial structuring.