Neil Nevitte

Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty

This article first examines the ideological composition of American university faculty and then tests whether ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing. A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study. The analysis finds similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.

ISSUE IMPORTANCE AND PERFORMANCE VOTING

Issue importance mediates the impact of public policy issues on electoral decisions. Individuals who consider that an issue is important are more likely to rely on their attitudes toward that issue when evaluating candidates and deciding for whom to vote. The logic behind the link between issue importance and issue voting should translate to a link between issue importance and performance voting. Incumbent performance evaluations regarding an issue should have a stronger impact on the vote choice of individuals who find that issue important. The analysis demonstrates that there is a significant interaction between performance evaluations and issue importance. People concerned about an issue assign more weight to their evaluations of the governments performance on that issue when making up their mind.

MEASURING PARTY IDENTIFICATION: Britain, Canada, and the United States

The article proposes an empirically based reflection on how to measure party identification cross nationally, using data from the 1997 Canadian Election Study, the 1997 British Election Study, and the 1996 American National Election Study. These studies included both traditional national questions and a new common one, which allows for an assessment of the effects of question wording on the distribution and correlates of party identification. We show that the distribution of party identification is strongly affected by question wording and that the relationship between party identification and variables such as party and leader ratings, and voting behavior does not quite conform to theoretical expectations. We point out problems in the wording of party identification questions and propose an alternative formulation.

Explaining The Gender Gap in Support for the New Right The Case of Canada

This article uses data from the 2000 Canadian Election Studyto examine a variety of possible explanations for the gender gap in support for the newright. The authors find structural and situational explanations to be of little help in accounting for the gap. What matters are values and beliefs. The gender gap in support for Canadas new right party reflects differences in views about the appropriate role of the state, lawand order, and traditional moral values. It also appears to reflect differences in the salience of politics in mens andwomens lives. When all of these attitudinal factors are taken into account, the gender gap ceases to be significant. The implications of the findings are considered in light of comparative analyses of gender gaps in vote choice and support for radical right-wing populist political parties in Western Europe.

Election Campaigns as Information Campaigns: Who Learns What and Does it Matter?

During election campaigns political parties compete to inform voters about their leaders, the issues, and where they stand on these issues. In that sense, election campaigns can be viewed as a particular kind of information campaign. Democratic theory supposes that participatory democracies are better served by an informed electorate than an uninformed one. But do all voters make equal information gains during campaigns? Why do some people make more information gains than others? And does the acquisition of campaign information have any impact on vote intentions? Combining insights from political science research, communications theory, and social psychology, we develop specific hypotheses about these campaign information dynamics. These hypotheses are tested with data from the 1997 Canadian Election Study, which includes a rolling cross-national campaign component, a post-election component, and a media content analysis. The results show that some people do make more information gains than others; campaigns produce a knowledge gap. Moreover, the intensity of media signals on different issues has an important impact on who receives what information, and information gains have a significant impact on vote intentions.

The formation of party preferences: Testing the proximity and directional models

We review the methodological debate between defenders of the proximity and directional models. We propose what we believe to be a rigorous and fair test of the two models, using the 1997 Canadian Election Study. The analysis is based on responses to questions in which the various issue positions are explicitly spelled out. We rely on individual perceptions of party positions because it is individual perceptions that matter in the formation of party preferences but we control for projection effects through a multivariate model that incorporates, in addition to indicators of distance and direction, socio-demographic characteristics, party identification, and leader ratings. We also take into account whether a party is perceived to be extreme. The empirical evidence vindicates the proximity model.

Does the Local Candidate Matter? Candidate Effects in the Canadian Election of 2000

This article ascertains the impact of local candidates on vote choice in the 2000 Canadian election. The authors show that 44 per cent of Canadian voters formed a preference for a local candidate and that this preference had an effect on vote choice independent of how people felt about the parties and the leaders. The findings suggest that the local candidate was a decisive consideration for 5 per cent of Canadian voters, 6 per cent outside Quebec and 2 per cent in Quebec. Although preference for a local candidate had a similar effect on urban and rural voters, as well as on voters of varying degrees of sophistication, the findings revealed that rural voters and more sophisticated voters were more likely to have formed a preference for their local candidate. As a consequence, the local candidate was more likely to be a decisive consideration for more sophisticated rural voters.

Making Sense of Regional Voting in the 1997 Canadian Federal Election: Liberal and Reform Support Outside Quebec

This article uses a regression decomposition approach to explore the meaning of the gaps in electoral support for the federal Liberal party between Ontario, the West and Atlantic Canada, as well as the gap in Reform party support between the West and Ontario in the 1997 federal election. The analysis proceeds in two stages. The first stage involves determining whether the regional vote gaps reflect “true” regional differences or whether they can be explained simply in terms of differences in the sociodemographic makeup of the regions. Having ascertained that the gaps are not spurious, the second stage of the analysis probes the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them. The authors conclude that the gaps are driven not just by differences in political orientations and beliefs from one region to another, but also by more fundamental differences in basic political priorities.

Which Matters Most? Comparing the Impact of Issues and the Economy in American, British and Canadian Elections

The objective of this study is to assess and compare the relative impact of issues and the economy on the vote in democratic elections. There is a rich and vast literature dealing with issue voting and an equally impressive literature concerning economic voting. For the most part, however, these amount to two separate streams of research. Relatively little attention has been paid to where these literatures overlap and less still to the simple but basic question: which matters most, the issues or the economy? The main debate in the issue voting literature recently has been between the directional and proximity models. That debate, engaging both technical and conceptual issues, has focused entirely on how issues play in an election, whether voters prefer the party that is closest to their own position or the party that is the strongest defender of their side on an issue. The question of how much issues affect the vote, however, has been neglected. Indeed, both the proximity and directional schools implicitly agree that issues matter, and so challenge the Michigan schools strong scepticism on the import of issues. Given that the difference between the two models is often quite small, a more fruitful line of investigation might be to return to the equally fundamental ‘how much’ question.

Authority Orientations and Political Support: A Cross-national Analysis of Satisfaction with Governments and Democracy

In the mid 1970’s Samuel Huntington predicted that the new middle classes in many advanced industrial states would become more restless and “post-industrial politics” less benign (1974; also Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975). The accumulated evidence provides some support for that prediction; citizens in a number of states have become more inclined to publicly express their dissatisfaction with governments (Inglehart 1997; Klingemann 1999; Dalton 1999). Occasional citizen dissatisfaction with a particular government is neither unusual nor necessarily problematic. More problematical is the possibility that deep and sustained dissatisfaction might corrode regime support. The worry is that dissatisfaction with particular governments might turn into dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy more generally. What are the determinants of dissatisfaction with governments? And, what is the connection between citizens’ evaluations of government performance and their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy more generally? This analysis examines these two separate but closely related questions. Neither research question is new, but we depart from