Paul Allen Beck

The Social Calculus of Voting: Interpersonal, Media, and Organizational Influences on Presidential Choices

Voting choices are a product of both personal attitudes and social contexts, of a personal and a social calculus. Research has illuminated the personal calculus of voting, but the social calculus has received little attention since the 1940s. This study expands our understanding of the social influences on individual choice by examining the relationship of partisan biases in media, organizational, and interpersonal intermediaries to the voting choices of Americans. Its results show that the traditional sources of social influence still dominate: Interpersonal discussion outweighs the media in affecting the vote. Media effects appear to be the product of newspaper editorial pages rather than television or newspaper reporting, which contain so little perceptible bias that they often are misperceived as hostile. Parties and secondary organizations also are influential, but only for less interested voters—who are more affected by social contexts in general. Overall, this study demonstrates that democratic citizens are embedded in social contexts that join with personal traits in shaping their voting decisions.

Pathways to Participation

The premise of this article is that adult participation in politics is affected by strong preadult forces in addition to the contemporaneous factors emphasized by recent studies. To test this premise, data are drawn from the 1965–1973 national socialization panel study of young Americans and their parents. Four causal models depicting pathways to participation among young adults are evaluated; each includes civic orientations as intervening variables. Three of the models assess the direct and indirect effects of parental characteristics—socioeconomic status, political activity, and civic orientations. The fourth model assesses the impact of adolescent involvement in high school activities. Taken individually, each pathway is shown to have an effect on adult participation, with parent socioeconomic status and high school activism having the most impact. When the four pathways are combined in a single model to reflect the connections among them, all remain important. The combined model illustrates the importance of a variety of methods of political learning. The combined model also demonstrates the crucial role of civic orientations in converting preadult experiences into later participation. Civic orientations are the primary carriers of preadult political learning. Overall, the results rebut the critics of socialization research who have questioned the existence of a linkage between early learning and adult political behavior.

Family Traditions, Political Periods, and the Development of Partisan Orientations

Two of the most important influences on adult political orientations are the political proclivities of their family of origin and the pressures of the times in which they first enter the electorate. Drawing upon a three-wave panel study of young Americans over the 1965-1982 time period and conceiving of parental orientations as producing a broad familial environment, this article traces the influence of parents on the partisanship and politicization of their children as the youth mature from adolescence to middle adulthood during a particularly turbulent period of American politics. The parental partisan legacy remained strong even though it was eroded by the antipartisan period pressures of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By contrast, family levels of politicization were reproduced only modestly throughout, leaving ample room for attentiveness to politics to develop outside of the family tradition. However, the interaction between the partisanship and the politicization of the family environment governs the dealignment of the youth generation after 1965. Youth from politicized Republican and Democratic families were affected most by the powerful antipartisan pressures of the post-1965 period.

A Test of Media-Centered Agenda Setting: Newspaper Content and Public Interests in a Presidential Election

The conventional wisdom in political communications research is that the media play a dominant role in defining the agenda of elections. In Bernard Cohens words, the media do not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. The present article challenges this conclusion. We present data on media coverage of the 1992 presidential election from the first nationally representative sample of American newspapers and compare these to the issue interests of the American public. We conclude that past claims that the media control the agenda-setting process have been overstated. Candidates messages are well represented in press coverage of the campaign, and coverage is even independent of a newspapers editorial endorsement. We argue that agenda setting is a transaction process in which elites, the media, and the public converge to a common set of salient issues that define a campaign.

PATTERNS AND SOURCES OF TICKET SPLITTING IN SUBPRESIDENTIAL VOTING

The primary source of divided government in the United States is voters who split their ballots between the parties. Yet there has been little comprehensive examination of either patterns or sources of ticket splitting in recent years. Instead, divergent lines of research have emerged, emphasizing such things as voter partisanship, incumbency, and a “new” (young, well-educated, even partisan) kind of ticket splitter; and their focus has been too often restricted to the atypical president–Congress pair. We seek to unify these research traditions in a comprehensive model of split-ticket voting and to test this model across the partisan ballot in a typical election setting-here, the contests for five Ohio state-wide offices in 1990. The model incorporates partisan strength, candidate visibility, and the individual characteristics that distinguish the “new ticket splitters”. The results support our partisan strength and candidate visibility explanations but provide little support for the emergence of a new type of ticket splitter.

Partisan Dealignment in the Postwar South

This study attempts to explain post-World War II southern electoral politics by examining the party identifications of southerners between 1952 and 1972. Pronounced decreases in Democratic loyalties and increases in Independent leanings appear during this period and constitute a dealignment of the southern electorate. While interregional population exchanges have diluted Democratic strength, their effects are almost counterbalanced by the mobilization of blacks into politics. Instead, the principal source of dealignment is the generational replacement of the native white electorate. Its youngest members, who entered the electorate after World War II, have come to favor political independence increasingly in recent years. This behavior seems partially attributable to a tendency for young native whites in particular to bring their partisan loyalties into line with their attitudes and party images on racial issues. Even so, there are clear signs that the racial question is losing its place as the major determinant of the regions politics. For the future, one can expect a continuation of dealignment politics and little chance of a partisan realignment.

The Electoral Cycle and Patterns of American Politics

The relationship between citizens and leaders is the core concern of democratic theory and the primary focus of students of democratic politics. Competitive elections are typically assigned the principal role in structuring this relationship. They are a means by which the public can make government officials accountable and influence the policy directions of government. The case for how elections should link public and leaders is a familiar one. Not so obvious is the strength of this link, particularly the extent to which mass electoral forces may make for fundamental changes in the behaviour of leaders and the policies of governments. This article examines the relationship between changes in mass electoral behaviour and changes at the elite (or government) level of the American political system in the last century and a half. It begins with a model of electoral change which posits the cyclical recurrence of three types of election periods realigning, stable alignment, and dealigning throughout American history. The article then turns to a consideration of how important features of government politics vary with election periods. Although mass electoral change is certainly not the only contributor to broader government changes, this study suggests that it is a vitally important one.

Ambiguity, Distorted Messages, and Nested Environmental Effects on Political Communication

In this paper we are concerned with the clarity of political signals transmitted through political conversation and the accuracy with which those signals are perceived. The social communication of political information is subject to distortion effects that arise due to skewed expectations on the part of the receiver and ambiguous representations on the part of the sender. Indeed, communication that occurs between two citizens might be distorted either by characteristics of the individuals who are transmitting and receiving messages, or by characteristics of the setting in which the information is being transmitted. We argue that the power of majority opinion is magnified by the inferential devices that citizens use to reach judgments in the face of ambiguous political messages and hence the use of a personal experience heuristic gives rise to a political bias that favors the continued dominance of majority opinion.

Political Periods and Political Participation

Analysis of complementary data sets, a 1965–1973 panel study of young adults and their parents and the 1956–1976 Michigan presidential election series, shows that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a deviant period where participation in American politics was concerned. During this time, the young were more active politically than their elders, substantially increasing their participation from previous years, and Americans on the ideological left participated more than those at other positions along the ideological continuum. While this surge of left-wing activism was not restricted to the young, it probably accounts for the relative participation advantage enjoyed by the young. These findings challenge the “conventional wisdom” about patterns of participation in America. They are best explained by recognizing that the opportunities for political action among the American citizenry are not fixed, but instead vary with changes in the political stimuli across different periods.

ENCOURAGING POLITICAL DEFECTION: The Role of Personal Discussion Networks in Partisan Desertions to the Opposition Party and Perot Votes in 1992

Drawing on data from a unique study of the 1992 American presidential election, this article demonstrates that personal discussion networks influence voting behavior, independent of candidate evaluations and partisanship. These social networks encouraged two different kinds of defections from otherwise-expected behavior. People were more likely to vote for Perot if their personal discussants supported him and to convert preferences for him into a Perot vote on election day. Partisans also were more likely to defect to the other major party if their discussion network failed to fully support the candidate of their own party. These results withstood controls for candidate evaluations and partisanship as well as for selective exposure to discussants and selective perception of their preferences. They show the importance of adding social context to personal attitudes, interests, and partisanship in explaining voting behavior.