Richard A. Brody

From Life Space to Polling Place: The Relevance of Personal Concerns for Voting Behavior

To live is to have problems. However the country as a whole fares, the individual has bills to pay, work to do, children to worry about – to mention only a few of the commonplace problems that people face in their daily lives. Commonplace or not, these are problems that people must wrestle with. They are immediate, inescapable, and serious, far more so for most than the ‘large’ issues facing the country. Students of voting have long suspected that such problems may influence political choices, but key questions remain unanswered. Which personal problems are taken to be political and which non-political? Do personal problems have an impact on voting behavior only if they are taken to be political? When and how do personal problems become translated into political choices? In this paper we shall address such questions as these.

Coping: The Ethic of Self-Reliance

This paper demonstrates that, contrary to the expectations of many, Americans in overwhelming numbers believe they ought to take care of their personal problems by themselves rather than believing that the government ought to provide them with aid. How they believe they ought to cope with such problems-on their own or with the assistance of government-helps explain, in part, the current cynicism of citizens. This paper relies on data gathered by the Center of Political Studies in the 1972 presidential election. The persistence, the pervasiveness, and the political significance of the ethic of self-reliance are discussed.

Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam

Foreign policy seems to command more public attention than domestic policy and yet—insofar as it has been, researched—public opinion on foreign policy seems to have less impact on governmental decisions than does opinion in most other issue areas. There are at least two reasons, one normative and one empirical, why public opinion can be regarded as pertinent to some foreign policy questions—especially those associated with “life and death.” Normatively, it is desirable for political leaders in a democracy to commit national resources in ways generally approved by the populace. Large scale military commtiments should, if at all possible, meet with the approval of public opinion. Empirically, if they do not, experience has shown there are circumstances in which public disapproval of the course of foreign policy may be registered in national elections. Specifically, our one recent experience with a situation of partial mobilization and a limited but large-scale and indefinite commitment to military action in Korea did in time produce a distribution of opinion that suggested the war was very unpopular. And though its precise impact on the 1952 presidential election is difficult to assess there is little doubt that the Korean issue contributed significantly to the Eisenhower landslide. Among the questions raised by the Korean experience is whether the American public will easily tolerate the prosecution of long drawn-out wars of partial mobilization. Therefore, it is not surprising that another such war, in Vietnam, has stimulated a concern with public opinion.

Indifference, alientation and rational decisions

In studying evaluations of Presidential candidates, one major task is to account for these attitudes with such causally prior variables as party identification, issue orientation, social characteristics, and the like.1 But it is equally important to consider the effects of candidate evaluations, that is, to consider their relationships to political behavior.2 In this paper we briefly consider the effects of candidate evaluations on turnout and on voting choice. Let us deal with the question of turnout first.

Policy failure and public support: The Iran-Contra affair and public assessment of President Reagan

The Iran-Contra affair is an example of the type of event that is expected to give rise to a “rally” of public opinion behind the president. However, the publics response to this event, uncharacteristically, was a sharp decrease in support for President Reagan. This case study constitutes an attempt to explore the sources of the public opinion response to foreign policy events. Statements of political elites, news coverage and commentary, and public opinion assessments are examined to test the patriotism, priming, and opinion leadership explanations of the rally phenomenon. The actions of opinion leaders appears to provide the best explanation of the differential public response to the Iran-Contra affair.

Policy Reasoning and Political Values: The Problem of Racial Equality*

What is the structure of policy reasoning among citizens at large, and particularly, how does this structure vary with the level of education? To answer this question, we examine the nature of policy reasoning on the issue of racial equality. Our analysis helps explain why the highly educated show greater support for the principle of racial equality than do the less educated but not appreciably greater support for government efforts to promote it. Highly educated citizens, we argue, have more fully integrated and differentiated belief systems, and thus they take a wider range of factors into account when evaluating government policy. Americans seemingly have a weak grip on democratic values. The root difficulty is not that people reject such values-on the contrary, nearly all accept them, stated in the abstract-but that they are not ready to stand by basic principles in specific controversies. This gap between

Measuring Affect and Action in Inter National Reaction Models

The Cuban crisis of October 1962 may be analyzed from several perspectives. The investigator may focus his attention on the unique characteristics of the situation and sequence of events which are outlined here. The analyst of international relations may, as is suggested in this paper, examine these events so as to permit relevant comparisons with other crisis situations, both those resolved by war and those eventually resolved by non-violent means. The conceptual framework for this analysis is a two-step mediated stimulus-response model in which the acts of one nation are considered as inputs to other nations. Such psycho-political variables as perceptions and expressions of hostility are traced over time by means of content analysis of documents to test the consistency of the model. In the Cuban crisis, both sides tended to perceive rather accurately the nature of the adversarys actions and then proceeded to act at an appropriate level. Efforts by either party to delay or reverse the escalation toward conflict were generally perceived as such, and responded to in like manner.

The Mass Media and Presidential Popularity Presidential Broadcasting and News in the Nixon Administration

During the first three years of the Nixon administration, the Presidents popularity in the Gallup Poll was found to be related both to the content of daily press coverage of the President and to the number of times he appeared on television. These findings support the argument that studying the mass media provides an important means of examining the exercise of presidential power. While further research is necessary to determine the impact of presidential media appearances on his popularity, this study is the latest in a number showing the impact of the daily news on the Presidents fortunes in the polls.

Evaluative bias and issue proximity

This study identifies two forms of evaluative bias toward political objects — positivity and negativity — in addition to the familiar one of partisanship. Bias is measured, predominantly, using open-ended responses to questions on political parties in the NES studies. The incidence of varieties of evaluative orientation toward the parties over time, beginning in 1952, is reported; so also are demographic and cognitive correlates of evaluative bias. Finally, hypotheses on differential assimilation and contrast effects in candidate perception are tested.

Participation in Presidential Primaries

SINCE 1968 the number of presidential primaries has exploded. In 1984 Democratic voters participated in 26 primary elections; Republican electors were involved in 29. They selected 56.4 percent and 68.2 percent of the delegates to their partys respective nominating conventions. The proliferation of primary contests is one of the most significant changes in electoral politics in recent years. It has become increasingly important to understand what motivates citizens to vote in these elections.