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Level-of-Analysis Effects on Explanations of Voting: The Case of the 1982 US Senate Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

The availability of rich survey data, and concerns over the ecological fallacy, have led voting researchers to focus on the explanation of individual voting decisions at the expense of accounting for patterns of aggregate election outcomes. This has skewed our understanding of the relative importance of various factors in the electoral process. A framework for analysis of elections at multiple levels is developed and applied using data from twenty-three exit polls from the US Senate elections. Comparable parameters for a simple voting model are estimated for individual voting and for election outcomes. Election-level factors, especially candidates' issue strategies and incumbency, are substantially more important in accounting for election outcomes than in explaining individual voting decisions. Finally, working with election outcomes permits an estimate of a path model of Senate election outcomes that shows key relationships that are not accessible from individual level data.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

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17 The exact wording and scoring (in parentheses) used throughout are as follows: Party Identification: ‘Do you usually think of yourself as a: Democrat (– 1), Independent (0), Republican (1)?’ Voter Ideology: ‘On most political matters do you consider yourself Liberal (– 1), Moderate (0), Conservative (1)?’ Presidential Popularity: ‘Do you approve or disapprove of the way Ronald Reagan is handling his job as President?’ Approve (1), Disapprove(– 1) (undecided was volunteered by some respondents, 0); Family Finances: ‘Compared to a year ago, is your family's financial situation better today (1), worse today (– 1), about the same (0)?’

18 Candidates and incumbents were asked if they favour or oppose constitutional amendments to: (1) allow individual states to prohibit abortions; (2) permit organized prayer in the public schools; and (3) require a balanced budget. In addition, they were asked about positions on (4) the Equal Rights Amendment; (5) a mutual nuclear freeze with the Soviet Union; (6) domestic content legislation for foreign cars sold in the United States; (7) cancelling the July 1983 tax cut; (8) cutting back increases in military spending; (9) additional reductions in domestic social programs; and (10) regulation of air pollution.

19 The use of the midpoint as a summary of candidates' issue positions is adapted from Robert Erikson's ideas on measuring party elite preferences in comparative state politics. See Erikson, Robert S., Wright, Gerald C. and McIver, John P., ‘Political Parties, Public Opinion, and State Policy’, American Political Science Review (forthcoming).Google Scholar

20 One generally needs to be concerned with heteroscadascity when using OLS regression with a dichotomous dependent variable. Regression creates no distortions in these data, however. All the individual-level equations were run with probit and the same conclusions resulted. Regression is used at both levels here to achieve comparability of the estimated coefficients.

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23 In this analysis we use only Democratic incumbency because Republican incumbency had no electoral payoff in 1982. Changing the variable of incumbency to reflect values for Republican in cumbency (i.e., 1,0, – 1 for Republican incumbents, open seats and Democratic incumbents) does not affect the results reported.