The Unchanging American Voter

by Smith, Eric R. A. N.

• ISBN13: 9780520068308
• ISBN10: 0520068300
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1989-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr on Demand

Summary

Have the American people grown more politically sophisticated in the past three decades, or do they remain relatively ignorant of the political world? Did a "great leap forward" take place during the 1960s in which our citizenry became involved and adept voters? In this important book, Eric Smith addresses these and other provocative questions that have long befuddled political scientists and policymakers. Much of the current wisdom about American voters derives from an argument advanced in a volume entitledThe Changing American Voter, written by Nie, Verba, and Petrocik. In this work, the authors contend that the electorate made a "great leap forward" in political sophistication and ideological thinking between the 1960 and 1964 elections. They argue that people changed in response to a shifting environment, and that, in particular, the surge of protest and ideological rhetoric between 1960 and 1964 engendered a new political savvy and sophistication. In their view, people learned to understand politics better, to relate the issues to the candidates more accurately, and to cast more informed, intelligent votes. InThe Unchanging American Voter, Smith takes issue with this portrait of an engaged American citizenry and replaces it with a quite different picture of the voters of this nation. He posits a more bleak political landscape in which the typical voter knows little about politics, is not interested in the political arena and consequently does not participate in it, and is even unable to organize his or her attitudes in a coherent manner. To support this view, Smith demonstrates how the indices by which Nie, Verba, and Petrocik measured levels of sophistication during the 1960s were methodologically flawed and how a closer examination of supposed changes reveals only superficial and unimportant shifts in the ways voters have approached the ballot box since the 1950s. The Unchanging American Voteris an intelligent and original work that provides a new perspective of the American citizenry. It is sure to engender discussion and debate about the dynamics of voting in postwar America.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. xi
List of Figures	p. xv
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
On the Meaning of Political Sophistication	p. 4
On Sophistication and Rationality	p. 5
Why Sophistication Matters	p. 6
Things to Come	p. 7
Reliability of the Levels of Conceptualization	p. 9
The Levels of Conceptualization Indexes	p. 10
Reliability	p. 16
Interpreting the Test-Retest Coefficients	p. 19
The Data on Reliability	p. 22
Further Data on Reliability	p. 32
Conclusions	p. 42
Reliability Under the Assumption of Nominal Variables	p. 42
The Validity of the Levels	p. 45
The Question of Validity	p. 47
An Alternative Hypothesis	p. 52
Anomalous Findings on the Levels	p. 56
Testing the Alternative Hypothesis	p. 58
Discussion	p. 76
Explaining the Failure of the Levels Indexes	p. 80
The Great Leap Forward That Never Was: 1960-1964	p. 98
What the Levels Can Tell Us	p. 101
Attitude Consistency	p. 105
The Nature of Attitude Consistency	p. 106
The Rise of Constraint	p. 109
The Question Wording Controversy	p. 117
Comparing Correlations	p. 129
Further Problems	p. 132
The Experimental Evidence	p. 135
Conceptualizing Attitude Consistency	p. 146
Measuring Attitude Consistency	p. 155
Summary Comments	p. 158
Changes in the Public's Political Sophistication	p. 159
Preliminary Considerations	p. 159
Measures of Political Knowledge	p. 163
The Structure of the Information Items	p. 173
The Causes and Correlates of Sophistication	p. 176
Explaining Changes in the Public's Knowledge	p. 191
Modeling Political Sophistication	p. 191
A Simple Recursive Model of Political Knowledge	p. 196
The Results of the Models	p. 199
Changes in the Public's Knowledge of Politics	p. 210
Isolating the Effects of Education	p. 210
Another Look at Education	p. 215
Can the Public's Sophistication Change?	p. 219
The Limitations of Behavioral Research	p. 221
Concluding Comments	p. 223
On the Influence of the Changing Political Environment	p. 223
On the Definition and Measurement of Political Sophistication	p. 224
The Simulation Method	p. 229
Coding the Data	p. 231
References	p. 235
Author Index	p. 261
Subject Index	p. 265
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