The Persuadable Voter by Hillygus D. Sunshine Shields Todd G

Author:Hillygus, D. Sunshine, Shields, Todd G.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

TABLE 5.1

Volunteered Racial Cross-pressures among White Democrats in 1960 and 1968

Percent All

Percent Non-South

Percent South

1960

1968

1960

1968

1960

1968

Any Cross-pressure

67.4

75.1

62.6

74.0

78.9

77.8

Racial Cross-pressure

5.4

5.4

1.0

4.3

15.6

8.4

Note: Table shows that southern white Democrats were more likely to volunteer a racial policy dislike about their party than northern white Democrats. Data source is the American National Election Study cumulative file.

The key question, however, is whether or not there is a relationship between racial policy incongruence and an individual’s decision to defect. We estimate the effect of racial cross-pressures on a white Democrat’s decision to vote for the Republican nominee, controlling for other factors that may influence the likelihood of defection, including age, education, gender, and strength of party identification.64 The model results, including coefficients, standard errors, model fit, and Wald estimates for the cross-pressure variable are reported in appendix 3.

To evaluate the priming effects, we compare the effect of racial cross-pressures across years. In figure 5.1, we see that racial cross-pressures among white Democrats predicted support for Nixon in 1968, but not 1960. In 1960 Democrats who disagreed with the national party position on civil rights and other racial issues were no more likely to support Nixon than those not cross-pressured. In 1968, in contrast, these cross-pressured Democrats had a 58 percent probability of defecting to Nixon. In other words, racially conservative Democrats were more likely to vote Republican than Democratic.65 These findings are supportive of our expectation that the decision for a persuadable partisan to defect depends on the issue content of the campaign. When candidates offered distinct issue positions on racial issues in 1968 and the issue was emphasized in the campaign, racial policy conflicts weighed more heavily in the vote decisions of incongruent Democrats. This is true even though the extent of policy incongruence remained stable or even declined (among southern Democrats) from 1960 to 1968.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.