October 16, 2008
Cover photo courtesy University of Michigan Press
Barack Obama will win the presidential election, predicts William Jacoby, a political science professor at Michigan State University, director of the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research summer program at the University of Michigan and co-author of a new book, The American Voter Revisited.
Jacoby bases his opinion not on the latest poll results or the unusual level of excitement that surrounds the Obama campaign, but on in-depth analyses he and three other political scientists, Michael S. Lewis, Helmut Norpoth and Herbert F. Weisberg, conducted in producing the book. Their work updates one of the most important books ever written on American voting behavior.
Essentially, his view boils down to the fact that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the U.S. today, and Americans generally cast their ballots based on party leanings.
DomeMagazine.com spoke with Jacoby recently about the book and its findings — the surprising habits of American voters in presidential elections. Following are excerpts from that conversation.
The American Voter Revisited, which is based on the original political behavior classic The American Voter (produced in 1960), was published in September by the University of Michigan Press.
DomeMagazine.com: What made you and your colleagues decide to reprise the book of 48 years ago?
Jacoby: The impact of The American Voter on the field of political behavior was so great. It defined what the field was — it’s that important. We wanted to replicate the study as precisely as possible using modern data.
D: How did you go about your analyses for the new edition?
J: The original book used data from the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections to analyze voters’ behavior. We analyzed data collected from 2000 and 2004 that was produced by the same organization, the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.
The study is based on public opinion polls, now called the American National Election Studies, which is the gold standard of survey research. It’s based on face-to-face interviews done on a random sample of the American population by highly trained interviewers. The interviews last more than an hour and the same people are interviewed after the election.
Professor William Jacoby
Photo by Jean EggemeyerWe were almost entirely able to redo what the original authors Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, [all U of M researchers] did. The new edition is basically a chapter-by-chapter replication.
At the end of each chapter, however, we’ve added a section, “commentary and controversies,” where we update the work. We discuss what’s happened since the ’50s and how the chapter topic has developed.
I think those sections in the book will get enormous attention because, again, the original book really started this field and led to all the work that is going on today.
D: I imagine you got the blessings of the original authors as you set out to revisit their work?
J: Phillip Converse is the only one of the four still living and we were well into our first draft when I was elected to go to him and get his blessing. In fact, I authored the same three chapters in the new book that he originally wrote, which was daunting because he is an incredibly good writer. One of the nice side outcomes of this project is that Phil and I have become good friends.
D: What were some of your major findings?
J: The first book really emphasized the impact of partisanship. For most Americans, partisanship is not an organizational membership; it’s a psychological feeling of attachment to one or the other party. It develops very early in life and, once developed, it seldom changes.
The party ID gives people a stable “viewing platform” from which to watch the political world develop and change; it gives people a pre-conceived bias.
Partisanship also stimulates participation. Contrary to some thinking, “independents” are less involved politically. The strength of attachment voters have to a party is really what pulls people in and makes them likely to vote in the first place.
The study also shows that Americans are perfectly willing to express inconsistencies in their opinions. We want more government services but we want government to cut spending, for instance.
We also found that citizens are not as engaged in the political process as some people would like to believe they are.
We looked at the degree to which people organize their political thinking in terms of “liberal” and “conservative.” In the 1950s, about 10 to 11 percent of the population viewed the world along liberal/conservative lines. Today, it’s a little higher but only about 20 percent. So George W. Bush’s victories in 2000 and 2004, in and of themselves, do not indicate that the public has become more conservative. And what we’re seeing today certainly backs that up.
D: Did you expect similar outcomes to the 1950s study?
J: I think all of us did. We are four guys who were socialized into this view [presented in the original]. But we were also very surprised at just how well the modern results duplicated what the original authors found. Our substantive conclusions are virtually identical to theirs.
D: What else surprised you?
J: The continued non-ideological nature of public opinion. That, despite the everyday use of terms like liberal and conservative in political discourse and rhetoric, people do not think that way.
There is not much change in the level of political engagement from the earlier study and our study. We found the continuity surprising. The massive changes in the media environment and the availability of mass media seem to have had little influence on how people reach their presidential voting decisions or their general level of engagement with politics.
D: What impact do independents have?
J: Our main conclusion is that most independents aren’t really independents…most independents admit that they lean toward the Democratic or Republican parties. As it turns out, these independent leaners often behave in a more partisan fashion than some of the partisans.
A lot of media attention is focused on “undecided voters.” There are very few undecided voters left at this point…most of the electorate have made up their minds by the two conventions. The usual figure is that one-third of the electorate hasn’t made up their minds by Labor Day. I think it’s even lower.
D: You’ve been on campuses for many years; have you seen the level of excitement that is surrounding Obama in previous election years?
J: I haven’t seen anything of this sort [surrounding a candidate]. I think the question is going to be whether or not the excitement is really unusual. I think, in the end, the outcome of this election is not going to be terribly extraordinary. I think Obama is going to win, but he is going to win because he is a Democrat...
When U of M releases its next national elections study in the spring, we’re going to see that the same factors that influenced voting behavior before…we will see the same thing in 2008.
Bookworm Jean B. Eggemeyer owns communications and marketing firm Carillon Communications LLC, serving the business and association communities. | E-mail
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