The proposed data collection is motivated by unanticipated events and conditions that provide a significant opportunity to advance scientific understanding of factors affecting electoral choice in the United States and other contemporary mature democracies.
Intellectual Merit: The study leverages unique resources provided by a 2008 national six-wave survey of the American electorate to study factors affecting electoral choice and change during this interesting and important historical period. The research focuses on the explanatory power of rival valence and spatial models of electoral choice. Whereas spatial models feature positional issues that divide the electorate, valence models based on recent research in political psychology and behavioral economics emphasize the importance of voters' judgments about rival parties' abilities to deliver salient and widely agreed upon policy goals. These party performance judgments, together with cues (heuristics) provided voters' images of party leaders and potentially mutable partisan attachments, are the major components of the valence politics model of electoral choice. Empirical research on voting behavior in the United States and elsewhere demonstrates that valence models outperform spatial rivals.
Although valence issues typically dominate electoral agendas, their preeminence is not foreordained. Novel positional issues may gain salience and issues already on the political agenda may be transformed from valence to positional ones (or vice versa) over time. Such a transformation occurred in an unanticipated way earlier this year, thus providing an excellent opportunity to study how the evolution of political issues affects electoral choice. The proposed research will enable tests of the explanatory power of rival valence and spatial theories of voting behavior in a political context that is shaping debate about several major issues in trade-off terms in unusually sharp ways. These issues include the economy, the environment (dramatized by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill), health care, immigration, and the war in Afghanistan. The proposed data collection extends a six-wave national survey conducted in 2008 with two additional survey waves bracketing the 2010 mid-term congressional elections. The resulting multiwave panel data set permits the marshalling of advanced statistical techniques such as mixed Markov latent class analyses and latent growth curve analysis to investigate how these issues affect the dynamics of electoral choice over the 2008-2010 period.
Broader Impact: The research focuses on extremely important substantive issues in contemporary American politics--the economy, the environment, health care, and immigration. Public policies designed to address these issues have major effects on Americans' quality of life, and have global ramifications. The capacity to turn the data around within a month is potentially transformative because it makes scientifically valid data available that can quickly inform the academic and policy communities about the importance of these different factors.
Intellectual Merits: This project collects data from national surveys of the American electorate before and immediately after to investigate how Americans voted in the consequential 2010 mid-term congressional elections. The total number of respondents is 3800, including a large California oversample to study voting in Proposition 23 on climate change legislation. All respondents in the 2010 pre- and post-election surveys also participated in the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project multi-wave national election survey. These 2008-10 panel data provide researchers and others with a valuable opportunity to analyze the dynamics of voting and elections in contemporary America. This data collection is motivated by spatial-positional and valence explanations of people's voting decisions. Spatial-positional accounts focus on issue or ideological proximities between parties and voters. Valence accounts emphasize the importance of voters' judgments about rival parties’ abilities to deliver important and widely agreed-upon policy goals. Although valence issues typically dominate electoral politics, positional issues may gain salience and issues may be transformed from valence to positional (or vice versa) over time. In this regard, unanticipated events and conditions did much to effect issue transformation in the run-up to, and to affect candidate choice and partisanship in, the 2010 mid-term congressional elections. During the 2008 campaign - a time of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression - Barack Obama raised expectations about "change you can believe in." In the run-up to the 2010 congressional elections, health care reform, championed by President Obama and increasingly cast as a trade-off between tax increases and unsustainable costs or health-care improvements, became a highly salient, positional issue. Moreover, health care reform debate has occurred when three other major issues - economy, environment, and immigration - have also been reframed. The economy and the environment typically are valence issues, that is, everyone wants a strong economy and a clean environment. Since 2008, the American economy has been beset by relatively high unemployment and slow growth. The environment debate - then largely focused on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill - also became recast as a clear trade-off between competing needs for environmental protection, energy resources and economic growth. Immigration, once a "pro-con" positional issue, has been increasingly presented as a highly salient valence issue. In addition to these issues, the data collection includes public attitudes about the Tea Party and about foreign policy issues related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Analyses (see "Additional Information" section below) show that a mix of issues, some of which might have been valence in good economic times but became contested positional ones, did much to erode the President's image and Democratic congressional candidate support when people voted on November 2, 2010. Broader Impacts: The project has been designed with broader impacts in mind. First, the 2010 congressional election result has determined how major issues on the public agenda are addressed in the years ahead. Health care, economic recovery, environmental protection, viable immigration policy - as well as national debt reduction, social security and adequate care for an aging population, national and personal security - are major items on this agenda. Several such issues had major effects in 2010, and they promise to have significant effects in the 2012 presidential election and the years ahead. Second, the project's data collection is cost effective, extensive, and very high quality. In keeping with NSF guidelines and best practice, project data are being prepared for timely release and analytical use by researchers and others. Third, the investigators, and others can, use the data for teaching purposes in their graduate and undergraduate courses on elections, voting, research design, survey research, and related. The data are being used in doctoral dissertation research, including "Group Perceptions, Group Conflict, and Political Support" and "Public Attitudes about Public Service Delivery." Additional Information: Anticipated publication of project results includes, but is not limited to- "Political Choices in Hard times: Voting in the 2010 U.S. House Elections, manuscript accepted for publication by the peer-reviewed Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. For results, see "Broader Impacts" section. "Green Choices in Hard Times: Voting on California's Proposition 23." Manuscript submitted for peer review to The American Journal of Political Science, using the 2010 California data to investigate voting on California's Proposition 23 - an important test case of the political viability of climate change legislation in the current era of economic difficulty. "The American Dream and An American President." Manuscript being prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, using new questions on attitudes towards "The American Dream" in economic hard times to investigate their effects on people's voting decisions. Other manuscripts in progress - public opinion on U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan, the influence of racial attitudes interacting with perceptions of President Obama on electoral choice, and the dynamics of voting decisions in America over the 2008-2010-2012 period.
