Benjamin Ginsberg - Do Elections Matter?

Benjamin Ginsberg and Alan Stone , Editors

Third Edition

First published 1996 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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First edition 1986. Third edition 1996

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ginsberg, Benjamin.
Do elections matter? / edited by Benjamin Ginsberg and Alan Stone.3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56324-445-4 (alk. paper).ISBN 1-56324-446-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Elections.
2. Voting.
3. Political parties.
4. Public policy (Law)
I. Ginsberg, Benjamin.
II. Stone, Alan, 1941
III. Title.
JF1001.D6 1996
324.973dc20
95-26785
Do
CIP

ISBN 13: 9781563244469 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9781563244452 (hbk)

Timothy A. Byrnes is associate professor of political science at Colgate University.

Chris Cookson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston.

Gregory Flemming is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

John Frendreis is professor of political science at Loyola University of Chicago.

Thomas Ferguson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Benjamin Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University.

Alan R . Gitelson is professor of political science at Loyola University of Chicago.

John C. Green is professor of political science and director of the Ray Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.

James L. Guth is professor of political science at Furman University.

Richard Joslyn is professor of political science at Temple University.

Lyman A. Kellstedt is professor of political science at Wheaton College.

Kathleen Knight is associate professor of Political Science at the University of Houston,

Anne Layzell is a doctoral candidate at Loyola University of Chicago.

Ross Lence is associate professor of political science at the University of Houston.

Carolyn V. Lewis is assistant professor of political science at Western Michigan University.

Bruce I. Oppenheimer is professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.

Corwin E. Smidt is professor of political science at Calvin College.

Alan Stone is professor of political science at the University of Houston,

Daniel Wirls is associate professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kenneth Woodside is associate professor of political science at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

The agenda for contemporary electoral research in the United States was set by the great voting studies of the 1950s, in particular the Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes study The American Voter and Berelson, Lazersfeld, and McPhee's Voting. These two volumes, and the literally thousands of articles and books that followed in their wake, were mainly concerned with how voters made their decisions. The authors of The American Voter sought to account for variation in whether a given individual voter is going to vote and which candidate he will choose. Similarly, the authors of Voting aimed to determine how people come to vote as they do. Both groups acknowledged that their primary focus on how voters decided rested on the assumption that what voters decided was important. In the three decades since the publication of these seminal works, election analysts have continued to show considerably more interest in the behavior of voters than in the effects, implications, and significance of elections. At the same time, scholars concerned with political institutions and public policies have focused primarily on questions of process or the evaluation of particular policies or institutions. Few studies have bridged the gap, yet the problem is important and challenging.