Flanigan William H. - Political Behavior of the American Electorate

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flanigan, William H.
Political behavior of the American electorate / William H.
Flanigan, University of Minnesota, Nancy H. Zingale,
University of St. Thomas, Elizabeth A. Theiss-Morse University
of Nebraska, Lincoln, Michael W. Wagner, University of
Wisconsin, Madison. Thirteenth edition.

pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4522-4044-2 (alk. paper)

1. VotingUnited States. I. Title.

JK1967.F38 2015
324.973dc23 2013038730

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

14 15 16 17 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

To

Nicholas, Christopher, Eleanor, Abigail, and all of our students

Tables and Figures

Tables

Figures

Acknowledgments

T HIS IS the franchise that Bill Flanigan and Nancy Zingale built. We are honored and delighted to begin building on the wonderful work they have done over the first twelve editions of Political Behavior of the American Electorate. Indeed, the general structure, orientation, and even many of the words found in these pages are outright pilfered from Bill and Nancy. We are grateful for their work and thank them for the opportunity to put our stamp on this book.

We are grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds our primary data source, the American National Election Studies (ANES). The NSFs willingness to champion ANES investigations of what people think, what they want, what they do, and how well they think our democracy is working is crucial to the understanding and improvement of the American experiment. The support of this important work has benefited tremendously from the innovative step taken by scholars at the University of Michigan six decades ago. The late Angus Campbell, at the time director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, first opened the data archives of the Survey Research Center to outside scholars. This generous act was the beginning of a tradition of data sharing that has characterized this area of the social sciences ever since. The late Warren Miller, former director of the Center for Political Studies, expanded these archival activities through the creation of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The ICPSR, composed of more than five hundred academic and research institutions, has made available to an extensive clientele not only the archives of the Survey Research Center but also thousands of other major data collections. Scholars and students have benefited in incalculable ways from the ability to use these data for their own research. The study of political science has likewise benefited from the ability to verify, replicate, and build on earlier work.

A second consequential development grew out of the first. The Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan had begun its state-of-the-art biennial election surveys in 1948, the fruit of which was being made widely available through the ICPSR by the mid-1960s. The critical importance of this for scholarship was recognized and institutionalized in 1977, when the National Science Foundation agreed to fund the surveys of the ANES as a national research resource. Under this arrangement, intellectual control of the development of the surveys passed to an independent board, composed of scholars drawn from several universities, with input from the political science community more generally and with data freely available via download from its website.

This book relies heavily on these institutional innovations in two ways. First, we base our analyses primarily on the large quantities of survey data collected by the ANES and the aggregate data contained in the ICPSR Historical Archive. Second, several generations of scholars whose work we cite have similarly benefited from the availability of these resources. We are pleased to acknowledge our great debt to the individuals involved in both the ICPSR and the ANES who have contributed to the establishment of these resources and services. We must hasten to add that they bear no responsibility for the analysis and interpretation presented here. We can only hope that any weaknesses of this work will not reflect on the worthiness and excellence of the open archives that the ICPSR and the ANES provide.

Given the quick turnaround time from the point that the 2012 ANES data became available and our publication deadline, we relied on an enormous amount of thorough-but-quick research assistance from Ben Sayre. We greatly appreciate and admire his passion for learning, data, coding, and tinkering. We could not have finished the book without him.