Suchergebnisse

A person has nonseparable preferences when her preference on an issue depends on the outcome of other issues. A model of survey responses in which preferences are measured with error implies that responses will change depending on the order of questions and vary over time when respondents have nonseparable preferences. Results from two survey experiments confirm that changes in survey responses due to question order are explained by nonseparable preferences but not by the respondent's level of political information, partisanship, or ideology.

A person has nonseparable preferences when her preferences for the outcome of one issue or set of issues depend on the outcome of other issues. A model of individual-level responses to issue questions in public opinion surveys implies that when people have nonseparable preferences, their responses will change depending on the order of questions. An individual's responses may also vary over time as her perception of the status quo changes. A telephone survey of a random sample of residents of Franklin County, OH, reveals that much of the public has nonseparable preferences on a wide range of issues. Results from a survey experiment confirm that aggregate-level question-order effects occur on issues for which people have nonseparable preferences, & order effects do not occur on issues for which most people have separable preferences. At the individual level, people with nonseparable preferences display greater response instability across question orders than people with separable preferences, & a respondent's level of political information has little impact on response instability. 3 Tables, 2 Appendixes, 57 References. Adapted from the source document.

The 1980 American presidential election, in which Ronald Reagan pledged to cut federal income taxes by 30%, provides a case study for the electoral impact of tax cuts and the sources of voter support for tax cuts. Probit estimation of a model of the 1980 Carter-Reagan vote reveals that voter preferences on the tax cut are closely associated with individual vote choice. Nearly as many voters opposed as supported Reagan's tax plan, giving him no net increase in his vote share. Individual preferences on the tax cut are more closely associated with expectations about the economic effects of the cut than with race, income, partisanship, or candidate evaluations. Trust in government is also closely related to preferences on the tax cut. Voter support for the 1980 Reagan tax cut was not part of a broad-based tax revolt; rather, it appealed to voters as a policy prescription for solving other, more important economic problems.

AbstractAlthough racial identity is usually assumed to be unchanging, recent research shows otherwise. The role of politics in racial identity change has received little attention. Using panel data with waves around two recent presidential elections, this article reveals survey evidence of racial fluidity and its strong relationship with vote switching patterns. Across several models and robust to various controls, switching from a non-Republican vote in 2012 to a 2016 Republican vote (i.e., non-Romney to Trump) significantly predicts nonwhite to white race change. Among nonwhites who did not vote Republican in 2012, switching to a Republican vote in 2016 increases the probability of adopting a white racial identity from a 0.03 baseline to 0.49, a 1,533 percent increase. Individuals originally identifying as Mixed and Hispanic drive this identity-voting link. A parallel dynamic on the Democratic side—new Democratic voters moving from white to nonwhite identities—does not occur. The systematic relationship between Trump switching and white identity adoption is unlikely to be spurious or due to measurement error, does not appear for the 2008–2012 election period, and makes theoretical sense in light of 2016 campaign rhetoric and trends in political-social identity alignment.

A long-running debate about how voters use issues to evaluate candidates pits the proximity theory of voting against directional theory. Using surveys, both sides of the debate have found support for their preferred theory, but disagreement remains because of differing ways of analyzing the data. point out that these researchers make assumptions that bias results in favor of their theory. To avoid these difficulties, our approach creates fictitious candidates with controlled positions, presents these candidates to randomly-assigned subjects, and examines the relationship between subjects' evaluations of these candidates and their ideological beliefs as a neutral test of proximity and directional theory. Our results provide reasonably strong support for proximity theory but little for directional theory. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]