For almost a decade we have taken issue with the prevailing view of independent voters. We showed that Independents, as they were usually defined, had nothing in common, and in fact were more diverse than either Democrats or Republicans. Virtually no generalizations about Independents were correct, except by accident, because they comprise three very different kinds of people. Most Independents acknowledge that they are closer to one or the other party. The crux of our argument was that this ‘leaning’ should outweigh an initial claim of independence when deciding how to classify respondents. Our most striking finding was that leaners vote like outright partisans. We interpreted this as evidence that most professed Independents are not neutral between the parties, but are nearly as partisan as avowed Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion had major implications for both mainstream and revisionist views of American politics, all the more so because of the growing numbers of Independents, who accounted for 38 per cent of the adult population by 1978, thus matching the Democrats and leaving Republicans in a distant third place.

Austin Ranney, the eminent political scientist and leading American authority on political parties and elections died, peacefully, at his home in Berkeley on July 24, 2006. He was 85 years old and for a number of years had been battling the debilitating effects of congestive heart failure and diabetes. Ranney's doctoral dissertation, The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government (1954), and his Jefferson Lectures at Berkeley, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction (1975), are major explorations of the role that parties play in the overall scheme of the American political system. The broad-gauged view adopted by these studies, theoretically informed but also rigorously disciplined by wide-ranging empirical study, was typical of Ranney's style of work, which extended to important contributions on democracy and the party system, referendums, presidential primaries, the measurement of party competition, the impact of television on elections, and the recruitment of candidates for public office, among other topics. His collaborators in some of these projects included Willmoore Kendall of Yale University and David Butler of the University of Oxford.

A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day, and requiring firms to give their employees time off to vote. Using the 2000 Voter Supplement to the Current Population Survey, we find that all but the last of these provisions enhance turnout, especially by the young and the less educated. Compared to a state that does none of these things, the estimated turnout of high school dropouts is nearly 11 percentage points higher in a state with these “best practices”; their effect on young registrants is nearly 10 points. Because African American and Latino registrants are disproportionately younger and less educated, they would benefit disproportionately from universal adoption of such postregistration laws. We estimate that if every state adopted these best practices, overall turnout of those registered would increase approximately three percentage points.

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 (P.L. 103-31) was designed to reduce the cost of voting by incorporating registration into a transaction with a public agency that citizens initiate for another purpose. The act took effect on January 1, 1995; between then and the 1996 election, 18,333,479 people registered in offices they had visited on other business (Federal Election Commission 1998, Table 2).Most of these were new registrations; the remainder were largely changes of address. (We are grateful to Brian Hancock of the Federal Election Commission for his help in interpreting this table.) They are 44% of the total of 41.1 million “registration applications or transactions” of any sort recorded in the 43 states subject to the NVRA in 1995–96. Six states are exempt from the NVRA; five—Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—because they permit electionday registration at the polling place and North Dakota, which does not require voter registration. Vermont's constitutional provisions kept it from implementing the NVRA by 1996. Four years later, answers to even the most elementary questions about this first NVRA election have not been published. We narrow the data gap by describing people who used NVRA to register, and then comparing their participation to that of their fellow citizens who registered to vote using more traditional methods.

Rich Americans, far more likely to vote than their poorer fellow citizens, also differ in how they vote and what policies they favour. These undisputed facts lead to the widespread belief ‘that if everybody in this country voted, the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.’ The gist of this conclusion, which seems to follow ineluctably from our opening sentence, is accepted by almost everyone except a few empirical political scientists. Their analyses of survey data show that no objectively achieved increase in turnout – including compulsory voting – would be a boon to progressive causes or Democratic candidates. Simply put, voters' preferences differ minimally from those of all citizens; outcomes would not change if everyone voted.John Kenneth Galbraith, Interview in California Monthly, February 1986, p. 11.

Election officials often say that many Americans do not register to vote for fear of being called to jury duty. The only published study on the topic claims that aversion to jury service depresses turnout by more than seven percentage points. We use questions from the 1991 National Election Studies Pilot Study to ascertain beliefs about the sources of jury lists, and we relate those impressions to registration status. We find that barely half the public professes any knowledge of how juries are chosen, and just 42% believe that they come from voter registration records. Estimations from a multivariate analysis indicate that fear of jury service accounts for less than a one percentage point drop in turnout. We discuss the implications of this finding both for reform proposals and the rational choice theory of turnout.

We examine the characteristics of a largely ignored low-turnout group—people who have recently moved. We find that neither demographic nor attitudinal attributes explain their lower turnout. Instead, the requirement that citizens must register anew after each change in residence constitutes the key stumbling block in the trip to the polls. Since nearly one-third of the nation moves every two years, moving has a large impact on national turnout rates. We offer a proposal to reduce the effect of residential mobility on turnout and estimate that turnout would increase by nine percentage points if the impact of moving could be removed. The partisan consequences of such a change would be marginal.

The 1978 CPS national election study, which includes many new questions about congressional candidates, is analyzed to discern what voters know about congressional candidates and why House incumbents are so successful at getting reelected by wide margins. Scholars have underestimated the level of public awareness of congressional candidates, primarily because of faulty measures. Voters are often able to recognize and evaluate individual candidates without being able to recall their names from memory. Incumbents are both better known and better liked than challengers, largely because they have the resources enabling them to communicate with their constituents frequently and directly. Yet the seriousness of the challenger is equally important for understanding the advantages of incumbency and why incumbency is less valuable in the Senate than in the House. Finally, public assessments of the president provide a national dynamic to congressional voting, but the effect is modest compared to the salience of the local choices.

After the drastic relaxation of voter registration requirements in the 1960s, do present state laws keep people away from the polls? More specifically, which provisions have how much effect on what kinds of people? We have answered these questions with data from the Current Population Survey conducted by the Census Bureau in November 1972.

State registration laws reduced turnout in the 1972 presidential election by about nine percentage points. The impact of the laws was heaviest in the South and on less educated people of both races. Early deadlines for registration and limited registration office hours were the biggest impediments to turnout.

Contrary to expectations, changing these requirements would not substantially alter the character of the electorate. The voting population would be faintly less affluent and educated; the biggest difference would be a matter of one or two percentage points. In strictly political terms, the change would be even fainter–a gain for the Democrats of less than half a percent.

Machine politics is always said to be on the point of disappearing, but nevertheless seems to endure. Scholarly analyses of machines usually explain why they have dwindled almost to the vanishing point. Since machine politics is still alive and well in many places, this conventional wisdom starts from a false premise. More im portant, it has several logical and definitional confusions that impede clear understanding of American local politics. This article shows that machine politics still flourishes, presents a clarified definition of “machine politics” as part of a typology of incentives for political participation, and argues that the familiar explanations both for the existence of machine politics and for its putative decline are inadequate.

Professor Frey and I seem to be in agreement on several points: (1) The research procedures proposed by Bachrach and Baratz are unsatisfactory. (2) Worrying about criteria of issue selection is unnecessary; policy formation can usefully be studied issue by issue. Indeed, I would add that typologies of issues are one of the more promising developments in the study of politics. (3) The notion of nondecisions is not a club with which to belabor Who Governs? in particular or “pluralists” in general. Frey has performed a considerable service by rescuing the idea of nondecisions from the ideologically tinged context in which its advocates generally have discussed it. (4) Analysts of policy formation who limit their attention to overt conflict miss many exercises of power. (5) The pluralist-elitist dichotomy is not a useful distinction.

The last two points call for further discussion. I do not know of any researcher who has disputed the fourth point. In his study of New Haven, Dahl employed three indices of power, “of roughly the same strength.” One of these was: “When a proposal initiated by one or more of the participants is adopted without opposition.”

The widely cited concept of nondecisions is particularly prominent in criticisms of “pluralist” research on local politics. But no scholars, including those who introduced the notion of nondecisions, have done empirical research explicitly on this topic. The lack of research on nondecisions reflects the concept's weaknesses as a guide to field research: (1) It involves a number of unrealistic assumptions about political life. (2) It requires data that are difficult to gather or wholly unobtainable. (3) Even the data that can be collected do not provide a basis for sensible conclusions about the distribution of political power.

The impracticability of research on nondecisions is not a serious setback for political science, however, for most of its specific component ideas, such as the policy consequences of different governmental forms or the impact of political socialization, are being studied without reference to the notion of nondecisions. Judged by its utility for empirical research, then, the idea of nondecisions appears to be superfluous. The same might be said of the notion of “power structures.”

One of the more fertile sources of data for systematic comparative political studies is in the regional differences that abound within political systems. When such differences are large and politically significant, explaining them becomes intriguing and important, especially if their causes cannot be found in the more familiar classes of socioeconomic variables.

Our purpose here is to present a preliminary analysis of a widely discussed intrasystem political difference—that between Northern and Southern California. This regional split has received particularly wide attention since the 1964 Republican primary, when Senator Goldwater's landslide majority in the South overcame his resounding defeat in the San Francisco Bay Area and insured his presidential nomination. Attempts to explain this pronounced regional variation have generated propositions about the political consequences of those social and economic conditions thought to be characteristic of Southern California. Since that area's most striking feature is its continuous rapid growth and economic development, many writers have been led to speculate that anxieties resulting from such changes lead to ultraconservative political preferences. These propositions are of considerable interest to students of politics, since neither economic growth nor its presumed attitudinal consequence is unique to Southern California, nor, for that matter, to the United States. AVe will examine various explanations for California's regional variation, with special emphasis on propositions about economic growth. Our data are from the 1960 Census, 1964 and 1968 election returns, and a series of statewide sample surveys conducted during the 1964 campaigns.

In the summer of 1963 the California legislature passed the Rumford Act, prohibiting racial discrimination by realtors and the owners of apartment houses and homes built with public assistance. California real estate and property management interests, which had fought the Act's passage, then placed on the November 1964 ballot an initiative provision (Proposition 14) that would amend the state constitution to repeal the Rumford Act and prevent the state or any locality within it from adopting any fair housing legislation. During most of 1964 intense and lavishly financed campaigns were fought by supporters and opponents of Proposition 14. Almost 96 per cent of the people who turned out on election day voted on the measure, which passed by a ratio of two to one. In one sense the campaign and balloting were an exercise in futility, for in May of 1967 the United States Supreme Court declared Proposition 14 unconstitutional. Some short-term consequences of its passage were apparent, however. For several years there was a severe weakening of legal sanctions against racial discrimination in housing, resulting in abandonment of many cases that were underway before the 1964 election. For eighteen months the federal government froze $120 million in funds for California urban renewal projects. Less tangibly, it is claimed that the proposition's overwhelming popularity contributed to the Watts riots and other racial violence in California.