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Appendix: Alternative Policy Domains?
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp 277-282
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Were there alternative grand policy domains that ought to have been inserted into this analysis along the way? Our reading of postwar political history was that the four domains ultimately selected were in fact the major recurrent realms for policy conflict; we think the voting analysis vindicates that judgment. Yet, in pursuit of the internal structure of four great policy domains on the way to creation of the basic voting model, it was intermittently necessary to remove an item that did not belong to any of these four but that did have policy implications. In effect, these items constitute the hunting ground for any additional domain. They thus raise the analytic questions appropriate to an afterword. Can any number of these items, too, be formed into coherent policy dimensions? If so, do any of these dimensions have sufficient impact on the presidential vote to justify inclusion in the voting model?
The most theoretically promising of these putative alternative domains is probably environmentalism; that is, governmental intervention to protect or enhance the natural environment (Hays 1987; Dunlap 1991; Dunlap and Scarce 1991). This is a keystone element in what is sometimes treated as an even larger alternative realm under the heading of “postmaterialism” (Inglehart 1977, 1990). Regardless, its substantive core remains sufficient to distinguish items that belong centrally to the putative domain, that do not belong to it at all, or that blend environmentalism with some other realm.
Preface
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp ix-xiv
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What is the real nature of substantive conflict in American politics during the postwar years? And more precisely, how is it reflected in the American public mind? Is it even possible to talk about an “issue structure,” about ongoing policy conflict with continuing policy alignments, at the mass and not just the elite level? If so, what is the ongoing structure of issue conflict characterizing the mass politics of our time? How do policy issues cluster, and nest, within this substantive environment for mass politics? How does the resulting issue structure relate to, and shape, electoral conflict? Has this relationship remained essentially constant over the last half-century, the period for which public opinion data are most widely available? Or are there major breakpoints, and, if so, when did they occur?
Those are the questions that motivate this book. Despite more than fifty years of survey data about public preferences, work on issue evolution – on the changing identity of those policy issues that actually shape political behavior within the general public – is still in its early days. This is surely not for lack of great events apparently requiring some public response during all the postwar years. There is war and peace, boom and recession, plus social change nearly everywhere one looks. Likewise, there is no shortage of grand policy conflicts following on from these events: conflicts over social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values.
Bibliography
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp 283-290
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9 - The Issue Structure of Mass Politics
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp 266-276
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This book began with a set of arguably fundamental questions, fundamental to an understanding of the place of public opinion in American politics, of course, but ultimately fundamental to the health of a mass democracy in the United States. What was the nature of substantive conflict in the American public mind during the postwar years? Can the answer reasonably be described as contributing an “issue context” having recognizable connections among its composite elements along with temporal stability in these connections? If so, how do policy issues cluster, and nest, within this substantive environment for mass politics? How does such a structure – and positive answers to those questions do indeed constitute the “structure” of public preferences – relate to the keystone activity of democratic politics, namely voting? And what do these voting patterns, if any, reveal about “the big picture” of American politics over the past half-century?
From 1948 through 2004 and counting, the American National Election Study has asked national samples of the American public about their preferences on major policy conflicts and about the political behavior that follows (or does not) from them. These are the data for an empirical answer to those fundamental questions, an empirical answer with normative implications. Fortunately, the picture that emerges from asking them is both structured and stable. The public does offer a differentiated set of policy dimensions to its opinions within the major realms of postwar political conflict.
1 - The Established Issues
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp 11-40
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Two policy crises, along with the programmatic responses to them, were central to the political order existing in the United States in the immediate postwar years. The first crisis was the Great Depression, and its policy response was the New Deal, bringing to the United States an extensive collection of welfare programs – its first real “welfare state.” The second crisis was World War II, and its policy response was total mobilization, bringing in its wake a standing military establishment plus an array of “entangling alliances,” also really for the first time in American history. Perhaps inevitably, the four presidential elections preceding the postwar era, those involving Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1932 through 1944, were centrally focused on one or the other of these grand policy concerns.
At the time, observers could not know where each policy realm would go as World War II came to an end. As it turned out, a formal end to armed conflict was followed not by international quietude but by the succession of foreign crises that resulted in the Cold War. Relief at the ending of World War II was thus insistently coupled with anxiety about the international future in ways that few could escape. For many, however, the domestic future was an even greater worry. Many feared that the domestic economy would merely fall back into depression, having been supported principally by mobilization for war.
PART I - THE STRUCTURE OF PUBLIC PREFERENCES
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp 1-10
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The postwar years in American politics contain some of the great policy conflicts in all of American history, several of which characterized the entire period. Battles to extend or retrench the American welfare state, institutionalized with the New Deal and then delayed by the Second World War, resumed in its aftermath and stretched across all these years, right up to the present, in headlines on Medicare, tax cuts, and Social Security. Likewise, questions about how to address the outside world were omnipresent. The Cold War arrived, colored an extended era of foreign relations, disappeared, and was replaced by an era still in its formative stages as this is being written. Along the way, the United States found itself intermittently enmeshed in struggles in geographic theaters as divergent as East Asia, Central America, and the Middle East.
Others of these great policy conflicts, while they did not dominate politics during the entire period, were remarkably intense when they arrived, and gave no indication that they would readily depart thereafter. A civil rights “revolution” burst upon the national stage, with a policy surge and then spin-offs in every institutional theater: in Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, and the federal executive. Conflict over race policy seemed here to stay. In a different fashion, behavioral norms fundamental to social life – bedrock cultural values involving religion, gender, achievement, and order – produced an insistent parade of policy issues that, if they lacked a single dominant thread like the Cold War, sustained their claim on the political agenda by their very multiplicity.
4 - The New Issues
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp 101-133
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Conflict over the place of black Americans was incipiently present in what would become the United States, if not from the moment when European settlers arrived, then certainly from the moment they brought African slaves to join them. Issues of civil rights, and conflicts over race policy, were to flare intermittently in all the years thereafter. In a different way, conflict over cultural values was likewise incipiently present from the beginning, breaking through and dominating politics at some periods while remaining comparatively quiescent at others. Many of the original settlers were simply seeking a better economic life, even if it required transnational uprooting and a leap off into the wilderness. For many others, however, a better life meant political and especially religious freedom, so that the values governing public policy were central to their presence on the American continent.
These values – How ought people to live? – were widely articulated and debated at the time of the American Revolution. They were rearticulated as storm clouds began to gather for the American Civil War. Yet the late nineteenth century was probably the great period of cultural conflict, at least before the modern era. The Civil War established that there would be one nation within the former boundaries of the United States, with the ability to make policy for all of it. The industrial revolution, but especially the massive immigration that was part and parcel of it, then drove questions of social policy to the center of the policymaking process.
The American Public Mind
- The Issues Structure of Mass Politics in the Postwar United States
- William J. M. Claggett, Byron E. Shafer
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010
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What is the real nature of substantive conflict in mass politics during the postwar years in the United States? How is it reflected in the American public mind? And how does this issue structure shape electoral conflict? William J. M. Claggett and Byron E. Shafer answer by developing measures of public preference in four great policy realms - social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values - for the entire period between 1952 and 2004. They use these to identify the issues that were moving the voting public at various points in time, while revealing the way in which public preferences shaped the structure of electoral politics. What results is the restoration of policy substance to the center of mass politics in the United States.
Frontmatter
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp i-vi
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2 - The Established Issues
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp 41-73
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By happenstance, what would become the American National Election Study arrived at a crucial turning point in American foreign policy. For more than a hundred and fifty years beforehand, international relations for the United States had featured disengagement from what were viewed as “entangling alliances.” In its early years, the country followed this path of conscious nonalignment – isolationism – out of practical necessity. A weak new nation in a world of strong established powers appeared to be best served by staying out of their intermittent but eternal conflicts. Yet, as the new nation grew, its sense of being apart, and its attachment to this strategy of disengagement, only grew as well.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was happy to focus on the Western hemisphere and stay out of the balance-of-power politics of the rest of the developed world, in a seemingly distant Europe. This grand strategy received a short, sharp exception with World War I, suggesting the possibility of change: initial resistance to foreign engagement, followed by delayed but forceful entry, followed by an inescapable leadership role. Yet, in the aftermath of war, the United States again largely withdrew from international politics, refusing most dramatically to join the new League of Nations. And all the while, the country prospered. By the time of the Second World War, accordingly, the United States remained that most unusual of nations, an isolationist Great Power.
5 - Blended Items
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp 134-160
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Chapters 1 through 4 have teased out the structure of public preferences in the four great domains of postwar policy conflict, namely social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values. Each of the resulting structures has proved to possess a story all its own. In other words, the public does not bring some grand and general template that it imposes on all policy realms. At the same time, these distinctive stories have testified, each in its own way, to the existence of an ongoing and consistent substructure to public attitudes. It need not diminish the role of political elites in connecting up the various referents for public preferences in these policy realms to note that the public as a whole offers a theoretically coherent and temporally stable pattern of orientations toward them. The same items are related to each other year after year, in a substantively interpretable manner.
As a result, when these structures are put back together, they offer – indeed, they constitute – nothing less than a comprehensive issue context for mass politics in the postwar era. Or at least, it is this context that can be used to search for a practical impact on mass politics, especially here by way of voting behavior. The introduction to Part II will be devoted explicitly to taking the within-domain analyses of Chapters 1 through 4 and converting them into a single comprehensive issue context by way of a cross-domain analysis for all of the postwar years.
Index
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- 17 May 2010, pp 291-295
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6 - Voting Behavior
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp 177-209
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There was no shortage of policy-related events during the postwar years. Some of these were the result of self-conscious interventions by political elites. Presidents and congressmen, in particular, constantly offered new programmatic suggestions in the realms of welfare, foreign, race, and social policy. These were the autonomous efforts by political actors to change public policy and, through it, public life; they are the stuff of “policy initiation” as we normally conceive it. Yet there were other policy-related events that were quite different. They involved developments external to this ongoing politics, even potential public crises, that appeared to demand some policy response or at least forced a decision about responding. Every one of these could also have slotted into – or become – the dominant substantive influence of its day. Said differently, every one could variously have stimulated or responded to, shaped or been shaped by, ongoing public preferences in their respective realms.
And indeed there were such preferences. That is the inescapable message of Part I of this book. Any given individual could still lack either an ongoing opinion structure in a given policy realm or any opinion at all on a given event of the day, just as any individual could assert opinions that then proved so labile, so malleable in response to policy substance or even question wording, that they could not possibly serve as a basis for responding to the issue context of American politics.
3 - The New Issues
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp 74-100
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The grand policy domains that were central to American politics as the Second World War ended, namely social welfare and international relations, were to remain integral to this politics during all the years to follow. Harry Truman and Tom Dewey could argue over Truman's proposed extension of the New Deal in the presidential campaign of 1948, just as George Bush and Al Gore could argue over Bush's proposed reform of its centerpiece, Social Security, in the presidential campaign of 2000. Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson could argue over the Cold War in general and Korea policy in particular during the presidential campaign of 1952, just as George Bush and John Kerry could argue over international terrorism in general and Iraq policy in particular during the presidential campaign of 2004.
This is not to say, however, that these two grand and continuing policy realms would continue to occupy the issue space of American politics in the same fashion, in undisputed centrality, across all these years. Sometimes, there were idiosyncratic policy concerns that broke through to influence a specific electoral contest. Though note that it was necessary to possess a more fully developed issue context, along with its measures, even to recognize these as idiosyncratic breakthroughs, in order to know that they were not merely some new incarnation of an established policy alignment.
PART II - SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE STRUCTURE
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp 161-176
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To this point, we have subjected an array of policy items from the domains of social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values first to exploratory and then to confirmatory factor analysis. The items themselves were carefully chosen to contain explicit policy implications and to guarantee that any errors associated with their selection would be matters of exclusion rather than inclusion. The product of exploratory and then confirmatory analysis on these items was a set of continuing measures for the four great domains of postwar policy conflict, including recognizable measures for the main dimensions within these domains for at least some span of years.
At an absolute minimum, these results facilitate an understanding of what individual items are measuring and thus what they are contributing to any larger measure. More to the practical point for an analysis concerned with the issue context for mass politics, these results comment powerfully on the internal structure of four great policy domains. And there is indeed something that ought to be called a “structure” to public preferences, one that is stable but not static overall. In the process of teasing it out, these results also provide what is arguably the best available – not the best, just the best available – ongoing means of following issue evolution in these domains over time. The resulting structures and their measures are thus the major within-domain benefit of this approach.
7 - Voting Behavior
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp 210-240
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The established issue domains for policy conflict in the postwar era, social welfare and international relations, could be viewed as hardy perennials – present across all of American history. The nation was born in international conflict by definition, and its early years made foreign policy crucial to national survival. The domain did wax and wane thereafter, with a long middle period of lesser emphasis. Yet as the postwar era opened, foreign policy had been dramatically reemphasized by World War II, as it would be again by the Cold War to follow. The very notion of a postwar era attested to the continued centrality of international relations to American politics.
By comparison, from the opening partisan split between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in the new nation, economics and social welfare had been much more of a constant in policy conflict. Sometimes their embodiment was public works, sometimes taxation. Sometimes it was tariffs and trade, sometimes monetary policy. Sometimes the focus was economic growth, sometimes redistribution. And sometimes it was the desirability and composition of targeted programs of social welfare conceived as such. The point is just that one or another of these embodiments was almost always present. Moreover, as the postwar era opened, the domain was represented by the greatest welfare enhancement in all of American history, the New Deal.
Yet even the new issue domains for policy conflict in the postwar era, civil rights and cultural values, were hardly new in some absolute sense.
8 - Voting Behavior
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 17 May 2010, pp 241-265
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All the preceding chapters have focused on teasing out a substantively complex but still easily summarized picture of the structure of policy preferences in the general public and its impact on voting behavior in presidential elections. The analysis began with a search for the continuing internal structure to four great policy domains, the ones that were arguably central to postwar policy conflict. It moved on to combine these four within-domain structures to create a cross-domain model, effectively the comprehensive issue context for postwar American politics in the mass public. This analysis extracted specific measures from select dimensions of each domain in order to operationalize the cross-domain context as a basic voting model. Finally, it applied this comprehensive model to voting behavior in all postwar presidential elections to date.
The resulting picture is nothing if not broad-gauge. Four major domains (with their five diagnostic dimensions) interact to contribute an ongoing structure of policy preferences capable of shaping mass behavior across more than half a century. This is not the study of politics in the small. On the other hand, each small step taken in that analysis has enabled further steps, so that possessing this broad-gauge picture – its conceptual framework, its concrete measures, and its voting applications – makes it possible to address a potentially vast array of further topics. One could carry the analysis to different institutions: to Congress, for example, or to state-level office.
Contents
- William J. M. Claggett, Florida State University, Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- The American Public Mind
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 May 2010, pp vii-viii
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