(Page 2 of 34) - Value Cleavages and Partisan Conflict: The 2004 American Presidential Election in Comparative Perspective authored by Gunther, Richard., Beck, Paul., Kuan, H.C.. and Smidt, Corwin.

Value Cleavages and Partisan Conflict:

The 2004 American Presidential Election in Comparative Perspective

By Richard Gunther, H.C. Kuan, Paul A. Beck, and Corwin D. Smidt

"Bush, Dems to War Over `Values'." As the headline of the July 9, 2004 issue of USA Today

announced, the 2004 presidential election campaign involved conflict between the incumbent President
and his Democratic challenger over "values." Nonetheless, despite the high salience of value conflicts
as foci of American election campaigns

(particularly following the electoral mobilization of religious

fundamentalists by the Republican Party over the past decade), empirical political scientists have
lacked a systematic conceptual apparatus that could be employed to analyze conflicts over "value
cleavages" within democratic electorates. And there have been very few concerted efforts by scholars
in the field of comparative politics to develop analytical schema that might transcend national
boundaries in systematically mapping electorally relevant value cleavages.

This paper is a preliminary attempt to map the attitudinal underpinnings of partisan preference

in seven countries on the basis of a multidimensional and cross-nationally comparable battery of
questions dealing with sociopolitical values that have commonly had considerable relevance to partisan
politics. These items (which fall between the high level of abstraction of the personality attributes
often used by political psychologists in their studies of values, at one extreme, and the specificity of the
highly transient and idiographic "issues" that figure so prominently in most election studies, at the
other) were deduced from attitudinal domains inherent within major political ideologies that emerged
over the past three centuries and have had considerable impact on party development, electoral
behavior and, more generally, political conflict in many countries, particularly in Western Europe. As
we will demonstrate, these values have exerted a profound impact on electoral behavior in several
countries even after the effects of other determinants of the vote have been "controlled" in previous
stages of a stepwise multivariate analysis. Indeed, in three of the four countries within which coherent
values clusters emerged from previous stages of analysis, the explanatory power of these values is
substantially greater than that of all social-cleavage variables combined. Most strikingly, we will see
that in the United States partisan differences over these values have become extremely polarized, and
that nearly 40 percent of the variance in the vote for George Bush vs. John Kerry is "explained" by
these values, even after the effects of the respondents' religiosity and sociodemographic characteristics
had been taken into consideration.

The electorates that will be analyzed in this paper are those of Spain, Greece, Chile, Uruguay,

Hungary, Hong Kong, and the United States.

These cases vary both geographically and with regard to

their respective political trajectories over the past century. Only one of them--the United States--can be
regarded as an "old" or long-established democracy. Two of these countries, Spain and Greece, are
Southern European countries that were redemocratized in the mid 1970s. Two, Chile and Uruguay, are
South American countries that were redemocratized about a decade later. Hungary was democratized
following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Unlike the US, Spain, Greece, Chile and Uruguay,
Hungary's late 19th and early 20th century political development was devoid of any extended period of
organized partisan politics, and its democratization process unfolded in the aftermath of over four
decades of Communist rule. And Hong Kong is still not a democratic polity: the 1998 Legislative
Assembly election analyzed here is the first that the territory had experienced following its emergence
from British colonial rule, and its status within the People's Republic of China makes its evolution into
a fully democratic system problematic. As we will argue in this study, these differing trajectories of
political development have resulted in significant differences regarding the clustering of value
orientations, and with respect to their impact on partisan politics.