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POLICY SUBSTANCE IN THE PUBLIC MIND: The Issue Structure of Mass Politics

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Abstract:

The challenges in isolating the substantive conflict in American politics as it actually moves the mass public are truly daunting. Two such challenges dominate all others, however. First, it is necessary to have consistent measures of the main domains of policy conflict across the postwar years, itself a demanding challenge. But second, it is necessary to combine these into a consistent issue structure across that same period, else good individual measures will mislead as much as they help, by masking and distorting the mix of available policy concerns.

This paper builds on previous APSA papers aimed at eliciting this issue structure, and moves on to its impact on voting behavior from 1952 through 2000. A set of measures for the policy domains of social welfare, foreign affairs, civil rights, and cultural values are developed, with much confirmation of an existing literature specialized to these domains, plus some twists that arrive with the ability to address them in an extended time-frame. These individual measures are then combined into a more comprehensive picture, an ‘issue structure’, so that their influence within a richer issue context can be examined.

What results is a picture of postwar American politics at the mass level, confirmed in many familiar ways but, we hope, nuanced in many others and actually disconfirmed in a few. Said differently, what results is a picture of social welfare as the dominating issue concern in this politics among the general public, with foreign affairs as an important—and frequently cross-cutting—secondary concern. Civil rights changes its partisan direction as the postwar years pass. And cultural values does the same, while exploding to prominence in recent years.

Most Common Document Word Stems:

polici (215), welfar (131), year (127), vote (112), item (101), social (94), domain (89), measur (87), public (79), dimens (79), issu (74), foreign (73), analysi (71), postwar (65), civil (65), nation (64), structur (63), polit (61), sub (60), secur (59), one (58),

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Issue Evolution, Issue Context, Voting Behavior, Presidential Elections
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Association:
Name: American Political Science Association
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http://www.apsanet.org


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MLA Citation:

Claggett, William. and Shafer, Byron. "POLICY SUBSTANCE IN THE PUBLIC MIND: The Issue Structure of Mass Politics" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, Sep 02, 2004 <Not Available>. 2009-05-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p60746_index.html>

APA Citation:

Claggett, W. and Shafer, B. , 2004-09-02 "POLICY SUBSTANCE IN THE PUBLIC MIND: The Issue Structure of Mass Politics" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL Online <.PDF>. 2009-05-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p60746_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The challenges in isolating the substantive conflict in American politics as it actually moves the mass public are truly daunting. Two such challenges dominate all others, however. First, it is necessary to have consistent measures of the main domains of policy conflict across the postwar years, itself a demanding challenge. But second, it is necessary to combine these into a consistent issue structure across that same period, else good individual measures will mislead as much as they help, by masking and distorting the mix of available policy concerns.

This paper builds on previous APSA papers aimed at eliciting this issue structure, and moves on to its impact on voting behavior from 1952 through 2000. A set of measures for the policy domains of social welfare, foreign affairs, civil rights, and cultural values are developed, with much confirmation of an existing literature specialized to these domains, plus some twists that arrive with the ability to address them in an extended time-frame. These individual measures are then combined into a more comprehensive picture, an ‘issue structure’, so that their influence within a richer issue context can be examined.

What results is a picture of postwar American politics at the mass level, confirmed in many familiar ways but, we hope, nuanced in many others and actually disconfirmed in a few. Said differently, what results is a picture of social welfare as the dominating issue concern in this politics among the general public, with foreign affairs as an important—and frequently cross-cutting—secondary concern. Civil rights changes its partisan direction as the postwar years pass. And cultural values does the same, while exploding to prominence in recent years.

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Document Type: .PDF
Page count: 70
Word count: 18322
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POLICY SUBSTANCE IN THE PUBLIC MIND: The Issue Structure of Mass Politics in the United States during the Postwar Era William J.M. Claggett & Byron E. Shafer Florida State University & University of Wisconsin Professor William J.M. Claggett Professor Byron E. Shafer Department of Political Science Department of Political Science Florida State University University of Wisconsin Tallahassee FL 32306-2230 Madison WI 53706-1389 Tel.: (850) 644-7326 Tel.: (608) 263-1909 Fax: (850) 644-1367 Fax: (608) 265-2663 Email: bshafer@polisci.wisc.edu Email: wclagget@garnet.acns.fsu.edu Prepared
international relations. The 1948 survey however is best viewed as a kind of `pre-test' for the NES in many regards not least of which for us is that it lacks policy items on both civil rights and cultural values. We make only the most limited use of its results in the analysis that follows. v It would have been nice to have a counterpart analysis for one or more of the early postwar years to be sure that nothing


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