The American Voter

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The American Voter (American voters) is the title of a 1960 first published monograph of the American pollsters Angus Campbell , Philip Converse , Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes . The authors were members of the research group led by Campbell at the "Survey Research Center" (SRC) of the University of Michigan , where in 1948 a national election study was carried out for the first time, which was the starting point of the American National Election Studies (ANES).

In this work they devoted themselves to the analysis of the individual voting behavior of voters in political elections and thus established an explanatory approach called the Ann Arbor model after the seat of the University of Michigan , which represents one of the three main streams of electoral research . The book, along with The People's Choice by Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and other authors , published in 1944, and An Economic Theory of Democracy published by Anthony Downs in 1957, is one of the most influential works in electoral research.

content

In the work The American Voter , which was based on analyzes of survey data on the elections of 1952 and 1956 as well as smaller samples of the elections of 1948, 1954 and 1958 in the United States , the authors took a socio-psychological approach to explain individual voting behavior in political circles elections . This as Michigan model designated theory is the assessment of the candidates, the evaluation of the currently relevant political issues and who are party identification , the decisive factors for the voting behavior of voters. In addition to the rational choice approach and microsociological theories, this model is one of the three main trends in electoral research.

criticism

One of the criticisms of the theory presented in The American Voter was that the authors did not present any rule for answering the question which of the three main variables of the model is decisive in the event of a conflict. Other scholars questioned whether party identification as postulated by Campbell and his colleagues is stable over the long term. The authors of The Changing American Voter were of the opinion that the conclusions contained in The American Voter were not universal, but only applied to the elections analyzed in the work.

meaning

The book The American Voter is considered one of the most important works in electoral research and a key work in political science . Other works such as The Changing American Voter (1976), The Unchanging American Voter (1989), The Disappearing American Voter (1992), The New American Voter (1996) and The American Voter Revisited (2008), in which the theories of Campbell and His colleagues were in part continued or subjected to critical analyzes, made direct reference in the title to their 1960 publication. Later studies also showed that the key messages of the model can also be transferred to other political systems, taking into account country-specific economic, cultural and social factors. The methods on which the book is based formed the basis for the voter surveys carried out regularly as part of the American National Election Studies in the USA and comparable projects in other countries.

literature

  • Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, Donald E. Stokes: The American Voter. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, ISBN 0-22-609254-2 (Reprint of the original 1960 edition).
  • Kai Arzheimer : Angus Campbell / Philip E. Converse / Warren E. Miller / Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter, New York 1960. In: Steffen Kailitz (Ed.): Key works of political science. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-531-14005-6 , pp. 67–72.