Comment: The Assessment of Policy Voting

The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication

“…Consistent with these conceptions, there is a strong relationship between public opinion and politicians' policy positions (e.g., Brody and Page 1972).…”

Inoculation in Political Campaign Communication

“…Tarrance, 1972;Graber, 1980;O'Keefe, 1975;Pomper, 1975;Shapiro, 1969 Repass (1971), Axelrod (1972), Boyd (1972), Page and Brody (1972), Pomper (1975), Miller and Levitan (1976), Nie, Verba and Petrocik (1976), and others report substantial changes in the electorate in the direction of greater issue consciousness. Pomper and Lederman (1980) synthesized electoral studies over the past two decades, finding that the issue coherence of the average voter has risen dramatically.…”

“…McGuire (1962) and Pryor and Steinfatt (1978) It is true that recent studies document a general weakening of party identification during the last two decades (Axelrod, 1972(Axelrod, , 1974(Axelrod, , 1978(Axelrod, , 1982(Axelrod, , 1986Boyd, 1972;Brody & Page, 1972;Goldberg, 1966;Miller & Levitan, 1976;Nie, Verba & Petrocik, 1976;Petrocik, 1980;Pomper, 1972aPomper, , 1972bPomper, , 1975Pomper & Lederman, 1980;Repass, 1971;Shapiro, 1969;Stanley, Bianco & Niemi, 1986;Weisberg & Rusk, 1970). This weakening of party identification has swelled the nonaffiliated ranks (a combination of politically apathetic and independent) to more than one-third of the electorate (Public Opinion, 1984, p. 21) and increased the extent of crossover voting (Republican identifiers who vote for Democratic candidates and vice-versa) to more than one-seventh of the electorate (Mann & Wolfinger, 1984, p. 273).…”

Multilevel logistic regression for polytomous data and rankings

“…This covariate represents the distance between a voter's position on the left-right political dimension and the mean position of the party voted for. The mean positions of the parties over voters were used to avoid rationalization problems (e.g., Brody & Page, 1972). The placements were constructed from four scales where respondents located themselves and each of the parties on a 11 point scale anchored by two contrasting statements (priority should be unemployment versus inflation, increase government services versus cut taxation, nationalisation versus privatisation, more effort to redistribute wealth versus less effort).…”