Adapted freely from “Elements of the Essay”, excerpted from An Expose

Companion, a manual provided to Harvard University writing

students.http://www.usd.edu/fye/sjwriteresp.html

__________ The first is the availability of data. Panel studies and surveys are
expensive and time consuming, and therefore not consistently performed. This
hodge-podge of available data forces researchers to draw broad conclusions from
data covering limited periods of time. For example, Marcus and Converse used
data from two elections. The Kinder and Abelson piece discussed by Asher found
that candidate assessment fell along two separate dimensions – competence and
integrity, yet the data was drawn during the Carter administration. Carter may be a
uniquely extreme example; an individual especially strong on integrity and weak
on competence. Similarly, CCMS drew conclusions about issue salience during a
particularly non-contentious time period. Many of these studies may be reporting
substantially time-bound phenomena.

__________ The topics covered this week are interesting in that they have great
implications for democratic theory. Issue voting would indicate an attentive
public, while retrospective voting could render campaign promises meaningless.
The enterprise of assessing the determinants of vote choice is an extremely
complicated one that suffers from several common difficulties.

__________ Another difficulty arises from drawing conclusions based on

particular cases. For example, Carmines and Stimson use race as the primary
example of an “easy issue” and Vietnam policy as an example of a “hard issue”
(both derived from data on the 1972 presidential election). Though these examples
may very well prove consistent with the conclusions about types of issue voting (or
rather, the one legitimate type), it may be that these results arise from the particular
examples.

__________ The transition of the voting literature from party ID driven to

candidate centered is more intuitively satisfying, and may reflect a progression in
understanding, due to the accumulation of scholarly work, as well as a temporal
shift in voting behavior itself. The Asher piece sums up the research in the field
effectively, stating that “the ferment that currently exists in the study of voting
behavior is an indication that this is a subfield in which important work remains to
be done.”

__________ One particular observation is that the Fiorina conceptualization of

retrospective voting seems plausible, yet I’m left wondering about the effect of
past experience with a party in the distant past as compared with that of the recent
past. For example, if a voter came of age in a time of single party dominance, how
would past experience with the other party be calculated?