I, Vermin From Under Rock

The Village Voice | 03-30-04 | George Smith

[Congressman Billybob]

I would strongly encourage you, and all other Freepers, to get and read a copy of The American Voter by Campbell, Stokes and Miller. Here is their methodology:

They interviewed, face to face, a representative sample of voters who cast ballots in the 1952 and 1956 Presidential Elections. They did NOT ask any of them to answer a list of predetermined reasons for why they voted. Instead, these were open-ended interviews. Then they coded the responses gotten. (The whole methodology is explained in the Appendix to the book.)

Bottom line, in answer to your comment, only 2% of the people who voted in those two elections, wound up being classified as "ideologs." The next category was people who voted for an expressed personal self interest. I still remember after forty years a women in this category who said, "I voted Republican. My husband is a furrier, and business is better when Republican are in office."

Standard interviews, where people are asked questions about ideological points and answer yes or no, give a false impression. Because people will respond to such polls, and the results will be widely disseminated, the impression is that ideology drives elections. However, open-ended interviews in which no ideas are suggested, provide a much better, and depressing, view of the low place of ideology in actual voting.

The reason that polling from lists of answers is almost universally used, rather than open-ended polling, is cost. The latter are very labor intensive, and therefore very costly per respondent. So open-ended polling is well known, but extremely rare.

John / Billybob

[Zack Nguyen]

Fascinating, Congressman. Scary too. I wish similar research could be done today. I still tend to think that voters are more ideological than today, but I am prepared to be wrong.

[Constantine XIII]

That's a whole lotta stupid. Scary, isn't it? :D