Psephologists are highly familiar with the sociological, social-psychological and rational choice explanations for elector behaviour known as the Columbia school, Michigan school and Rochester school studies. However, these were developed when television was still an emerging medium. Today's political leaders reach us not only in our living rooms but also at work and while in transit, often with a celebrity treatment that emphasizes personalities. The relationship between media and electors' political knowledge, combined with variances in partisan flexibility, indicates that a new model of voter choice may be overdue.
The broad purpose of Making Political Choices is to assess the extent to which American and Canadian electors are influenced by their intuitive sense of whether a political product is in line with their own values. Valence politics, a term coined by Donald Stokes in a 1963 American Political Science Review essay, refers to elector views of how leaders and parties propose to solve pressing political issues. The valence politics model suggests that citizens who face difficult decisions and who lack information often resort to using heuristic cues. These judgment shortcuts include images of which party's leader is best able to achieve commonly desired policy outcomes, such as peace and prosperity. The authors contend that this model can help us better understand how electors make political choices.
Their emphasis is on elector behaviour in recent elections in Canada and in the United States. Allan Kornberg and, in particular, Harold D. Clarke are well known for their past contributions to this field. As with past collaborative efforts, such as Political Choice in Canada (Harold D. Clarke, Jane Jensen, Lawrence LeDuc, Jon H. Pammett, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979) this research seeks to understand how voters arrive at a decision and, to a lesser extent, why electors do or do not vote. The basis for this comprehension is their analyses of survey data from datasets such as the American National Election Studies.
Their work is organized as a collection of election case studies that are bookended by discussion sections. The chapters examining the 2004 and 2006 Canadian federal elections, both of which previously appeared as journal articles, examine valence issues such as accessible health care, a strong economy and government honesty. The ensuing American chapters profile the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections and the 2006 congressional elections. Valence politics is measured by considering elector views on crime, education, health care, national economic conditions and terrorism, as well as national “hot button” issues such as the Iraq War and political scandal. Multivariate analysis demonstrates the electoral implications of leaders' positions; for instance, had Al Gore not distanced himself quite so much from the Clinton administration's record, he might have won his famously close race against George W. Bush. These are followed by a single chapter engaging in a more cursory examination of the consequential 1988 and 1993 Canadian elections and the 1980 American presidential contest, which featured public debate on free trade, a changed party system and neoconservative politicking, respectively. In their subsequent chapter about nonvoting, the authors add to an existing literature which has demonstrated that an elector's age is the best predictor of political interest and voter turnout.
Related theories of voter decisions have been discussed before, such as the “impression-driven model of evaluation” proposed by Milton Lodge, Kathleen McGraw and Patrick Stroh in the 1980s. Making Political Choices provides comparative empirical evidence to demonstrate that valence politics has existed over time in two major Western democracies that have similar, yet fundamentally different, political systems and cultures. American and Canadian voters, including many partisans, are more likely to prefer a leader whom they perceive to hold policy values that reflect the broad public mood. The data are a reminder that often circumstances and luck favour the victor while defeat represents a missed opportunity for the runner-up.
As with any collection of case studies, this volume is faced with the challenge of linking each event and also with questions about the perceived relevance of the cases profiled. The comparative narrative generally works, though the tendency to be overly quantitative is more suitable for individual journal pieces than for a book. The presentation of elections in a non-chronological order inhibits the flow, and the only featured election that is likely to survive the test of time is the historic 2000 American contest. In any event, the overall theoretical contribution is greater than the sum of its election profiles.
Making Political Choices will be of particular interest to people who study political behaviour and elections. It implies that the cumulative media emphasis on leaders' personalities leads to valence politics making the difference on election day. The authors provide evidence that election outcomes often do not reflect whether electors were knowledgeable about public policy so much as what their intuition was about competing party leaders.
