RAPID - Valence Politics Meets Position Issues: The Dynamics of Electoral Choice in America, 2008-2010

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The proposed data collection is motivated by unanticipated events and conditions that provide a significant opportunity to advance scientific understanding of factors affecting electoral choice in the United States and other contemporary mature democracies. Intellectual Merit: The study leverages unique resources provided by a 2008 national six-wave survey of the American electorate to study factors affecting electoral choice and change during this interesting and important historical period. The research focuses on the explanatory power of rival valence and spatial models of electoral choice. Whereas spatial models feature positional issues that divide the electorate, valence models based on recent research in political psychology and behavioral economics emphasize the importance of voters' judgments about rival parties' abilities to deliver salient and widely agreed upon policy goals. These party performance judgments, together with cues (heuristics) provided voters' images of party leaders and potentially mutable partisan attachments, are the major components of the valence politics model of electoral choice. Empirical research on voting behavior in the United States and elsewhere demonstrates that valence models outperform spatial rivals.Although valence issues typically dominate electoral agendas, their preeminence is not foreordained. Novel positional issues may gain salience and issues already on the political agenda may be transformed from valence to positional ones (or vice versa) over time. Such a transformation occurred in an unanticipated way earlier this year, thus providing an excellent opportunity to study how the evolution of political issues affects electoral choice. The proposed research will enable tests of the explanatory power of rival valence and spatial theories of voting behavior in a political context that is shaping debate about several major issues in trade-off terms in unusually sharp ways. These issues include the economy, the environment (dramatized by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill), health care, immigration, and the war in Afghanistan. The proposed data collection extends a six-wave national survey conducted in 2008 with two additional survey waves bracketing the 2010 mid-term congressional elections. The resulting multiwave panel data set permits the marshalling of advanced statistical techniques such as mixed Markov latent class analyses and latent growth curve analysis to investigate how these issues affect the dynamics of electoral choice over the 2008-2010 period. Broader Impact: The research focuses on extremely important substantive issues in contemporary American politics--the economy, the environment, health care, and immigration. Public policies designed to address these issues have major effects on Americans' quality of life, and have global ramifications. The capacity to turn the data around within a month is potentially transformative because it makes scientifically valid data available that can quickly inform the academic and policy communities about the importance of these different factors.