A Majority Party in Disarray: Policy Polarization in the 1972 Election

Abstract

The Center for Political Studies' 1972 presidential election survey was used to investigate the role that issue voting, ideology, candidate assessments, and partisan defections played in the Republican landslide of that year. An analysis of issue attitudes revealed a deep policy schism among the Democrats: McGovern supporters preferred liberal policy alternatives while Nixon Democrats favored distinctly conservative issue positions. Interitem correlations among various issues and a liberal-conservative scale showed the voters to have substantial attitude consistency. A normal-vote analysis of these issues demonstrated that the Vietnam war and social issue domains contributed more significantly to the explanation of the vote than did cultural or economic issues. The candidates were clearly perceived as having taken opposing issue positions, with Nixon's position the more preferred by a majority of the population. A proximity measure, computed as the discrepancy between perceived candidate issue position and the voter's policy preference, proved to be a better predictor of the vote decision than the voter's own issue position taken alone. Analyses of candidate assessments showed that McGovern was not a personally appealing candidate—a factor that allowed issue differences to gain maximal importance. The sharp intraparty polarization of Democrats over policy alternatives, a change in the educational composition of the electorate, a decrease in partisan identification, and a growth in partisan defection combined to suppress the impact of party identification as a determinant of the vote decision. It was concluded that the 1972 presidential race could be labeled “ideological” by comparison with past elections.