Domestic and foreign policy issues in the 1988 presidential election

Abstract

Abstract. Data surveyed for the ‘Americans Talk Security’project prior to the 1988 U.S. election are used to evaluate the impact of domestic and foreign policy attitudes on the presidential vote. Both kinds of issues did have significant effects on voting behavior, contributing to Dukakis’defeat. It is demonstrated, however, that prior attempts to isolate and weigh the electoral influences of these two sets of opinions are flawed, because they ignore their interrelation and their dependence on partisan sympathies. If these factors are explicitly taken into account within a causal modelling approach, the 1988 presidential vote in the aggregate is found to have been much more strongly determined by domestic concerns. Moreover, the assumption of uniform reactions within the electorate to various issue areas is proven wrong. While domestic policies were more decisive for the vote of the majority, there also was a clearly identifiable substantial minority that can be described as a foreign and defence issue voting public.