Strong Partisans Research Articles

Decaying Versus Developing Party Systems: A Comparison of Party Images in the United States and West Germany

This article examines citizens' attitudes towards the two major parties in the United States since 1952 and in West Germany since 1969 employing open-ended data from each country's National Election Study time series. Despite similar declining trends in party identification in the two countries, it is found that the patterns of change in party images are markedly different. In the United States it is shown that voters have become increasingly neutral towards the two parties as the focus has turned more and more towards the candidates. In contrast, in West Germany voters have come to have a more balanced view of the parties, seeing both positive and negative features of both. Thus in both cases there has been a decline in polarized strong partisanship (‘my party right or wrong’), but for different reasons. In the United States this decline can be seen as a sign of the decay of an ageing and outdated party system; in West Germany it can be seen as the development of realistic and balanced views of a party system which is just reaching full maturity. The implications for analysing party system development in Eastern Europe are discussed.

Question-Order Effects of Presidential Approval Ratings on Gubernatorial Approval Ratings: A Research Note

Data from four Ohio polls, conducted between June 1983 and May 1984, showed a significant question-order effect of presidential approval on gubernatorial approval. The Governor of Ohio, Richard Celeste, received significantly higher approval ratings when the gubernatorial approval question was asked just before the presidential approval question than when it was asked immediately afterward. The analysis also suggests that the order effect on gubernatorial ratings may be due, in large part, to a tendency for strong Reagan partisans to contrast Celeste's job performance to that of Reagan's when the question about Reagan's job performance was askedfirst. The results have significant implications for the ordering of questions on sociopolitical objects or figures within a survey interview. Public opinion researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that the order and context in which a question is asked can significantly affect the results of a survey (see e.g., Bishop, Oldendick & Tuchfarber 1982, 1984a, 1984b; McFarland 1981; Schuman & Presser 1981). The purpose of this article is to examine question-order effects on presidential and gubernatorial approval (cf. Crespi & Morris 1984; Sigelman 1981) and to suggest a theoretical scheme for understanding how and why such effects occur. We will also discuss the implication of these findings for the design of survey questionnaires.

Political Information, Party Identification and Voting Defection

A NUMBER OF recent studies have argued persuasively that policy issues play a significant role in voter decision-making.' Although they are an important addition to voting research, these studies leave several major questions about the information level of the voter unresolved. This is unfortunate, for the quantity and quality of the underlying information must affect one's interpretation of the studies' findings. purpose of this research note is to present data that have bearing on two of these unresolved considerations-namely, the relationship between political information and (1) strength of party identification and (2) voting defection. On the basis of the impressive investigations conducted by the Michigan Survey Research Center/Center for Political Studies (SRC/CPS), it is generally thought that strong partisans are more informed than weak partisans. And weak partisans, in turn, are presumed to be more informed than Independents. Partisans, however, apparently use their information to reinforce their partisanship. As Converse puts it: The

On methods for the continuous (photographic) and the quasi-continuous registration of the diurnal curve of the temperature of the animal body

In this paper, the author, after referring at some length to the earlier stages of the investigations of the temperature of man, and pointing out that the first approximate attempt to study the diurnal curve of the temperature of man commenced with the investigations of Jürgensen, of Kiel, whilst the systematic study of temperature in disease dates from the time of the researches and publications of Wunderlich, discusses the methods which he has adopted: ( a ) for the absolutely continuous and ( b ) for the quasi-continuous, registration of the diurnal curve of the temperature of man. After referring to the method employed by Benedict and Snell for the quasi-continuous record of the curve of temperature, and which, as he points out, is in no sense an automatic method and involves, in a very serious manner, the errors due to the “constantly varying personal equation” of the observer, he declares himself a strong partisan of a thermo-electric method of recording exceedingly minute variations of temperature. Since the time when, early in life, he studied the question, the experimental conditions have changed in certain very important particulars:— 1. By the discovery of galvanometers of the moving-coil type which we associate with the name of D’Arsonval, but which had their prototype in the syphon-recorder of Lord Kelvin, and which are practically uninfluenced by changes in the surrounding magnetic field.