The Structure and Stability of Political Attitudes: Findings from the 1974–76 Dearborn Panel Study

This article examines the structure and stability of public opinion between the 1972 and 1976 presidential elections. The data consist of a four-wave panel study of 800 residents in Dearborn, Michigan; interviews were conducted in the spring of 1974, 1975, and 1976 and in the fall of 1976 immediately after the presidential election. The paper focuses on the structure of political attitudes, the stability of attitudes, and the impact of attitudes on the presidential votes. A central thesis is that public opinion can be disaggregated into two clusters-the Disintegration Cluster and the Alignment Cluster-one of which disrupts and one of which reinforces partisan voting. On the basis of correlations between the seven factors making up the clusters, we anticipate neither a rapid realignment nor a disintegration of the party system, but instability, with election outcomes affected by attitudinal factors salient to a specific campaign. We find signs of increased crystallization of political attitudes compared to the 1956-1958-1960 national panel. Finally, our voting studies indicate that the Disintegration Cluster had a significant effect on the 1972 election, but that issues in general had little impact in 1976, once controls were introduced for party identification and candidate image. Frank Wayman and Ronald Stockton are Associate Professors of Political Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The two are co-equal authors. The study was funded by the Rackham School of the University of Michigan. The authors are grateful to Fran Featherston for computer assistance. The anonymous reviewers for Public Opinion Quarterly made several useful suggestions. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 47-329-346 ? 1983 by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc 0033-362X/83/0047-329/$2.50 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Mon, 01 Aug 2016 04:31:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 330 FRANK WHELON WAYMAN AND RONALD R. STOCKTON existing partisan alignment and on party stability? Third, which dimensions show signs of stability or instability? Fourth, what impact do issues have on presidential voting? In this study, the authors benefited greatly from a wealth of previous research which is both empirically impressive and theoretically insightful. Trends and patterns, well known to most scholars (and hence only summarized here), show that the old social welfare issues of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s are declining in saliency; that identification with the parties has weakened but not broken; that party voting has declined; that political apathy and political ideology both increased from the early 1960s to the early 1970s; and perhaps more critically, that issues have emerged which are volatile, strongly held, and persistent. These issues are not overtly economic in nature; they include such social or moral topics as race, crime, abortion, drug use, and the family. Furthermore, such issues do not always correspond to socioeconomic or partisan lines and hence have served to disrupt the parties and to reduce vote predictability (Campbell, et al., 1960; Nie, et al., 1979; Weisberg and Rusk, 1970; Miller and Levitin, 1976; Converse, et al., 1969; and A. Miller, et al., 1976). Several questions which emerged from these studies will be addressed in this paper. The first set deals with exactly how many new issue dimensions there are, how and if they are interrelated, and whether they are linked to the previous social welfare dimension. There is reason to believe that various of these new issues are linked to each other. Gun control and crime, for example, seem logically linked, as do busing and other attitudes about the relation of the state to one's children. Other questions, such as abortion and gun control, seem to have no logical linkage. The question of whether the new issues are linked in some coherent manner or are merely ad hoc is a critical one. We are assuming that if they are merely ad hoc they can be isolated in the political system and handled one at a time without producing any change or disruption. However, if they are linked together, they can restructure the present partisan alignment or disrupt it on an on-going basis (Campbell, 1966). The realignmentdisruption potential is also linked to the question of whether the old issues are still relevant or are merely artifacts of the past. If old issues have faded greatly in salience, and if new issues arise that appeal to the voters in a way that cuts across the cleavage structure of the old party system, realignment of the party system becomes possible.2 2 Sundquist (1973) provides an excellent theoretical discussion of these matters. His analysis of old and new issues is the best we have seen. See Butler and Stokes (1971) for a classic discussion of the earliest realignment to be documented with public opinion findings-the British realignment between 1910 and 1918. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Mon, 01 Aug 2016 04:31:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms STABILITY OF POLITICAL AlTITUDES 331 Weisberg and Rusk (1970) contributed a pioneering effort that demonstrated the relevance of such cross-cutting dimensions to recent presidential election campaigns.3 Subsequently, Miller and Levitin (1976:267-72) have demonstrated the utility of indices of cross-cutting social concerns in analyzing the 1972 and 1976 presidential elections. Building upon these efforts, we have attempted to further clarify the structure of cross-cutting issues in the 1970s and the impact of those issues on the 1972 and 1976 campaigns. The Structure of Attitudes We asked respondents dozens of questions tapping political and social attitudes and issue positions. Twenty-five of these items were linked together in a series of seven factors (Table 1). These seven factors in turn were linked to each other in two main clusters.4 The first cluster we call the Alignment Cluster because it is associated with and reinforces the persistent partisan loyalties of the electorate. Its components are party identification and social welfare liberalism. The second cluster we call the Disintegration Cluster because it encompasses attitudes which destabilize the party system. It is made up of law and order, an Inglehart-type value system (Inglehart, 1971), racial prejudice, racial fears, and lifestyle. The Alignment Cluster and the Disintegration Cluster are almost completely unrelated to each other. They are "nearly decomposable," in the language of cognitive psychologists (Simon, 1969). Simply stated, the fact that a person is liberal on the Alignment Cluster does not tell us whether he will be a liberal or conservative on the Disintegration Cluster. His mind can be split, for our purposes, into two distinct parts, because he does not himself make any connection between attitudes in the Disintegration Cluster and attitudes in the Alignment Cluster. But while the two clusters are independent of each other we find that within each cluster the various factors are associated in an integrated way. This is a pattern which deserves elaboration. First, however, let us look at the nature of the seven factors and their component parts: (1) The first factor, racial prejudice, has measures of attitudes toward blacks associated with it: a thermometer question 3 See Rabinowitz (1973), which illuminated many of the technical issues in such analysis. 4 The factor analysis reported in Table 1 is a varimax rotation of a correlation matrix based on pairwise deletion of missing cases, using OSIRIS iII. The analysis is based on the 1974 wave, chosen because it was halfway between the two presidential elections. A cluster is defined as a set of variables, the correlations among which are all higher than the correlations between any member of the cluster and any variable not in the cluster. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Mon, 01 Aug 2016 04:31:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 332 FRANK WHELON WAYMAN AND RONALD R. STOCKTON Table 1. Factor Analysis of Key Questionnaire Items (Varimax Rotation)