This study examined the relationship between voting defection from the traditional Democratic norm among social groupings and noncongruence of their attitudes and social backgrounds with parties' candidates in presidential elections. The 1956 and 1976 SRC/CPS National Surveys provided the data base. The interviews were designed to explore the voters attitudes and behavior surrounding the 1956 and 1976 presidential elections. / Demographics or social background of Catholics, Blacks and native white Southerners were referred to as independent variables which included age, sex, SES, group identity and party identification. Also, attitudes on social, economic and governmental role issues were included among the independent variables. Presidential preference, which consisted of voting defection and nondefection, was implemented as the dependent variable. / Several hypotheses were generated to examine this noncongruence theory of voting defection. Hypothesis one examined the patterns of voting defection and socioeconomic status. Hypothesis two examined role identification and voting defection. The third hypothesis examined age and voting defection. Age consisted of three age cohorts (Post-Depression, Depression and Pre-Depression). Hypothesis four examined perceptions of compatibility with candidates (or party) on issues and presidential choice. Issues were classified into three typologies: social, economic, and governmental role. Hypothesis five examined group identity and voting defection. The final hypothesis examined the magnitude of voting defection and partisan loyalty among the social groupings. Catholics, native white Southerners, and Blacks were investigated in relation to the above hypotheses. / Both chi-square and Pearson product-moment correlation were used to examine the directionality and the strength of the independent variables to the dependent variable. To examine the magnitude of voting defection among the social groupings, the Student's t was employed. Finally, multivariable discriminant analysis was used to determine the relative importance of the independent variables in relation to the dependent variable. / In general, most of the hypotheses were supported for the 1976 election. However, only the hypothesized relation about issue voting was strongly supported for the 1956 election. Some of these independent variables were stronger predictors than others. They also varied in importance depending upon the social groupings. Using the Pearson product-moment correlation to examine the relative importance of the independent variables among Catholics, native white Southerners and Blacks, economic issues appeared to be the most important independent variable in both elections. Issues ranked in importance depending on the immediate impact those issues had on voters' lives. Voters were more likely to respond to the candidate's position on issues rather than political parties' position on those same issues. While appearing to be the most important variable when testing the hypotheses, issues had a secondary role to party identification for the 1976 election in the canonical correlation analysis. Also, SES and age had the most important explanatory value among Blacks in the 1976 election. Group identity had a secondary position to economic issues among Blacks in 1956. In 1956 strong group identity lead to partisan stability, but in 1976 strong group identity related to partisan defection among Blacks and Catholics. Both issues and demographic variables are important explanatory factors of voting defection depending upon the social group. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-09, Section: A, page: 4155. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74283 |
| Contributors | WRIGHT, LARRY LEE., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 118 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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