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In 1960, The American Voter, by Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, introduced the social-psychological approach to the study of voting. The core of the authors' theory was the mediating role that long-term psychological predispositions, particularly party attachment, play in individual voting decisions. In the decades since its publication, the book has spurred a wealth of scholarly research in this country and others. It also has generated questions of how well its findings have stood the tests of time. Now, almost fifty years later, a quartet of scholars has taken on the task of replicating The American Voter, focusing on the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections with an eye toward comparing today's American voter with that described a half-century ago. The end result is a well-crafted book that both updates and expands on the original foundational work.
In The American Voter Revisited, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, William G. Jacoby, Helmut Norpoth, and Herbert F. Weisberg retain much of the original authors' approach. Campbell and associates used survey data and focused on the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. The new book uses National Elections Studies to examine the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The authors follow the same theory and book format as the original classic. Most chapters mirror themes and correspond to chapters in the 1960 book. The updated book deletes some chapters--for instance a chapter on agrarian political behavior was no longer necessary--to accommodate changes in election studies over time and also out of recognition of changing national priorities. It also takes advantage of more advanced statistical methods, for instance using logit rather than regression to capture the effect of partisan attitudes on vote decisions.
Notably different, the authors conclude each chapter in The American Voter Revisited with commentary and controversy sections. These sections outline advances in the study of voting behavior since the original...