Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Scholars have long noted that voting behavior is deeply rooted in social positions and group memberships that leave some citizens (and not others) highly cross-pressured in their party preference. In the earliest voting studies, researchers used crosstabulation to illustrate the concept of cross-pressures. Although pollsters and scholars have invoked the concept ever since, it rarely is incorporated into multivariate analyses of voting behavior for want of an adequate individual-level measure. We construct an original measure of cross-pressuredness by estimating the extent to which a person’s social attributes yield (or fail to yield) clear expectations for his party preference (specifically, high cross-pressuredness = low variance in predicted probabilities). We then use the measure to test predictions that greater cross-pressures lead to lower degrees of partisanship, interest, and electoral participation. Evidence from the ANES cumulative dataset strongly supports the hypotheses. Looking across decades of data, we also assess the extent to which the locus and impact of cross-pressures has changed over time and what this tells us about the evolving nature of social influence in the United States over the past half century.