RICHARD
BORN
Vassar
College
To
account for the increase in divided government in the United States, Fiorina
has advanced a purposive theory of split-ticket voting that emphasizes voters' desire
to balance the relative policy extremism of the Democratic and Republican par- ties.
This study uncovers little empirical evidence to substantiate the policy-balancing
model. Respondents' issue-scale placements of the president and federal government
challenge the premise that national policy is perceived as a weighted average of
the individual positions staked out by the executive and congressional branches.
More importantly, conditional logic analysis in three of the five presidential-year
elections from 1972 to 1988 provides no support for Fiorina's central tenet
that voters will endorse the presidential-House pair for which the averaged
partisan position is closest to their own ideological preference. Finally,
there is only scattered support for the propositions that are developed as logical
extensions of this theory.
