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Where Did They All Go ? Testing the Conventional Wisdom That Proposition Support Inevitably Declines
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Jarvis, Matthew G. |
| Copyright Year | 2012 |
| Abstract | Conventional wisdom says that a California ballot proposition that starts off in polling below 50% support will rarely win. In fact, the conventional wisdom holds that support for propositions falls during the course of the campaigns. This paper tests this conventional wisdom, using all those propositions surveyed on by the Field Corporation from 1997 to 2010. Is the conventional wisdom right or was it right at one time? Is it true of all propositions or just those dealing with some issues? Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Portland, OR March 22-March 24, 2011 “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking” -John Kenneth Galbraith Political scientists often like to disparage the “conventional wisdom.” Doing so serves to distinguish academia from the masses. But, as John Kenneth Galbraith’s famous quote reminds us, it is also squarely within the academic functions of learning and teaching, for the conventional wisdom is often wrong, or at least misleading. The problem with testing “the conventional wisdom” is that it is often a hard concept to nail down. There are often competing versions of what that “conventional wisdom” is—making it hardly “conventional!” They are often unclearly stated. When they are clear, they often speak of absolutes, a level of proof rarely used in empirical (particularly quantitative) political science. All of this does not preclude using “conventional wisdom” as an inspiration to derive theory from. What it does, though, is induce caution in interpreting findings as definitively rejecting or confirming these theories, since they are not necessarily based in a concrete logic, but are often purely inductive observations. This paper attempts to test one nugget of conventional wisdom that I have heard from political consultants and academics in California over the years: “if a proposition doesn’t have majority support the first time it’s polled on, it’s going to lose.” 1 There are a number of ways of interpreting this statement. In particular, what it means for a proposition to first poll “down” is open to interpretation. One way this could be understood is if fewer people support it than oppose it—a majority of those with an opinion, in other words A second way is that a proposition first polls support below 50%—an absolute majority. Corollaries or alternative versions of this conventional wisdom include: 1 This is a very preliminary draft of this paper. In particular, there is no real treatment of the existing scholarly literature in this version, for which I apologize. --“support for propositions always goes down.” This implies that the first version presented above is the product of a universal downward trend in support. Thus, polling above 50% at first indicates nothing more than some “cushion” for the inevitable loss of support. This version could be represented as: First Poll – X = Final Vote, where X is uniformly positive. Thus, if the first poll isn’t above 50%, it would guarantee the final vote would not be. Related to this corollary is the idea that support goes down more or less uniformly, thus meaning that there would be some better threshold—55%, 60%, 65%—that would more accurately predict passage or failure. --“when in doubt, voters stick with the status quo.” This implies that the reason for propositions failing if they poll below majority support is that the undecided voters will break decisively against the proposition. This corollary thus leans more heavily on that second interpretation of what it means to poll “down.” For this version, a proposition that is ahead 52%-43% is much safer than one that polls 49%-40%, or possibly even one that polls 49%-45%. The focus of this wisdom is decidedly on the undecided voters. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/meet/2012/jarvis.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
