CONTY CARL CUNANAN
BSED 1-G MAPEH

EL PRESIDENTEample Reaction Paper
Note: This may be a bit short, but you get the idea - talk about common concepts, show that you understand and can ANALYZE the readings, offer critiques, and use specifics. Citations are also encouraged. Don't just recap the readings. The topics covered this week are interesting in that they have great implications for democratic theory. Issue voting would indicate an attentive public, while retrospective voting could render campaign promises meaningless. The enterprise of assessing the determinants of vote choice is an extremely complicated one that suffers from several common difficulties. The first is the availability of data. Panel studies and surveys are expensive and time consuming, and therefore not consistently performed. This hodge-podge of available data forces researchers to draw broad conclusions from data covering limited periods of time. For example, Marcus and Converse used data from two elections. The Kiinder and Abelson piece discussed by Asher found that candidate assessment fell along two separate dimensions – competence and integrity, yet the data was drawn during the Carter administration. Carter may be a uniquely extreme example; an individual especially strong on integrity and weak on competence. Similarly, CCMS drew conclusions about issue salience during a particularly non-contentious time period. Many of these studies may be reporting substantially time-bound phenomena. Another difficulty arises from drawing conclusions based on particular cases. For example, Carmines and Stimson use race as the primary example of an “easy issue” and Vietnam policy as an example of a “hard issue” (both derived from data on the 1972 presidential election). Though these examples may very well prove consistent with the conclusions about