Chapter 11 Further Reading: The American Voter and Beyond

Ten annotated entries ranging from foundational texts to accessible contemporary scholarship.

1. Campbell, Angus, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes. The American Voter. University of Chicago Press, 1960 (reissued 1980).

The foundational text of the Michigan model and one of the most influential books in political science. Based on the first systematic national surveys of American voters (1952 and 1956 ANES), it introduces party identification, the funnel of causality, and the concept of the perceptual screen. Dense reading, but the introductory chapters are essential. Don't skip Chapter 7 on issue voting and ideology — it sets up Converse's later work.

2. Converse, Philip E. "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." In Ideology and Discontent, edited by David Apter. Free Press, 1964.

Arguably the most cited paper in political science. Converse's central argument: most voters show little ideological constraint — their positions on different issues are only weakly correlated. Introduces the concept of "non-attitudes" — survey responses that are essentially random rather than reflecting stable underlying beliefs. Essential for understanding why the Michigan model minimized ideology as an explanatory variable. Available in many political behavior anthologies.

3. Key, V.O., Jr. The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting 1936-1960. Harvard University Press, 1966.

Key's posthumous response to what he saw as an overly dismissive view of voter rationality in the Michigan tradition. The book is short, readable, and argued with characteristic elegance. His central demonstration: "switchers" — voters who change parties between elections — do so in response to policy and performance differences, suggesting rational evaluation rather than mere habit. Essential reading for understanding retrospective voting theory.

4. Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. Yale University Press, 1981.

The definitive statement of retrospective voting theory as a systematic model. Fiorina integrates Key's insights with the Michigan model, proposing that party identification is a running tally of past party performance. More rigorous and methodologically sophisticated than Key's work, and more theoretically explicit about how retrospective evaluation and party ID interact. Chapter 5 on economic voting is particularly relevant.

5. Nie, Norman H., Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik. The Changing American Voter. Harvard University Press, 1979.

The major revisionist challenge to The American Voter, arguing that ideological constraint among voters increased substantially between the 1950s and 1970s. The methodological controversy surrounding this book — particularly the question of whether observed changes were real or survey artifacts — is as instructive as the substantive argument. Read alongside Converse's response for the full debate.

6. Sears, David O., and Carolyn L. Funk. "The Role of Self-Interest in Social and Political Attitudes." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 24 (1991): 1–91.

A comprehensive review of research on self-interest in political attitudes that helped establish the symbolic politics framework. Sears and Funk demonstrate across a range of issues that symbolic attitudes (moral values, racial feelings, group identities) are typically stronger predictors of political positions than narrowly defined personal economic self-interest. Dense but rich with empirical evidence.

7. Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper, 1957.

The foundational text of the spatial model. Downs applies microeconomic reasoning to electoral competition, deriving the median voter theorem and a range of predictions about candidate strategy and voter behavior. Remarkably readable for a work of formal theory. Chapters 2, 7, and 8 are most relevant to vote choice; Chapter 13 is an underappreciated discussion of rational ignorance with modern relevance.

8. Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. "An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict." In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by W.G. Austin and S. Worchel, 33–47. Brooks/Cole, 1979.

The foundational statement of social identity theory, which has become one of the most influential frameworks in political behavior research. Tajfel and Turner articulate how group categorization, social identification, and social comparison produce in-group favoritism and out-group hostility. Not specifically about politics, but the psychological mechanisms it describes are central to understanding partisan behavior. Accessible for social science readers.

9. Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton University Press, 2016.

A provocative synthesis that challenges both the Michigan model and retrospective voting theory from a more radical direction: the authors argue that voters are not rational processors of political information and that elections do not reliably produce policy responsiveness. Their critique of economic voting models — demonstrating that voters punish incumbents for events like shark attacks that have nothing to do with policy — is particularly memorable. Essential for a sophisticated understanding of the limits of all vote choice theories.

10. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction." In Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, edited by Lipset and Rokkan, 1–64. Free Press, 1967.

The foundational statement of cleavage theory. Dense with historical detail about Western European party systems, but the theoretical framework in the introduction is clear and powerful. Essential for understanding why comparative political behavior research uses different frameworks from American voting behavior research, and for appreciating how historical context shapes partisan structures that can persist for generations.