選挙研究における「争点態度」の現状と課題

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This review article surveys the relevant literature of issue voting, namely the studies of the effects of issue attitudes on voting behavior. This subfield of voting behavior studies brought about the biggest controversy in the history of voting behavior or electoral studies in the United States.
The core of issue voting controversy is a question regarding whether an average voter (the general public) can understand policy issues at the time of an election and whether he/she can make vote decision based on his/her issue attitudes. The American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes, 1960) found that not so many American voters could cast their votes based on their rational judgment of public policy. In the 1970s, the “revisionists” found some contradictory evidences against the findings of The American Voter. Thus, the issue voting controversy developed.
In my view, the issue voting controversy reflected the difference in epistemological attitudes of the scholars between the Michigan school of voting behavior and the so-called the “revisionists” who criticized the Michigan school. The revisionists' efforts to respond to the criticism from those advocated “post-behavioralism”. On the other hand, the scholars of the Michigan school seem to have firmly devoted themselves in scientific rigor.
But, as the result of this big controversy regarding issue voting, the discipline of voting behavior could confirm the “rationality of the voters, ” which lead many students of political science to the rational model approach (or formal modeling approach), because this approach is based on an assumption of the rationality of an average man. Thus the issue voting controversy itself contributed to the development of political science.