Transcript
THOMAS E. MANN: Today, we're going to be exploring a whole range of questions. Are elections about the past or the future? Candidates always say they're about the future. Some of us may suggest democratic accountability works primarily through the mechanism of retrospective voting.
Are specific issues important, or is it more a matter of broad ideologies? Do parties own issues? How do they come to own them, and can that be altered during the course of a presidential campaign?
To what extent are issues important as a choice of alternatives for voters? That's certainly the model many journalists have. I would call it the "good government league of women voters" perspective on the role of issues. You know, the candidate clearly lays out what he's going to do on Iraq, and the other candidate does, and then the public decides between those competing choices.
It turns out that may be a good way; it may be a lousy way. There may be too little information that voters actually absorb to be able to make that choice. It may be that what candidates say is their position on the future is an unreliable guide to how they will perform in office and much better is to look at their performance in the past in office.
Do objective conditions determine which issues are important in a particular election, or are subjective perceptions critical, which can be directly influenced by the campaign itself?
Those are some of the issues, matters we're going to be grappling with as we try to understand how much issues do influence the vote.
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