Foreign affairs, vote choice, and the post Cold War era

Abstract

The relationship between foreign policy issues and vote choice has not been given proper attention by political scientists. The preeminent work on the topic, Aldrich, Sullivan, and Borgida (1989), mentions that many political scientists justify this by believing that foreign policy issues do not matter to voters. They find, using NES and Gallup data from 1980 and 1984, that foreign policy does matter to voters. One possible problem exists in the validity of these results. They may be time bound by the end of the Cold War in 1991. This thesis will determine whether foreign policy issues have become less important to the electorate since the end of the Cold War and will determine reasons why this has occurred. I will test several different possible reasons why foreign policy issue salience has changed since the end of the Cold War. These reasons include the end of the Cold War in 1991, the possibility there may be no difference between the candidates on foreign policy issues, the salience of all issues has declined, and the possibility there may be no difference between foreign policy stance and party. All of these will be tested using NES data from the 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000 elections. If one or more of these possibilities turn out to be true, then we will have another answer to the question of what factors are important in the area of vote choice.