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Correlates of Public Sentiments About War: Local Referenda on the Vietnam Issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Harlan Hahn*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside

Extract

Political science, by whatever definition of the discipline one might want to adopt, traditionally has been concerned with public opinion and participation on significant policy questions. Although the literature has become too vast for a complete enumeration of the varied contexts in which this research has been conducted, one issue that might rank high on a list of priorities for study—and yet has received somewhat less emphasis than other topics—is the subject of public attitudes toward war.

Perhaps this relative neglect has been promoted by a lack of opportunities for direct public participation in foreign policy decisions. Unlike most domestic issues, controversies over world problems have been relatively insulated from popular influence. Hence, research on the development of international conflict usually has devoted more attention to the statements and behavior of national leaders or key influentials than to public sentiments regarding war.

In recent years, however, the bitter debate generated by the war in Vietnam has stimulated mounting interest in popular attitudes concerning military action. The controversy has provoked both an unusual display of public disagreement about the war and a desire for basic changes in the policy-making process. Many persons not only have registered strong disapproval of American involvement in the Vietnam war, but they also have expressed an acute sense of frustration about their inability to affect the conduct of international relations. As a result, growing demands have emerged to permit expanded public access to critical decisions and to create increasingly democratic methods of formulating foreign policy.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1970

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References

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23 For a description of the Cambridge referendum, see Bonnell, Victoria and Hartman, Chester, “Cambridge Votes on the Vietnam War,” Dissent, 15 (03-04 1968), 103106 Google Scholar. For an account of the first Dearborn referendum, see Hahn, Harlan and Sugarman, Albert, “A Referendum on Vietnam,” War/Peace Report, 11 (05 1967), 1415 Google Scholar.

24 Census tract data were not available for Lincoln or Mill Valley. Data for the other cities in this study were prepared by superimposing precinct boundaries on tract maps and reaggregating precinct voting statistics so that election and census districts were comparable. For a further description of this procedure, see Hahn, , “Ethos and Social Class,” 299 Google Scholar. The author currently is conducting an extension study supported by U. S. Public Health Service grant No. DH 00151 of referendum voting behavior in approximately 60 U. S. cities employing social and economic variables obtained from city block statistics rather than from tract data.

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29 Perhaps referenda also have given citizens an increased opportunity to project their personal sentiments about the war in their votes rather than asking them to respond to the specific alternatives posed by an interviewer, which usually have focused on the international rather than the personal implications of foreign policy proposals.

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31 Although the variables or categories of income, education, and occupation are both inter-related and ipsative—that is, the proportion of persons at one level will affect the percentage at another level, they are not mirror images of each other. Consequently, all of the classifications have been reported both to indicate the patterns or the thresholds reflected by the correlations and to provide a more complete picture of the associations between socioeconomic status and the vote on Vietnam policy than would be possible through the use of summary measures.

32 The mean vote against the Vietnam war in Madison ranged from 59 percent in tracts with a median income below $4,000 to 37 percent in tracts where the median income was $8,000 or more.

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42 In Dearborn and Beverly Hills, however, the percentage of foreign-born residents was closely-related to the vote against American participation in the war.

43 Due to limitations on degrees of freedom in some cities, only first-order partial correlations were used in this study. Missing data for some variables also necessitated the elimination of Beverly Hills from this analysis.

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51 Impressionistic, unstructured interviewing conducted after the first vote on the Vietnam war in Dearborn, Michigan, in fact, suggested a sharp distinction between the “ideological” reactions to the referendum issue that were elicited in relatively affluent sections of the community and the highly “personal” responses that emerged in working-class neighborhoods where the proposal to withdraw American troops from Vietnam received a clear majority. While many high-status voters evaluated the controversy as a necessary defense against the global threat of Communist expansion or as an unwarranted intervention in a civil war, most working-class residents responded to the war as a tangible and direct threat to the lives of American men. Since their interpretation of the war was confined to the death and injury that it implied, the perspectives of working-class voters left them with few alternatives except to oppose the war. See Hahn, and Sugarman, , “A Referendum on Vietnam,” 1415 Google Scholar.

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