Voting Behavior: A Study of Research Methodology and Design

This study is an attempt to measure what cannot be measured. In any highly organized society, and especially in a democracy, the attitudes of ordinary people toward the philosophy and methods of their organization, in this case voting, consists of a series of sociological and psychological phenomena far too complex to analyze accurately by any single standard. Political behavior has been studied at many levels and is now being analyzed at the national, state, and local levels by the latest methods of motivational research. Still there is no complete answer to the question of why people behave as they do, why individuals of similar background and training take different political positions, or why it is that they vote the way they do