On Mandates, Realignments, and the 1984 Presidential Election

After almost every presidential election, politicians and pundits try to discern what voters really intended to say. Of course, the most important thing about an election is its actual outcome, who got elected. But next come the competing efforts to interpret the outcome in a way favorable to one side or the other. This is neither surprising nor disturbing. Various groups and interests have stakes in the long-term course of American public policy; naturally, they choose to relate election outcomes to what they want that course to be. This continuing policy struggle gets expressed by the idea of a mandate. Who got a mandate from the voters to do what? In the pages of this journal four years ago, I discussed the Reagan-Carter election against the backdrop of the argument about what kind of a mandate the new president had won.' Rejecting both the view that Ronald Reagan's victory was the culmination of a coherent swing to the right and the view that it was nothing more than the rejection of Jimmy Carter, an unpopular incumbent, I maintained that Reagan had received a positive mandate to take the country in a new direction-but that the mandate was necessarily brittle. Its lack of firmness had three related sources: First, a more highly educated electorate, in the personality-emphasizing world of TV-centered electioneering

Argument (complex analysis) · Law and economics · Mandate · Nothing · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Presidential election · Presidential system · Sociology · Victory · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Public Administration

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