New Measures of Issue Salience: An Evaluation

The 1979 NES Pilot Study and the 1980 National Election Study included new items intended to measure the importance of different issues to individual respondents. Theory suggests that voters should weigh more important issues more heavily than less important issues in arriving at candidate evaluations and vote choices. However, no such differential weighting is evident using the new measures of issue salience in either the Pilot Study or the 1980 Election Study. A variety of question formats, samples, and coding schemes all lead to the conclusion that the new salience items add little or nothing to our ability to account for electoral behavior.