Change in the components of the electoral decision: The nature of short-term forces in elections

The procedure developed by The American Voter ( Campbell et al., 1960) to understand determinants of the electoral decision first demonstrated the importance of short-term forces as vote components. Using a similar categorization scheme of these components from the National Election Studies, this paper examines the importance of these short-term forces in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, augmenting the basic components model by developing summary measures of the combined impact of these forces as well as analyzing the vote components for political independents. The authors conclude that, in comparison with the 1952 and 1956 elections, these short-term forces were relatively mild in these two recent elections and that, despite the conventional wisdom, the way in which short-term forces affected Independents did not impact the outcome of the elections generally.