Petition-Signing in the 1968 Election

Published date01 December 1971
DOI10.1177/106591297102400409
Date01 December 1971
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-17Kf9boGIo11O1/input
PETITION-SIGNING IN THE 1968 ELECTION
ALLEN R. WILGOX and LEONARD B. WEINBERG
University of Nevada
URING
the early stages of the 1968 presidential election campaign, spokes-
men
for many national news media suggested that the facility with which
supporters of George Wallace were able to get enough petition signatures
to have his name placed on the ballot in state after state was a reflection of broadly
based popular enthusiasm, especially in the North.’ However, evidence from ear-
lier social science research indicates that an individual who signs a petition need
not be particularly committed to its stated purpose.2 The questions to which we
intend to address ourselves are, first, how committed to Wallace’s presidential
aspirations were the people who signed a petition ostensibly on his behalf? Second,
to what extent were these individuals representative, demographically and politi-
cally, of the general electorate in the same community?
Our evidence is based on questionnaires we mailed, in October 1968, to
systematically drawn samples of registered voters and of individuals in a medium-
sized western city who signed a petition to have Wallace’s name listed on the bal-
lot.3 Approximately 800 people completed and returned these instruments.4
THE POPULARITY OF GEORGE WALLACE
The data displayed in Table 1 reveal, rather unsurprisingly, that there is a
significant difference between the two samples’ voting intentions and that Wallace
was considerably more popular among the petition-signers than among the regis-
tered voters.5 What is interesting, however, is that Wallace failed to receive major-
ity endorsement even from those individuals who signed his petition, and, in fact,
finished second to Nixon.
NOTE: This research was supported by the Behavioral Science Committee of the Desert Re-
search Institute and the Graduate School of the University of Nevada, Reno. We would
like to thank Richard Siegel, James Richardson and Pamela Brunsell for their comments
on earlier drafts of this paper.
1
For Wallace’s name to appear on the ballot in most states, it was necessary that a petition
be circulated and signed by a predetermined percentage of the state’s eligible voters.
2
Robert R. Blake et al., "Social Forces in Petition-Signing," Southwestern Social Science
Quarterly, 37 (March 1956), 384-90, and Harry Helson et al., "Petition-Signing as
Adjustment to Situational and Personal Factors," Journal of Social Psychology, 48
(August 1958), 3-10.
3
Two thousand questionnaires were mailed, fifteen hundred to registered voters and five
hundred to petition-signers. The response rates were 40.6% (609) and 40.0% (200)
respectively. We consider this an excellent response for a survey of the mass public in
view of the length of the questionnaire (12 pages) and the fact that we had time to
send out only one follow-up before the election. The questionnaires were mailed to
petition-signers in the expectation of our being able to isolate a large number of pro-
Wallace voters. This paper, devoted as it is to the petition-signing phenomenon, is a
by-product of a more general study concerned with the characteristics of Wallace sup-
porters.
4
We have no means of judging how accurately the petitions were checked by state officials
beyond reporting that there was a higher incidence of "address unknown" returns to
questionnaires mailed to petition-signers than to registered voters.
5
Henceforth the acronyms "REGVOT" and "PETSIG" will be used to signify "registered
voter" and "petition-signer" respectively.
731


732
TABLE 1
PRESIDENTIAL VOTING INTENTION OF REGISTERED VOTERS AND PETITION-SIGNERS
~~
~
- -----------_._~
X2=71.46; p * The actual election results were Nixon 56.6%, Humphrey 33.3%, and Wallace 10.1%.
It might be argued, nonetheless, that by this late date in the campaign large
numbers of PETSIGS had given up hope of a Wallace victory and had decided to
vote for either Nixon or Humphrey as the less repellent major party alternative.
(When asked who they expected to be the next President, 73.5 percent of the
PETSIGS named Nixon while only 7.0 percent thought Wallace would win.) In
response to a question asking the respondents to name their second choice in the
election, Wallace was selected by 36.1 percent of the PETSIGS who had not named
him their first choice as against 23.2 percent of the REGVOTS. It is therefore
tempting to conclude that Wallace was more popular among the PETSIGS than
their expressed voting intentions suggested. Fortunately, we can explore this inter-
pretation further by adding the following questions to the analysis: &dquo;Forgetting
for the moment that the Presidential race has at this point been narrowed down
to three candidates, which one of the people listed below do you think would have
made the best President?&dquo; (See Table 2.)
TABLE 2
PERCEPTIONS OF BEST PRESIDENTIAL TIMBER
X2=58.31; p<.001>

733
As with the voting intention results, these data provide little support for the
contention that the PETSIGS viewed Wallace as a particularly attractive potential
...

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