The effects of respondent characteristics with regard to the propensity of nonvoters to report that they voted are examined by analyzing the vote validation studies conducted by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center in 1964, 1976, and 1980. Previous research has suggested that vote overreporting derives from the respondent's wish to appear to engage in socially desirable behavior. This earlier research suggests that the only respondent characteristic that is strongly related to overreporting is race; measures of socioeconomic status and of general political attitudes are said to be at most weakly related to the tendency to exaggerate voting. These earlier conclusions are incorrect. We measure the extent of overreporting for the population “at risk” of overreporting voting: those who did not actually vote. Respondents most inclined to overreport their voting are those who are highly educated, those most supportive of the regime norm of voting, and those to whom the norm of voting is most salient—the same characteristics that are related to the probability that a person actually votes. Blacks are only slightly more likely to overreport voting than whites. The pattern of relations between education and vote overreporting is opposite what would be found if those who falsely reported voting fit the typical image of the uneducated, uninvolved, “acquiescent” respondent who is concerned primarily with pleasing the interviewer.

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Voters in multicandidate contests may confront circumstances under which it is in their interest to vote for a second- or even lower-ranked candidate. The U.S. electoral system, typically offering a choice between only two major contenders, rarely presents opportunities for this “sophisticated” voting. In presidential primaries, however, many plausible candidates may compete. We investigate the presence of sophisticated voting in the 1988 presidential primaries, using data from the National Election Study's Super Tuesday survey. We examine patterns of voting types based on ordinal measures of preferences among candidates and assessments of their chances of winning their party's nomination and estimate several models of choice, testing the multicandidate calculus of voting. Among both Republicans and Democrats, respondents' choices were consistent with the calculus of voting and thus with sophisticated voting.

Confirming Inglehart's prediction (1971) of an intergenerational shift toward postmaterialist values, a time series analysis controlling for the joint effects of inflation and unemployment demonstrates that there is a statistically significant trend toward postmaterialism in all eight West European countries for which data are available over the past two decades. Evidence from the 1981–83 and 1990–91 World Values Surveys indicates that this value shift occurs in any society that has experienced sufficient economic growth in recent decades so that the preadult experiences of younger birth cohorts were significantly more secure than those of older cohorts. Large intergenerational differences tend to be found in societies that have experienced rapid growth in gross national product per capita, and are negligible in societies that have had little or no growth. Accordingly, postmaterialism increased in 18 of the 20 societies on five continents for which we have comparable data over the past decade.