Voting and the PFCI-SMS Model

The New America Papers analyzes the 2000 elections (before they were decided) and contrasts traditional approaches to voting tendencies with more meaningful and useful typological approaches. Given the rich complexity of interpretive information, we would like to focus on the PFCI-SMS quadrant map, which gives one of the best "bird's eye" views. More importantly, it is the Social Material Stress scale that relates most closely to voting.

• Overall, Americans who fall into the two right-hand quadrants (low SMS) tend to be more politically engaged.
• Those who fall into the two left-hand quadrants (high SMS) tend to be less politically engaged.

This is further qualified by the continuum of values that the Positive Future-Cooperative Integrative scale contributes.

To help bridge traditional voting demographics (such as party, "ideology," candidate, likelihood to vote, etc.), we have taken the PFCI-SMS quadrant and overlaid these common voting labels used in political polling. Party/Ideology and candidate are separated into two sets of bands — likely to vote and not likely to vote. In the full-sized diagram, differences in these superficial labels within each of the five zones of the PFCI-SMS model are clearly evident.

To emphasize this more graphically, we've created a "color wheel" pie-chart analysis of the 2000 election by voting likelihood, candidate, and party/ideology for the PFCI-SMS quadrant model. (We only show the upper right quarter of the full pie-chart due to size constraints.) The complementing graphics shown below demonstrate the spatial distribution of candidate choices, divided into likely and less likely voters, across the PFCI-SMS quadrant. (Less likely voters are shown in lighter shades.)

The traditional political-demographic approach readily breaks down in terms of its ability to identify patterns that translate to significant positions and policy that would be represented by a new type of social and political leadership and, at the very least, public servants who truly serve society for the highest good of all. This also contributes to the inability of traditional political-demographics to accurately predict voting patterns.

Traditional Voting Demographics
and the PFCI-SMS Map

To compare traditional political demographics with The New America Papers models, "candidate choice," "party by ideology," and "voting likelihood" have been overlaid onto the PFCI-SMS quadrant model. The full quadrant-circle map represents eligible voters circa 2000. The entire graphic, seen here in miniature, also includes a separate set of elements for the middle or "boundary zone" region that, for simplicity, is not shown here.

There are two sets of rings. One set (the innermost and outermost rings) are for those people who are least likely to have voted in the 2000 election. The two rings in between are those people who were most likely to vote. Moving from the inner to outer rings, the first ring shows candidate choices for non-voters, the second ring shows candidate choices for voters, the third ring is the party/ideology affiliation for voters, and the outermost ring shows party/ideology for non-voters.

NOTE: Each ring will equal 100% when the missing center elements are included. An enlarged version of the upper right quadrant appears on the next page.