Stanley and Mirer 1974
Modern prodigies of election forecasting tend to obscure an important fact: Our ability to predict how voters will vote is far more solidly based than our ability to explain why they vote as they do. To acknowledge this fact, as any analyst of voting must, is to admit that some of the most interesting questions about voting and elections cannot at present be given satisfactory answers. What particular attitudes actually bear on voting, the character and quality of such attitudes and perceptions, the impact of campaigns, the extent to which elec- tions serve to increase the responsiveness of officials on the issues that voters see as at stake in elections-secure knowledge about these matters must wait upon a securely established theory of voting. At present, there is no such theory.