Breaking Empirical Deadlocks in the Study of Partisanship: An Overview of Experimental Research Strategies (original) (raw)
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Recent work has questioned the conclusions of the revisionist model of party identification. One central issue concerns the measurement of party identification. According to the critics, the research showing that partisanship is responsive to other political evaluations is in error because of peculiarities of measurement. I test this assertion by considering the effects that changes in measurement have on estimates of the dynamics of party identification. The results strongly support the original revisionist conclusions. The findings of responsiveness of party identification to evaluations of party issue positions are quite robust in the face of alternative measures of party identification.
Justifying Party Identification: A Case of Identifying with the “Lesser of Two Evils”
Despite the centrality of party identification to our understanding of political behavior, there remains remarkable disagreement regarding its nature and measurement. Most scholars agree that party identities are quite stable relative to attitudes. But do partisans defend their identities, or does this stability result from Bayesian learning? I hypothesize that partisans defend their identities by generating ''lesser of two evils'' justifications. In other words, partisan identity justification occurs in multidimensional attitude space. This also helps to explain the weak relationship between attitudes toward the two parties observed by proponents of multidimensional partisanship. I test this hypothesis in an experiment designed to evoke inconsistency between one's party identity and political attitudes. To establish generalizability, I then replicate these results through aggregate level analysis of data from the ANES.
The Motivated Partisan: A Dual Motivations Theory of Partisan Change and Stability
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Is party identification highly stable or regularly updated? Is party identification an impediment to democratic accountability or a helpful shortcut? Political scientists have debated the answers to these questions for fifty years. This dissertation incorporates intuition from both of the two dominant camps in this debate, arguing that partisan dynamics are shaped by competing motives. This theory is tested through a series of four original experiments and analysis of survey data from the American National Election Studies. By bringing partisans' attitudes and party identities into conflict with one another, I am able to observe the methods that partisans use to reconcile their motives and defend their identities. By inhibiting partisans' ability to deploy these defenses, I am able to induce party identification change among the most vulnerable partisans. Through a survey experiment, I observe how salient political evaluations can create identity pressure during surveys and how respondents go about resolving this pressure. Finally, by x priming instrumental concerns versus expressive concerns, the motivational underpinnings of partisan responsiveness are clarified. Specifically, party identification change results from the desire to appear pragmatic-a norm of civic duty-and not from the drive to attain policy benefits. Implications for partisan dynamics, the responsiveness of the electorate, and our understanding of democratic accountability are discussed. .
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Rising hostility between members of opposing political factions has gained considerable attention in both academic and popular press. The adverse effects of this phenomenon are widely recognized, but its psychological antecedents remain the focus of ongoing debate in political psychology. Past research has honed in on two conflicting explanations: one highlights the extent to which people self-define as supporters of particular parties or candidates (the identity view), and another points toward the intensity with which they disagree on substantive matters of policy (the issues view). A nationally representative survey of 1051 eligible Spanish voters yielded support for both explanations. The perceived magnitude and nature of disagreement were associated with increased partisan prejudice, while controlling for partisan identification. Path analyses revealed that issue-based prejudice was more pronounced among ideologically extreme agents (β = 0.237, 95% CI [0.174, 0.300]) than toward extreme targets (β = 0.140, 95% CI [0.078, 0.201]), and replicated recent findings that identity-based prejudice is motivated primarily by non-instrumental factors (β = 0.286, 95% CI [0.230, 0.337]). Together, these results indicate that discrimination across party lines responds to two fundamentally distinct, though at times co-occurring, imperatives: to coalesce in ideologically homogeneous communities, and to protect one's sense of partisan identity.
Krehbiel 2000 AJPS Party Discipline and Measures of Partisanship.pdf
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It has been argued that party membership has declined in most liberal democracies over the past several decades, and the remaining party members are even more committed to party goals and policies. If partisanship becomes more of an elite phenomenon, it might also become a very effective tool to exert political influence. We use Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data (1996-2016) to investigate the magnitude of the association over time between party identification and political efficacy. The results support our main hypotheses that party identification remains strongly associated with political efficacy throughout the observation period, and that the magnitude of this association has increased in recent years. Thus, despite attention in the literature to stagnating or declining party identification, we provide new evidence that supports expectations in the literature of continued and even increased importance of the relationship between party identification and political efficacy.
Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization
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Party identification, the psychological bond between citizens and a political party, is one of the central variables in understanding political behavior. This article argues that such party ties are also a measure of party system institutionalization from the standpoint of the public. We apply Converse’s model of partisan learning to 36 nations surveyed as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. We find that electoral experience and parental socialization are strong sources of partisanship, but the third-wave democracies also display evidence of latent socialization carried over from the old regime. The results suggest that party identities can develop in new democracies if the party system creates the conditions to develop these bonds.