A Dynamic Approach to Understanding the New American Electorate (original) (raw)
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American politics has become more partisan, strident, vitriolic, and polarized in recent years, and recent trends suggest that there is a clear link between Americans' heightened partisanship and their level of political involvement. However, past political behavior research on political participation has paid little attention to its origins in partisanship. This study examines closely the connection between partisanship and political participation, building on past research to ground the conception and measurement of partisanship in social identity . Specifically, we extend past research in three important ways: First, we argue that partisan identity is best understood as a social identity with concomitant emotional and behavioral consequences that heighten political participation. Second, we develop a new social identity-based 4-item measure of partisanship and demonstrate empirically in three different studies including cross-sectional and experimental designs its greater ability to predict political involvement and related emotions than the standard 7-point measure of partisanship. Third, we contrast the new partisan identity scale with a multi-item issue scale to demonstrate that the impressive explanatory power of partisan identity cannot simply be attributed to its greater variance. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of our findings for the conception and measurement of political partisanship that at a time where American politics is increasingly polarized and the level of political involvement is increasing.
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One can arguably claim that party identification is the most important concept in modern electoral behavior research. 1 The early analyses of the Michigan election studies demonstrated how partisanship was a core element in political identities and behavior (Campbell et al. 1960, 1966). Since then, party identification is routinely a predictor in a wide array of analyses, ranging from voting to participation to predicting issue positions. Indeed, the developers of the concept stressed its functional importance: The present analysis of party identification is based on the assumption that the ... parties serve as standard-setting groups for a significant proportion of the people in this country. In other words, it is assumed that many people associate themselves psychologically with one or the other of the parties, and that this identification has predictable relationships with their perceptions, evaluations, and actions. (Campbell, Gurin and Miller 1954: 90) But just as the authors of The American Voter were demonstrating the analytic and predictive power of partisan identification as a concept, these ties began to weaken. At first, researchers asked if this was a temporary response to the political controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Converse 1976; Abramson 1979). But now, a quarter century later, partisan attachments remain weaker than during the "stable state" period of The American Voter studies. Indeed, partisanship reached a new low point in the 2000 American National Election Study (ANES); only 41 percent of respondents claimed to be independents in 2000, compared to barely 25 percent in the 1950s. These trends of weakening partisanship are well documented in American electoral research, but their meaning and interpretation remain widely debated. Some analysts discount the significance of these trends, or even the reality of partisan dealignment (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Bartels 2000; Keith et al. 1992). Others discuss weakening partisanship as due to the depoliticization of the electoral politics (Dimock 1998; Milner 2002), consistent with Putnam's thesis of Americans' decreasing social engagement (Putnam 2000). This research tests an alternative explanation that begins with the functional theory of partisanship that underlies The American Voter model, and then asks how the socioeconomic transformation of American society during the later half of the 20 th century may have altered this logic. Using the long data series from the American National Election Studies (ANES), we
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The partisan and ideological polarization of American politics since the 1970 s appears to have affected pubic opinion in striking ways. The American public has become increasingly partisan and ideological along liberal-conservative lines on a wide range of issues, including even foreign policy. This has raised questions about how "rational" the public is, in the broad sense of the public's responsiveness to objective conditions. Widespread partisan disagreements over what those conditions are-i.e., disagreements about "the facts"-suggest that large proportions of the public may be perceiving the facts incorrectly. The facts in question are important enough that these partisan disagreements may translate into sub-optimal policy preferences and electoral decisions. He who denies my version of the facts is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts.
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