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This article explored parochial partisanship among university students amid growing concerns about political polarization in Ghana. The paper used mixed research methods to gather data with the aid of an interview guide and a questionnaire. It argued that university education inculcates in and endows young people with a sense of civic-minded duty to prioritize the collective good of society and subordinate parochial partisan preferences in an analysis of political policies. The novel finding is that university education in Ghana has enlightened many young people to decipher between the facts and the propagandistic view held by political activists because of parochial partisan interest. However, university education was found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition to wipe out parochial partisanship which is the bane behind the growing political polarization in Ghana. The paper recommends continuous seminars on the dangers associated with negative partisanship in all tertiary educational institutions. Further, the winner-takes-all politics should be reviewed.

Scholars have long assigned a key role to party identification as an explanation of voting behaviour. In doing so, they have assumed that individuals' partisan affiliations remain unchanged for long periods of time. But is partisanship sufficiently stable to justify this assumption? At the very least, to be considered a long-term force party identification cannot change during an election. Yet the intra-election stability of party affiliations has been accepted on faith, rather than examined empirically.Our analysis tests this assumption by looking at the evolution of partisanship over the course of the 1980 election. We find that many citizens do alter their partisanship over a single electoral period. These changes in party identification follow a systematic - and not a random - pattern. Both cognitive and affective factors account for this intra-election partisan lability. These findings suggest that much of the previous research on voting behaviour has been seriously misspecified.

In this study, we evaluate how voter polarization and the level of partisanship influence electoral outcomes. We show that when the level of partisanship is low, the polarization of voter preferences translates into popular support for extreme parties. In contrast, longstanding attachments to mainstream (moderate) parties dampen the relationship between voter polarization and support for extreme parties. The implication of these findings is that the lack of voter attachment to parties contributes to extreme party competition, while strong attachment can help reduce party extremism even if electorates are polarized.

Catholics have long been an important force in American electoral politics, but the direction of that influence has changed in recent decades. Once a mainstay of the New Deal coalition, the community's political loyalties have shifted away from the Democrats to a virtual partisan equilibrium, with white Catholics drifting to the Republican camp and the growing number of Latino and other "new ethnics" providing Democratic votes. Here we examine the demographic structure of Catholic partisanship, testing four perspectives used by Shafer and Spady to identify the social underpinnings of partisan orientations, perspectives which also characterize the literature on Catholic alignments. These alternative views stress (1) social class and education; (2) racial and ethnic influences; 3) "domestic roles," such as gender, sexuality, family structure, and residence; and, finally (4) religious cleavages. We find that ethnic divisions contribute massively to contemporary Catholic partisanship, but that socioeconomic influences have faded dramatically. Religious factors, especially theological views, have become much more salient. We also discover that socioeconomic status is more influential for Latinos, while religion matters more for white Catholics. Finally, we show that conclusions drawn about the structure of Catholic partisanship depend in part on the survey used and the specific measures available.

Partisans & Independents, in a 1960 Detroit survey of 1350 voters, have the same image of the ideal President but partisans have clearly differentiated images of their preferred presidential candidate & the non-preferred. The preferred is seen in the image of the ideal Presdient. Closer examination shows that the source for the candidate's image is not the candidate himself but rather the image of the voters' party, ie, candidates are seen in the image of their own parties. Independents see both candidates in less idealistic & more candidate-determined ways. Partisan & Independents do agree on the personal characteristics of the 2 candidates, thus indicating that the candidate image emerges strongly only in non-pol'al areas but that for pol'al areas party, not candidate, has high saliency. AA.

Presidential cabinets include on average more nonparty ministers than governments in any other form of democracy, and critics of presidentialism have argued that this compromises representativeness, accountability, and governability. Yet cabinet partisanship in presidential democracies remains poorly understood. Existing studies argue that the partisan composition of cabinets reflects the degree to which presidents prioritize building legislative support. We demonstrate that a better understanding of government formation requires attention to a second dimension of choice: agency risks. Focusing on the relationship between presidents and their own parties, which is at the core of every presidential government, we show that party-affiliated ministers are not always reliable agents for presidents and that presidents appoint nonpartisan ministers to limit agency loss. We test this argument using original data on the partisanship of single-party cabinets in 12 Latin American countries and find support for the key claims. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

TO WHAT EXTENT IS A GOVERNMENT'S LEGITIMACY AFFECTED BY THE REGIONAL BREADTH OF ITS SUPPORT? IN THE 1983 BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION THE CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT WAS RETURNED TO OFFICE WITH A LARGE OVERALL MAJORITY IN THE COMMONS, BUT THERE WERE CONSIDERABLE REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN THE EXTENT OF ITS SUCCESS. THE CONSERVATIVES WON 70% OF THE ENGLISH SEATS BUT ONLY 37% OF THE SEATS IN WALES, 29% IN SCOTLAND AND NONE IN NORTHERN IRELAND. WITHIN ENGLAND THE CONSERVATIVES WON 86% OF THE SEATS IN THE SOUTH AND 70% IN THE MIDLANDS, BUT JUST 41% IN THE NORTH. THE EXISTENCE OF SUCH MARKED REGIONAL VARIATIONS IN THE LEVEL OF THE GOVERNMENT'S SUCCESS RAISES THE SPECIFICALLY TERRITORIAL ASPECT OF THE GENERAL QUESTION OF HOW FAR IT IS DESIRABLE FOR POLITICAL PARTIES, AND A GOVERNMENT PARTY IN PARTICULAR, TO HAVE BREADTH OF SUPPORT AS WELL AS DEPTH. THE PRINCIPLE OF MAJORITY RULE MEANS THAT "A MAJORITY OF ONE IS ENOUGH", BUT GOVERNMENT NORMALLY SEEK MORE THAN JUST A BARE MAJORITY. TO DISRAELI'S OBSERVATION THAT "A MAJORITY IS THE BEST REPARTEE" CAN BE ADDED THE RIDER THAT "A MAJORITY THAT IS LARGE AND BROADLY-BASED IS THE BEST REPARTEE OF ALL". CERTAINLY, DURING 1983 ELECTION CAMPAIGN THE PRIMKE MINISTER INDICATED THAT SHE ECT SOUGHT AS COMPREHENSIVT A VICTORY AS POSSIBLE AND WAS QUICK TO CORRECT THE (THEN) FOREIGN SECRETARY WHEN HE SUGGESTED THAT A LANDSLIDE WIN WAS NOT NECESSARILY DESIRABLE BECAUSE OF THE STIMULUS IT COULD GIVE TO TO BACKBENCH DISSENT.

Despite pervasive downward pressure on government policy from exogenous forces, the author argues that partisanship still exerts an effect on privatization in Latin America. When a country is indebted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and a government of the right is in power, scholars can expect increased levels of privatization. However, when a country is indebted to the IMF and a government of the left is in power, electoral incentives will prompt these governments to ignore IMF pressure and reduce levels of privatization. The author tests this argument on a data set of eighteen Latin American countries, between the years 1984 and 1998.

CHANGE IN THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE HAS TRADITIONALLY BEEN STUDIES BY COMPARING THE NUMBER OF INDEPENDENTS TO THE NUMBER OF PARTISANS, AND COMPARING THE IMPACT OF PARTISANSHIP TO THE IMPACT OF ISSUE VOTING. STABLE NUMBERS OF PARTISANS AND STABLE CORRELATIONS BETWEEN PARTISANSHIP AND ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR ARE INTERPRETED TO MEAN CONTINUITY IN THE ELECTORATE. THESE COMPARISONS, THOUGH USEFUL, IGNORE THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE MEANING OF PARTISANSHIP AND THE REASONS BEHIND ITS IMPACT ON ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR MAY HAVE CHANGED AS WELL. AS THE POTENTIAL FOR INDEPENDENT BEHAVIOR AND POLITICAL SOPHISTICATION INCREASES IN THE UNITED STATES, THE MOST SOPHISTICATED AND RATIONAL PARTISANS ARE ABLE TO LAY ASIDE THEIR PARTY LABELS, LEAVING FEWER, LESS RATIONAL PARTISANS. THIS ARGUMENT IS TESTED AND SUPPORTED USING DATA FROM THE NATIONAL ELECTION SURVEYS OF 1952 THROUGH 1980.