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The balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of government in the United States has held firm despite the evolution of each branch. Moreover, as the primacy of one branch succumbed to the dominance of the other there remained a constant variable. Partisanship existed since the American founding, however, the importance of Congressional partisanship in the later half of the nineteenth century and rise of the imperial presidency in the twentieth century highlight the formidable challenges of divided government in the United States. The following paper utilizes rational choice theory in political science to explain decision making of American political leaders though inclusion of casual and descriptive examples highlight certain choices within

This research examines the partisan inclinations of American Indians, a minority population with a complicated history with the U.S. government and American society. The empirical analyses identify Native Americans as preferring the Democratic Party over the Republican Party. The impact of being Native American on identification with the Democratic Party is sizable, equivalent to the effect for being Hispanic, Asian, or female. In addition, American Indians demonstrate a pronounced tendency to not affiliate with a major American political party. The higher incidence of non-identification among Native Americans likely results from the importance of their claims for sovereignty and, relatedly, living separate from much of American society. Unlike other broad-based social groups in American politics, Native Americans disseminate cues that reduce the tendency of their members to affiliate with a major political party.

This article compares partisanship across East Asian nations, with four indicators reflecting different dimensions of the concept. Across these indicators, partisanship in East Asian nations was found to be relatively weak compared with most Western democracies, reflecting the less institutionalized nature of their party systems. This could be caused by insufficient time to develop partisanship through mechanisms such as electoral experience and parental socialization. Further breakdowns of income, gender, age groups, and educational levels of partisans showed that more advanced democracies share a relatively uniform pattern across demographics, while young democracies in East Asia showed a more skewed distribution of partisan identifiers, unevenly distributed across income and gender groups. This pattern suggests partisanship is likely to start its development from certain segments of the population and then spread into other segments of the society as a party system becomes more institutionalized.

How do attachments to political parties among the mass publics of East Asia affect the process of democratization in the region? Analyses of the East Asia Barometer surveys reveal that partisanship motivates East Asians to endorse the democratic performance of their political system and embrace democracy as the best possible system of government. These findings accord, by and large, with the socialization, cognitive dissonance, and rational choice theories of partisanship.

Recent work on partisanship has highlighted the role of political parties in rendering democracy and justice widely accessible to citizens. In these recent works, a distinction is drawn between a contemporary conception of partisanship that focuses on fidelity to political parties and a classic conception that emphasises the importance of a civic ethos of active political engagement. I argue that these two conceptions of partisanship are not so disparate if we focus on the role of political parties in promoting civic commitment and contestation. More specifically, I show how a normative account of partisanship can contribute to a defence of a civic ethos of political commitment. I then argue that commitment leads to contestation among both partisans and non-partisans, and that polities lacking active contestation of political commitments are in one significant respect less well off than those societies where there is such contestation.