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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.

THIS ARTICLE RE-EXAMINES THE MEANING OF SOUTHERN PARTY LOYALTIES. DRAWING FROM SURVEY DATA GATHERED IN THE EARLY 1970S, IT IS ARGUED THAT THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONVENTIONS HAVE UNDERESTIMATED THE DEGREE TO WHICH INTRA-PARTY DIVISION IS MANIFESTED IN SOUTHERN PARTISAN PERCEPTIONS AND IDENTIFICATIONS.

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.

No factor appears more powerful in explaining how individuals evaluate political information and form political preferences than partisanship. Yet, virtually all work on the effects of partisanship on preference formation neglects the crucial role of social settings. In this study, I examine how social settings can fundamentally change the influence of partisanship on preferences. I demonstrate that, in fact, social settings exert an independent influence over preference formation—one that is even larger than the influence of partisan ambivalence. The central implication of these findings is that, going forward, we cannot fully explore how citizens apply their partisanship in evaluating political information without also accounting for the social settings in which individuals find themselves.