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'Party identification' has been variously described: as an anchor; as constituting 'psychological membership' of, or 'psychological identification' with the party; and so on. The compilers of a recent collection of political attitude measures, published under the auspices of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center (where most of the election analyses since 1952 have pivoted about the concept), even describe party identification as 'probably the most important attitude variable in the field of political behavior'.² But the term itself and its connotations are misleading. Even where they do not suggest a borrowing from the technical vocabulary of psychoanalysisγ they tend to define away a set of questions that need to be answered: a preference for one party compared to what?; an intense preference, in what sense and compared to whom?4In 1955 Professor H. L. A. Hart put forward the claim that 'if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free', and this thesis and the arguments he adduces in its support have been thought sufficiently important for the article to be reprinted in a recent book of readings on political philosophy for students and general readers. The truth of Hart's thesis as stated is clearly meant to be independent of the moral stance of the asserter. Yet to my mind it is untenable as it stands, and could be modified only at the expense of taking up a particular moral position.

Previous research has found that some individuals give different answers when asked about their national, state and/or local party identifications. These response inconsistencies suggest that there is a level of government dimension to party identification. It is possible, however, that the consistency of individuals' responses to questions about their different party identifications is instead the product of measurement error. The validity of measures of mixed party identifications is investigated in this study. The results of the analysis support the conclusion that there is a level of government dimension to party identification.

Bedeutung der Parteiidentifikation.

Themen: Politikinteresse; Parteineigung; Parteiidentifikation;
Parteipräferenz; Gründe für die Parteineigung (Skala); Parteiinteresse
des sozialen Umfelds; Parteipräferenz der meisten Bekannten; Häufigkeit
politischer Gespräche; persönliche Einstellungen zum Leben und
Wertorientierung (Skala: Orientierung an Vorbildern, Verpflichtung
gegenüber der Allgemeinheit; Sinn des Lebens; Selbstbewusstsein und
Neigung zur Unterordnung); Identifikation mit der präferierten Partei;
Parteien, die als politischer Gegner betrachtet werden;
Gemeinschaftsgefühl mit den Anhängern der präferierten Partei;
Selbsteinschätzung als typischer Anhänger der präferierten Partei;
Empfindung bei Kritik sowie bei Lob für die präferierte Partei;
Empfindung bei einem negativen Öffentlichkeitsbild der präferierten
Partei; Freude bei Erfolgen der Partei.

Demographie: Bundesland; Geschlecht; Alter; Beruf; berufliche
Position; Schulabschluss; Haushaltsnettoeinkommen.

"Party Identification and Its Implications" published on by Oxford University Press.

Decisions about the similarity of party identification as a process affecting voting patterns in various countries should be based on the relationship between the strength of identification & party loyalty. Hypotheses about the nature of party identification, either as an affective tie or as a stabilizing force, are neither corroborated nor refuted by data concerning absolute levels of identification, defection, or vote switching, since these rates depend on many factors other than party identification. In Comment: The Filling of Wine Bottles Is Not Easy, Jane Jenson (Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario) faults Elkins's analysis for lacking a theory of voting within which the concept of party identification could be described. Elkins mistakenly treats two notions of 'change' as if they were equivalent, treating as 'change' both the voter's decision to vote for a political party other than the one with which he is identified, & his decision to change that identification. 3 Tables. S. Karganovic.

Data from the 1988 Canadian Election Study (N = 3,610 interview respondents [Rs]) are drawn on to explore the role of party identification in the 1988 election campaign. Analysis reveals party commitments remarkably like those found in studies of US Rs, which subsequently shaped Rs' reaction to the events of the campaign: issue positions lined up with party identification, as did perceptions of the leader rehabilitated by the campaign. But the campaign also cut through party groups. It is suggested that such a mixture of reinforcement & displacement might well typify campaigns in Canada & elsewhere; implications for academic observers of US campaigns are discussed. 3 Tables, 7 Figures. Adapted from the source document.

Party identification has long been thought to be the unmoved mover of political evaluations. The research presented here shows that party identification is changeable. In fact, over a 2-year period (1990-1992), we can see that there is a substantively important amount of movement. MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson argue that expectations, not retrospections, lie at the core of political economy. This work takes that logic and shows that the individual-level changes in party identification are explained by both prospective and retrospective economic evaluations. A novel finding in this article is that egocentric economic evaluations are more important than sociotropic evaluations. People are looking at what the government has done to them rather than at what the government has done to the national economy when making political decisions.

Concepts are like wines; some do not travel well. Thus, a frequent problem concerns whether phenomena with the same label in two societies are really the same. Party identification is a concept which is particularly interesting in this regard. The effect of party identification on voting decisions has been examined in more than a dozen countries, and the data have evoked controversy about the concept's utility, especially in Canada. Although this paper will focus on the term's usefulness in Canada compared to the United States, the arguments are sufficiently general to have implications for analysis elsewhere.

Despite the centrality of party identification in understandings of political behavior in the United States, there is an unacknowledged disparity between our theories and measurement of the phenomenon. The traditional method of measuring party identification relies on supplying cognitive cues by explicitly asking respondents to "think" about their partisanship. The Michigan theory of party identification, in contrast, assumes that partisanship is primarily affective. Using a survey experiment, we explore the effects of asking respondents to feel rather than think about their party identification. The new questions reveal that the electorate is more Republican than previously thought. Response timers show that respondents take longer to answer the new items, suggesting that they are surveying a wider and deeper array of considerations. These results serve to revive many of our traditional conceptions of how party identity works while also opening the door for new research questions.

What are the roots of party identification? Credit (or blame) often falls to parents, who have been shown to play a central role in development of partisan identification in adolescence. Usually in models of parental transmission of partisanship, children are seen as unquestioning recipients of partisan messages. I consider whether this is so, investigating whether differences in young people's levels of political interest, attention, and engagement direct the development of partisan identity. I also explore the effects of factors beyond the household such as the state campaign context in producing partisan instability across a midterm campaign season. I find that the development of adolescent partisanship reflects both the political personality of adolescents and their wider political environment. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

National Election Studies data 1952-1988 are used to examine party identification of 3 US nonblack voter generations: those who first voted before, during, & after the New Deal era. It is found that political turmoil from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s shaped basic party identifications in the generation who first voted after 1968, but did not affect dispositions of older generations. This finding confirms the concept of enduring predisposition to a political party, largely unaffected by changing election-specific circumstances. Also discussed are the realignment of party identification in the South 1960-1988, & the circumstances of the national realignment 1980-1988. 6 Tables. Adapted from the source document.

This article presents a model of individuals' party identification that contrasts with previous models. Past models, with the few recent exceptions noted, assume a hierarchical relationship either from identification to other aspects of political behavior, such as the perception and evaluation of issues and candidates, or from these behaviors to party identifications. The model discussed here places party within a dynamic concept of the electoral process and tests several hypotheses about factors producing changes in identifications. The first factor, consistent with the spatial-type issue voting models, estimates the effects of the relative proximity of each party to the individual's own policy preferences. Second, we examine the effect of the actual voting decision on subsequent identifications, with the expectation that if votes differ from previous identifications, there is a resulting shift in partisanship. Finally, we examine the hypothesis that identifications become less susceptible to change as people age and accumulate political experience. When combined with other research, the results indicate a model of the electoral process in which party identifications are both influenced by circumstances specific to each election and influence other behaviors. This nonrecursive model has a number of implications for the development and evolution of individual and aggregate partisanship. These implications are discussed at the end of the article.

THE AUTHOR REEXAMINES THE CONCEPT OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION AND THE SURVEY QUESTIONS USED TO MEASURE IT. HE ARGUES THAT SEVERAL ATTITUDES MUST BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT: ATTITUDES TOWARD THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE, AND POLITICAL PARTIES GENERALLY MAKE UP THE COMPONENTS OF A MULTIDIMENSIONAL CONCEPTION OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION.