Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters
ISBN: 9780300132007
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Party affiliation; Voting; Party affiliation -- United States; Voting -- United States;

In this, the first major treatment of party identification in twenty years, three political scientists assert that identification with political parties still powerfully determines how citizens look at politics and cast their ballots. Challenging prevailing views, they build a case for the continuing theoretical and political significance of partisan identities.

The authors maintain that individuals form partisan attachments early in adulthood and that these political identities, much like religious identities, tend to persist or change only slowly over time. Scandals, recessions, and landslide elections do not greatly affect party identification; large shifts in party attachments occur only when the social imagery of a party changes, as when African Americans became part of the Democratic Party in the South after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Drawing on a wealth of data analysis using individual-level and aggregate survey data from the United States and abroad, this study offers a new perspective on party identification that will set the terms of discussion for years to come.

Donald Green is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Political Science and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. Bradley Palmquist has taught at Harvard University and Vanderbilt University. E

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