9.5: Partisanship

The party-in-the-electorate is key to any party’s electoral success. A person’s personal attachment to a party is known as his or her partisanship (alternatively called party identification, or party ID for short). For some Americans, this party membership is formal, in the sense that they have officially registered to vote in their state under a particular party label or have signed up with a national, state, or local party organization. But partisanship can also refer to the informal feeling of belonging or closeness to a party, which need not be accompanied by formal registration.

Partisanship functions differently for different people. In an instrumental sense, a person’s party identification can serve as a heuristic, a mental shortcut for making decisions based on limited information. A typical American voting in a general election will be unfamiliar with most of the candidates on the ballot, especially those seeking lower-level offices such as city council or public utility commissioner. If that voter identifies with a party, however, she can use the candidates’ party affiliation as shown on the ballot to help her choose which candidates to support.

Voting for candidates solely on the basis of their party affiliation is often criticized as ignorant or unsophisticated, but it would be wrong to dismiss it as voting blindly. A person’s party identification in the United States contains a great deal of information about his or her ideology and political stances. A relatively uninformed voter can encounter an unfamiliar candidate, see that the candidate’s partisanship matches her own, and reasonably assume that she and the candidate agree on abortion, gun control, healthcare, immigration, taxes, and a whole host of other issues. Because parties in America today tend to be ideologically uniform (thanks in part to polarization), most of these assumptions will turn out to be correct most of the time.

In addition to its instrumental use as a heuristic, partisanship can also be an identity. If a person’s partisanship shapes his or her social relationships, leisure activities, geographical living preference, involvement in groups and organizations, or self-image, it may be as much of an identity as his or her race, ethnicity, religion, or sex. Like all identities, partisanship is more central or influential for some people than others, and can be more or less influential for any particular person at different times depending on the circumstances.

In the United States, a voter’s partisanship is the single best predictor of his or her vote choice. Not all Democrats vote for Democrats all the time, and not all Republicans vote for Republicans all the time, but Democrats vote for Democrats and Republicans vote for Republicans more consistently than any other group votes for either of the major parties. Again, this consistency is not necessarily a reflection of blind loyalty. If a typical Republican took the time to research the positions of all the candidates on the ballot before voting, he or she would probably still vote for the Republican over the Democrat in almost every instance — and the reverse is true for a typical Democrat. Partisan voters use their party identification as a shortcut the same way a driver uses a stoplight to determine when it is safe to proceed through an intersection rather than checking each of a dozen or more cars individually: it is quicker, easier, and usually just as accurate.