The Reputational Premium: A Theory of Party Identification and Policy Reasoning by Paul M. Sniderman & Edward H. Stiglitz

Author:Paul M. Sniderman & Edward H. Stiglitz [Sniderman, Paul M. & Stiglitz, Edward H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781400842551
Google: n1Gddn24pQgC
Goodreads: 17035785
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Operationalization

To operationalize our key concepts, we trade in the currency of the realm. Party identification and ideological self-identification have been measured time and again, mainly (though not always) in the same way from study to study.19 The measures of partisanship and ideology therefore have sharply defined profiles. The same is true for our measure of knowledge of the political parties' ideological reputations. For all three indicators, what goes with what has been pinned down, literally over decades. So in each of our studies, we can tell whether (the largest number of) our measures measure what they purport to measure.20 In short, plain vanilla indicators, one asking respondents to indicate whether they are a Democrat or a Republican, another whether they are liberal or conservative; yet another testing whether they know the parties' policy reputations.21

This trio is combined in three steps. First, party identifiers are classified as sorted (Republicans who also identify themselves as conservatives plus Democrats who also identify themselves as liberals) and nonsorted (all other partisans). Second, partisans are given a half point for being sorted and also a half point for knowing the policy reputations of the political parties. Summing their scores, the Index of Programmatic Partisanship runs from party identifiers who neither know nor share the outlook of their party, to those who manage one or the other but not both, to those who both know and share the outlook of their party. For presentational convenience, though, we shall refer to those who neither share nor know the outlook of their party as traditional partisans; those who manage one of these elements but not the other as mixed; and those who both know and share the outlook of their party as programmatic partisans.

TABLE 4.2: Distributions of Traditional and Programmatic Partisans

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